Topic: Social Media and the Cloud.
Guest Presenter: Anne Shillolo, teacher and promoter of Internet skills in education.
We will also briefly take a look at the new iBooks 2 for the IPad, iBooks Author for the Mac and iTune U for everyone.
I will be sending out an invitation to people who attended the IPad 2 session on January 18 or expressed an interest. The evening was well attended — full house with over 25 people.
See you on the 13th I hope.
Cheers, Meg
To me one of the most intriguing developments of our modern internet society has been the rise of ‘Anonymous’
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com 
If you’ve never heard of them, I’d be surprised. If you are confused as to who and what they are, I wouldn’t be…..
I’ve found two good articles in recent days – First up this three part series of articles for Wired magazine by Quinn Norton.
Secondly this single article from Triple Canopy entitled Our Weirdness Is Free by Gabriella Coleman
As a side note, I found the Triple Canopy website ‘style’ very annoying – if you think so too choose the printer icon above the article and preview the results for something you can actually read…
Both of these women are articulate and involved, and able to bridge the gap between worlds well enough to explain it to the rest of us.
Anonymous was listed in Time Magazine’s person of the year that mattered in the #4 position – I’m betting they’ll turn up there again next year too.
This article is spot on.
It’s not short.
It won’t all sink in at once.
There are lots of cute little references like the crack about aircraft carriers that not everyone will ‘get’.
Nonetheless, read it, think about it, and consider framing it, because 10 years from now it will all seem so obvious in hindsight.
Computers and the internet continue to change our lives. Sorting out what is good and what is not so good about this is always a challenge. Brian Harvey is hot to trot about “Big Brother” type powers the current government is trying to acquire which should concern us all. If everyone brings their computer passions and concerns we will be sure to have a rollicking meeting to start the new year!
Hope to see you there.
P.S. If any of you have become an iPad user, we will be holding an iPad User meeting on Wednesday, January 18th. Lance Barrs, longtime customer, resident of Huntsville and gung-ho iPad user is going to provide some energetic leadership. It promises to be a lot of fun! It might be a good meeting to attend if you are debating whether to get an iPad or not!
Let’s keep the same format as last time and share some digital life tips for the holiday season. I’ll have a plate of goodies and some hot apple cider.
Hope to see you all there.
I have discovered that there is more to owning an e-book than it seems on the surface. Here is a good article about it.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/219335/the_pitfalls_of_ebook_buying_what_to_look_out_for_before_you_purchase.html
Brian Harvey has suggested that we each come prepared with a couple of tips that we can share about something we have learned that has made our life easier as a Mac User. If its been a Godsend for you it will likely be very helpful for others. I think my tip is going to be about eBooks and some things I have learned. See you Monday evening 7:30 p.m.
There was some discussion lately, and Brian also posted about Lion’s Resume feature, where old, closed windows would automatically open up when you started up an application. Preview I found to be the worst, as it would open up old PDF files that I worked on last week, and would have to close several windows each time. It was suggested that some terminal commands would fix the problem, and rightly so. Apple however has responded by adding a checkbox in the System Preferences, under General that you can uncheck “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps”. This is easy and global as well – applies to all programs!
I have become the brand new owner of a 27-inch iMac. The picture is magnificent! I am going to enjoy it.
In the process of switching from a smaller iMac, and my adaption to Lion, I learned a few tricks from Craig:
Out of Memory
It has been my practice when acquiring a new Mac to double the memory. The idea is that I would never get those dreaded “out of memory” notices that haunted earlier Macs. Therefore, I was surprised to discover in the last couple of weeks that I was being told regularly that my “Start Up Disc” was out of memory and that I should turn off some running programs.
I would turn off running programs by using the red button at the top left of all programs. But I was still out of memory.
Turns out that the red button does not really do anything. You have to click the name of the program at the very top left of the desktop, e.g. Pages and Quit the program.
The other clue, which I did not know about, is look for a faint white button located under the icon for the program in the bottom (in my case) of the desktop. I always thought that was just a reflection of the icon, but it signifies that the program is running.
This freed up a great deal of memory.
Empty Trash
Another big hog of memory was the Trash.
I had been cleaning out the old computer of blocks of old items. I dumped them into Trash. But I had not emptied the trash for a few days. It took a couple of hours to get rid of it all
And don’t forget the Trash in iPhoto!
Recover Documents from AppleWorks
If you are like me, you have many documents in your computer composed in AppleWorks. But Lion does not recognize them. For all intents and purpose, they are lost.
However, there is a simple workaround which allows you to recover those documents:
1. In Finder, open Documents and select a document in AppleWorks which you cannot open:
2. Choose “ Get Info” on the document or Command – 1. This opens a window on the left of the desktop.
3. Look for the Open With option.
4. Select the program you would like to open, e.g.Pages, then click
Change All.
This will automatically open al documents with the “cwk” suffix.
Numbers
I also was having difficulty with spread sheets under Numbers.
If you opened a Blank spreadsheet page, the default gave you a minuscule chart at the top left corner, rather than a full page. It was not readable.
But there was a simple fix.
At the bottom left corner of the page is a percentage indication. The default is 25%. Click on the number and reset for 100 or 150 per cent (or whatever you like) and it expands to a readable size.
To add more rows to the chart, click on the large corner bracket (rather than the corner box) at the lower right corner and drag down. (I was only getting the small boxes and it would not work.)
Bill