February 21, 2009 eNewsletter

This was a roundtable meeting with discussions, some show and tell items, and a few questions. 

Stephen Farber won the raffle for "iWork 08 Keynote, Pages, and Numbers" by Richard Harrington furnished to us by Peachpit Press. You can read about this book here.

Warren Walker brought stereoptic photographs with special glasses to view them.

Our president, Midge Lubot is looking at stereoptic photographs by Warren Walker, with, from left to right, Bruce Shields, Stephen Farber and Warren.

Midge was only able to stay until noon because she had to get to a Kiwanis meeting in Lancaster, N.H.

Warren also brought in this large waterfall picture which he is donating to the Kiwanis auction.

Warren uses special inks and papers for durable prints. He said that there are different standards for defining how long a  print will last - their decay times. A print may last 19 years by a standard that compares the old print side by side with a new one and you cannot tell them apart. The same print might last 25 years by a standard that says you will not see any difference in quality after 25 years if you are not doing that side by side comparison.

Some old film had great durability. Technicolor labs 1950 slides are almost perfect today.

Mary Killian said she tried to scan something on her HP multipurpose scanner and it put a file on her computer but she could not bring it up on her screen. Warren recommended against buying HP multifunction equipment. Geof suggested that she hold down on the control key and click on the icon in her computer. Someone else suggested, if she can find it, dragging into Photoshop in the dock.

Neil Raphel asked if anyone was using Twitter. He has been considering whether he should use it in his business. Only one person occasionally uses it. There is a Vermont Twitter with marketing people that found her.

Geof Gonter, left, showed Stephen Farber, right, the computer tools he carries in his backpack.

Stephen asked Geof if he had a screwdriver, and Geof took out a case of them.

These are two of our best Mac technicians.

Geof said that kids still use older MacBooks in lower grade levels where they are learning data entry, keying and other lower level applications. 

Geof said that schools can now buy complete labs of older reconditioned PCs with a 3 year warrenty, cart, wireless unit and free spare from a company in Minneapolis. Apples are not included as yet. Honestly, he said, Dells are easier to take apart and work on than Macs, but Apple's towers are easy to change stuff in. iMacs are harder to work on than Minis. MacBooks are almost as easy, and PowerBooks are more difficult to work on. If Geof had to buy a new Mac portable, he would buy a MacBook because it will do anything he wants to do.

Geof has a Newport phone number. He said he needs to use Vonage for his telephone calls because almost every school he works with is long distance. He said he has had good experience with it.  

Gene Levine emailed me that I should Google "Windows 97" to see what it says. I disclosed the result at the meeting, but if you were not there I suggest you try it - for humor.

Barry Hayes brought in this WalMart print of his picture of the cast of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Barry is in the play and his hair and mustache are like this for the part.

Bruce Shields, on the left of the picture above, is not the only one at the meeting that still uses AppleWorks.

He said that AppleWorks still worked fine on his G4 until he updated Mac OS X 10.4 to version 11. Then the machine screwed up. He brought in the error report, and Stephen looked at it. Stephen said it was a "navigation services" problem which could be caused by miss-matched memory chips. This could cause the timing not to be right. Bruce said he had changed his memory chips and one did have a different number than the others. Stephen recommended how he should go about changing the chips to check the problem.

Bruce has all the CDs from AppleWorks.

I told them that my wife was happy using AppleWorks spreadsheet to do her bookkeeping. When she became worried that it was no longer supported, I investigated what I could do in iWork Numbers. It took several tries to find a way to do it so that now she likes it better than she liked AppleWorks. 

One neat thing about numbers is that you can have a table of results for printing, and have each part of the table automatically updated when the cells change in one or more spreadsheets. All you have to do is to put an = sign into the cell where you want the data to go. This brings up a formula. Then you just click on the cell in your spreadsheet that has the number you want in the printed report. It is difficult to believe, but you are done.