Summary of 2005 meetings
Sept. 2005
For Sept, our 20th anniversary meeting, drew such a
large audience we had to bring in extra chairs. There
was no demo but instead we brought in a quite an impressive
collection of Macs and John discussed the various models
of Macs and their processing power starting with the "Lisa" and
ending with the G4 Titanium 17" powerbook.The huge
turnout was in part due to the story in the Press-Enterprise
by reporter extraordinaire Jacquie Paul. We want to thank
you Jacquie for your wonderful work and story about our
user group.
August 2005
The demo for August was the iPod for both Windows and
Mac. John showed us the different generations of iPod
and the latest one which has a 12-hour battery.
July 2005
The demo for the month of July was eBay by John Schreck.
I'm told after we discovered that the Goeske Center had
blocked eBay from their internet access, we had to improvise
and we went to Yahoo auctions instead. Since the setup
was very similar, everyone got an idea of how internet
auctions work.
June 2005
The demo for the month of June was Graphic Converter
and Photoshop Elements. by John Schreck.
May 2005
The demo for the month of May was Microsofts' "Powerpoint." Bruce
Rouman presented the topic.
For the month of April, local cable providers Charter
Communications folks came by and showed their latest offerings
and they answered many of our questions. Despite some
very intense questions about their pricing structures,
they were gracious to offer specials to members who wanted
to sign up for their services.
March 2005
For our March meeting, Dan Castle showed us how to use
create simple videos from digital video with Apple's iMovie
application on his iMac.
Robert Saber showed us the new operating system 10.3
or "Panther" for February's demo.
January 2005
The demo for January's meeting was Voice Recognition software.Specifically
we used. IBM's Via Voice. John Schreck brought in a Windows
machine installed with that software and we compared its
performance in the windows and Mac environment. PC version
seems to be more accurate and more responsive.
December 2004
Our year-end December meeting featured the hilarious
quicktime movies that Bruce Rouman so carefully researched
and scoured the net for our enjoyment. Thanks Bruce. The
main topic for the night was DVD authoring, hardware and
software. John touched on the various issues like capacities
of CDs and DVDs, the "plus" and "minus" formats
of DVDs.
December 2004
The demo for November 's meeting was "upgrading your
computer." John Schreck brought in a old Powermac
8500 and various (Peripheral Component Interconnect) PCI
upgrade cards.
There are various vendors out there, but John showed us
the Sonnet line which has been around the longest and
they have excellent support. We were given a chart which
showed the different models of computers and its options
and also a price list. He covered the pros and cons
of upgrading versus buying a new computer. He also addressed
the issues like
potential conflicts when upgrading.
October 2004
The demo for the month of October was "Games." Dan
Castle brought in his brand new
1GHZ G4 iMac with its 17" monitor to show us some
of his favorite games. John Schreck
showed us his favorite game F18 flight simulator.
.
September 2004
The demo for the month of September was the iSight webcam by Robert
Saber (with the help of Adina Wineland) and Rusty Chapman.Both Robert
and Rusty brought in their G4 Titanium powerbooks hooked up their
iSight webcams and connected wirelessly
with their airport cards using Jaguar's Rendezvous. Rusty
was up front while Robert with help of Adina were in the
back of the room during the demo.
August 2004
194 persons attended the month of August meeting.The
topic for the demo was eBay.
July 2004
The month of July's demo was Dreamweaver. Thanks to
all those who attended
and your kind attention during the demo. As I mentioned
in the demo, Dreamweaver is a very powerful web building
application.I must have just
shown about a tenth of what it is capable of mainly because
that's the extent of
what I know myself.
June 2004
The month of June's topic had to be changed last minute
because the Goeske Center's broadband connection wasn't
ready so the eBay demonstration was substituted by a discussion
of the utilities on the club CD.
May 2004
The month of May's topic was a demonstration of the
capabilities
of Photoshop 7.
John showed us how you can clone objects, selectively
change colors and objects in a photograph.. He showed
us the healing brush on troublesome pictures that had
dust and scratches.
January 2004
January 2003 meeting's topic was presented on-the-fly
by Darryl. He showed us a how Apple's "Keynote" works
compared to Powerpoint. John Schreck mentioned that he
had a lot of questions from members about networking your
computers and which routers/switches to buy so he will
probably touch on that topic one of these upcoming meetings
.
December 2002
December 2002 meeting was a blast for members and guests.
Members and guests were treated to huge sandwiches and
drinks. See the home page for pictures from the party
and also the door prize winners.
November 2002
November meeting's topic was "Wireless Computing." John
brought his airport base station, some other hardware
like the Linksys routers. He went over the differences
between routers and switches.
October 2002
October meeting's topic was "Which Mac to buy?" John
Schreck covered a lot of details far too much for me to
list. If somebody has a question about which one to buy
I believe club members may still have the handouts he
passed out, check see me or other members.
Sept 2002
The report of our Sept 17,2002, meeting:
SEARCH ENGINES by Keith Mueller MacItRight
MacItRight consultant Keith Mueller opened our eyes to "Search
Engines" and how they come up with our answers. Briefly
he touched on the differences between Yahoo, Alta Vista,
Google, Refdesk,AskJeeves and other search engines.
August 2002
MUGSIE member Robert Griffith brought an imposing array
of computer and sound equipment to Goeske Center on August
20, and almost got us evicted in the process! Robert showed
us how he synthesizes his Jazz Caribe band music on his
Macintosh – aided by some leading-edge Mac software
and auxiliary hardware.
Just one burst of big sound escaped from his studio JBL
speakers during his demo. It sounded great, but the barbershop
quartet practicing in the adjoining room must have thought
it was the beginning of The Battle of the Bands!
