Please make every effort to attend this meeting which reviews club activities and gives you a chance to have your say in how the club is run. Nominations for Committee officers, Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer should be forwarded to the Secretary before the meeting.
AGM
ICENI COMPUTER CLUB 2016
7.30 p.m. Wednesday 19th April 2017
Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE
AGENDA
1. Apologies for Absence
2. Minutes of the last meeting
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman's Report
5. Treasurer's Report
6. Election of Officers and Committee
7. AOB.
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This will be followed by the IoT (Internet of things) and description of devices used.
Peter began by having a look through Mac IOS Sierra which is the thirteenth major release and as he was still getting used to his newer Macbook Pro and mentioned that the mouse trackpad did not have any separate buttons now so you had to just press anywhere with either one finger for left button or two fingers for the right button. This started a lively discussion about mice, touchbar and trackpads. He also encountered a problem if you pressed and slipped sideways at the same time the pointer would click on the wrong object, just a matter of getting used to it. The dock allowed you to see applications ready for opening. You could open a file manager to select files and arrange this in several ways , alphabetically, by kind or as a list in date or name order or coverflow. Coverflow allows rapid scrolling sideways to expand the view of a file with a thumbnail if it is a graphic file. He used Timemachine which is Apple's backup system. This enabled him to upgrade to his new machine by copying over from the old time machine and doing a restore. However he decided to encrypt the TimeMachine drive on his new machine. This however resulted in it taking 3 days to encrypt all the old sectors of TimeMachine as well. He also has ended up with 4 different passwords for login, SSD, Time machine disk and AppleID used with the keychain.
He uses Enpass to store all his passwords in an encrypted Dropbox file accessible from his iPhone, PC etc. which is helpful. Anne mentioned that teachers in schools used iPads and only used a four digit passkey to access them. SMUG (Suffolk Mac User Group) were having a meeting on security next week. We would have our own meeting on this in June.
He also mentioned Affinity Photo from Serif which he hoped would take over from Aperture, which he currently used for still photo editing. However it did not do all of the photo organising which Aperture did which he used currently. Affinity Photo was a very complicated package as he later showed and was much liked by users of Photoshop.
Affinity comes with a whole load of video tutorials and is very powerful. It has various persona, which are used as you work through the workflow. A Develop persona for RAW files, a Photo persona for initially processed files an export persona etc.
He had not had much time yet to learn this program and had tried to process a photo and add a caption to a print, but had had to give up after an hour because he couldn't see how to do it. The language used was so different to Aperture. (he was still finding new things in Aperture as well!) We had another go on the night again without much success, although we could paste text into a photo and delete it again. It is all handled by the print routine in Aperture after you have defined the text in a caption field in the EXIF data.
He had also purchased Affinity Designer as it was on offer, but had not used it yet.
He had managed to update to version 3 on his new Mac which he couldn't do on his old Mac but only because he had purchased it originally. It is not available to new users. Unfortunately Aperture is no longer being supported by Apple and is being replaced by Photo which has not had good reviews. But I haven't looked at this. He also showed some photos in Aperture. He had moved most of the RAW files as onto a separate hard drive to save on space in his old Mac. Which is called "Relocate" and then later you can "Consolidate" with the option to either keep the file off line or move it back into the Aperture Library. This meant that my older RAW files can then be accessed by Affinity from the offline files. You can of course export JPEG files from Aperture too and then import those.
He also said that he had not seen any photo editing software that worked in the way that Photodesk did where the left mouse button applied an effect and the right button would undo it which was very neat.
He thought that Affinity might be altering the original RAW file where as Aperture kept the original file intact. This needed to be checked out.
Aperture used layers but in a different way to Affinity and Photoshop.
He showed how Aperture would organise photos by Albums and projects and also Smart albums where photos could be grouped by using a keyword from any of the projects without needing a separate copy just the reference. You can select photos and mark them with 1 to 5 stars and then only display those with two or more stars say.
Anne showed some interesting videos of her holiday in South Africa with some spectacular underwater shots, although unhappy with the music which had been added by Photo. She took a large amount of video but has not had much time to process it all yet. She had wanted to display it from her brand new Macbook Pro with a Touchbar (which I had never seen before). This had USB-C but no HDMI connections and we could not see how to get a direct output to VGA. So she displayed the videos on Peter's Mac from a memory stick initially. After this Michael tried the combination of a USB-C to USB connector, which he had just purchased, and the USB to VGA connector in order to achieve this. However it did not work to start with. Then he decided maybe the driver for the USB-VGA adapter was not present so downloaded one and rebooted and low and behold it worked. So now Anne will be able to connect straight away, as long as we have the adapters. She was pleased with her new MacBook Pro 13" but had problems undoing the sophisticated packaging. She had to look up a YouTube video to show her how to open it! She was hoping to redeem a copy of Final Cut Pro for video editing which she would show us on the next video evening. I look forward to that.
We have now had a committee meeting and updated the future programme.
| ICENI Future programme 2017/2018 | ||
| 2017 | ||
| April 19th | AGM + IoT- Devices | All |
| May 17th | RISCOS update - New !Impression - ARMX6 | All |
| June 21st | Security, Antivirus,Ransomware, Botnets and Firewalls | All |
| July 19th | Windows update - The Creators update | Michael |
| August 16th | Summer Social Event - The Last Anchor , Ipswich -(Provisional) | |
| September 20th | Alternative software applications, Model Railways, Amateur radio and Telescope control. |
All |
| October 18th | Linux /Ubuntu updates. | Gareth et al |
| November 15th | Slide/Video Evening | All |
| December 20th | Gadgets and Party Evening | All |
| 2018 | ||
| January 17th | Winter Social Evening - The Wooden Fender, Ardleigh (Provisional) | |
| February 21st | Arduino/Raspberry Pi / BBC :Microbits | All |
| March 21st | Backup systems - Cloud/ CCTV, Acronis | All |
| April 18th | AGM - Virtual Reality and secure password storage | All |
| May 16th | Computer surgery evening | All |
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website.
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Membership fee currently £10, visitors free.
We are continuing our publicity for EAUG events , however their website has not been updated for a years now. So if you wish to know information please phone one of their contacts.
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
Their website has not been updated since 2011
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website. If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.