Naturally, Robert quickly turned down the volume – this
wasn't intended to be a lease-breaker party. Fortunately,
our welcome at the Goeske Center was not compromised!
There were too many technical subjects introduced by
Robert to cover in detail here, but for the interested
members, these are the products that he either used or
talked about. You may investigate them at the listed URLs:
• Digital Performer 3.02 and 6 from Mark of the
Unicorn, Inc.
http://www.motu.com
• Deck 3.5 and Peak 3 from BIAS Sound Creative
http://www,bias-inc.com
• SmartSound Movie Maestro
http://www.smartsound.com
• Logic Audio Platinum
http://www.emagicstudios.com
• RealVerb 5.1
http://www.kindofloud.com/products/realverb51.html
• Antares Auto-Tune 3
http://www.antarestech.com/products/auto-tune3.html
Many thanks to Robert for an informative and enjoyable
evening.
July 2002
Photoshop 7 and Adobe Elements Compared;
Members Hyneman & Wineland Win Raffle
During our featured presentation, President John Schreck
demonstrated key features from the two popular Adobe image
processing applications: Photoshop 7.0 and Adobe Photoshop
Elements 2.0. At meeting's end, Lynn Wineland won a copy
of Elements. Then, in a long-awaited raffle, John Hyneman
took home a coveted new 5MB iPod. Congratulations to both
MUGSIE members for their good fortune.
The meeting began with the usual Question & Answer
Period for attendees who had problems to solve or just
wanted to know better how Macs work. Mr. Schreck gave some
insight into making video and DVD recordings.
A significant development in video recording comes with
new Final Cut Pro 3. Until the release of this version,
the rule of thumb was that shooting 20 minutes of video
requires 2 GB of hard drive space for uncompressed storage.
Now, Pro 3 will put that amount of video into 800GB of
space by using a technique that does lossless compression – a
saving of 60%.
Mr. Schreck then reviewed the media requirements for DVD
recording. Most of the time, the less expensive General
Use DVD Disks should be purchased for recording; however,
if a Mac user wants to have his or her DVD recording duplicated
at a professional facility, a more expensive Authoring
Disk must be used.
A member asked if there were a way to disable the trackpad
on a new iBook so that hand movements while typing do not
cause the cursor to make spurious dashes across the screen – sometimes
making the cursor disappear into the margins of the display.
The answer is that with OS X, only a partially effective
solution is available. Go to System Preferences/Mouse/Trackpad
and check the box "Ignore Trackpad while typing."
Finally, the topic of the night, Photoshop, took center
stage. Mr. Schreck said that Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0,
which costs about $90, will handle 99% of all members'
digital imaging manipulation needs. It even has a number
of desirable features that aren't matched in more expensive
Photoshop 7.0. These are:
1) Direct downloading of data from digital cameras without
the necessity to use any camera company's proprietary software
2) Capability to set constant filters to adjust for color
biases peculiar to certain cameras or brands
3) New File Browser which allows batch renaming of thumbnail
images
4) An easy-to-use Red Eye Tool which instantly eliminates
the red-eye look that digital cameras are prone to record
5) The Automate Tool which conveniently produces contact
sheets of mixed photo sizes.
Photoshop 7, the professional's choice, has two outstanding
features not found in Elements 2.0. One is the Healing
Tool which is used to eliminate blemishes and wrinkles
in photos of faces, while preserving exact skin color and
texture. The other is built-in Spell Check. Naturally,
as we discovered in our June Shoot-Out, Photoshop 7.0 is
optimized to run at its fastest under OS X.
The product raffle finished up this informative and successful
evening. Two members went home delighted with their wins,
while the remainder of us decided we needed to collect
a few more rabbit's feet for good luck. •
April 2002
The Great Mac vs Dell Speed Shoot-Out;
It Finally Took Place
The premier Dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 outsped the $25,000
Dell Dual Processor doing the same Photoshop 7 job. The
Mac was 1.56 times faster.
MUGSIE members and guests saw a Dell Model 2500 Dual Processor
2.2 GHz computer run a challenging 500Mb Photoshop file
rotation job in 5 minutes, 9 seconds. Later, The Macintosh
Power Mac Dual G4 1GHz ran the identical job in 3 minutes,
18 seconds.
The ratio of these times, which were repeated several
times for verification, is 1.56. If a Mac Dual, holding
maximum RAM, does 1.0 hour's worth of this kind of Photoshop
work, it takes a Dell Dual 2.2 GHz, holding maximum RAM,
1.56 hours to do the same work – a significant saving
for a production shop doing Photoshop all day.
The David-sized OS X Mac beat the Goliath-sized Dell,
which costs – depending on configuration –3
to 5 times as much. Both machines held the maximum amount
of RAM memory they could possibly hold. They both had huge
amounts of extra hard drives in their cases, and contained
the latest, fastest video graphic cards; however, only
processor speed and RAM figured into this task.
Photoshop 13-degree Rotation, i.e., changing the angle
of the orientation of an image by 13 degrees, requires
the recalculation of every pixel in an image. During this
operation, the image is painted into a window at the start,
then it disappears while calculation takes place over 3+
to 5+ minutes. Then, the final rotated image is painted
in again. The capability and speed of any video graphic
cards and hard drives have little or no effect on the speed
of this operation.
This test showed the tremendous impact of OS X and Photoshop
7 on the speed of the Mac Dual. With this arrangement,
the two processors in the Mac Dual were able to work in
true parallel-computing mode. A test several months earlier
with this same file using Photoshop 6 and OS 9 on this
Mac Dual took 14 minutes. •
