1. Apologies for Absence
2. Minutes of the last meeting
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman's Report
5. Secretary's Report
5. Treasurer's Report
6. Ratification of Constitution
7. Election of Officers and Committee
8. AOB
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All are welcome to the AGM . Please inform the Secretary of any nominations for Officers of the Club.
The formal business of the evening will be followed by computer games of various sorts. Please support your club and make every effort to attend the meeting.
Please note that subscriptions are now due for 2006/7.
For our March meeting we invited members to talk for 5 - 10 minutes on what they use their computers for. This was quite an informative evening, given both the differing uses, and variety of platforms and software we use in our daily tasks.
First up presenting RISCOS, Tony provided us with a demonstration using Virtual RiscPC running on his laptop. Tony uses Pipedream, an application with a long and varied history, both for wordprocessor/ simple DTP style presentation and also for spreadsheets, some of
which he demo'd to the group.
Tony showed us examples in Pipedream, of preparing content for a family wedding, producing menu's and seating plans for his dance club, and of the planning for his trip to Poland, including a breakdown of the routes through Germany and Poland. He also
demonstrated how he maintains information on our club in his role as Treasurer.
Tony also monitors his blood pressure regularly, and he talked about his blood pressure monitor, and how he stores the details in a spreadsheet to monitor his health over time.
A number of willing volunteers had their readings taken.
Finally, Tony switched back to windows, and showed us a short slideshow of pictures, a facility he used previously at our JPEG slideshow evening.
Next up, Frank also provided a portable RISCOS demonstration using Virtual RiscPC on a windows laptop. Frank uses Artworks quite extensively, and showed us how he prepared maps and diagrams for the guests at his wedding anniversary. This included quite detailed diagrams, but also an OS map imported as a bitmap, over which the route was overlaid. He also produced maps and diagrams for a coastal walk, including a reminder that if parked in a certain location, cars could be flooded by the tide...
Also in Artworks, Frank demonstrated how he creates an A2 sized wall planner each year, with all the text movable and grouped into objects to make it easy to adjust year on year. It is carefully aligned for 4xA4 printing, to minimise the trimming required, and looked very
professional.
Frank also demonstrated using Artworks to make Christmas cards, which he does each year using Artwork from his grand children scanned into the computer, creating good looking cards including a web address to view full sized artwork. A sample of the printed output was passed around for us to look at.
Frank also showed us a number of handouts for lectures he had created over a number of years. These documents including technical formulae and graphs/diagrams were originally written in Impression, but had been imported to Ovation Pro using TransIMP, a converter between the two formats. This was very successful, requiring only minimal manual correction.
At Tony's request, Frank also demonstrated an issue he has with his laptop whereby a sequence of events can cause the screen to go black although windows is still running. This has not been reproduced by the authors of the software, and is believed to be a display driver issue which he is still investigating.
After a short refreshment break, Gareth provided a demonstration using OS X on an Apple Mac. Apart from the usual uses of email, web browsing etc., Gareth uses the computer mainly for video editing and photo editing.
Using the iMovie package, Gareth showed a quick example of how he created a wedding video which was output to DVD. This package has also been demonstrated in depth at a previous meeting on Video Editing.
Moving on, Gareth showed iPhoto, the included photo storage and simple editing package on the Mac, but explained how since getting a more modern digital camera, he has used more powerful applications such as Photoshop, although he finds it difficult to use. He demonstrated a working beta of Lightroom, an application for the authors of Photoshop that contains many of the powerful features of Photoshop, but in an easier to use package for those looking at working with digital images.
To end his talk, Gareth showed how he uses the web and database servers that are part of Mac OS X to develop and test web pages locally, which he has been using to create a simple website that stores information on car miles per gallon using the PHP language and a MySQL database.
Michael ended the evening with a discussion on his computer interests. Like many people he mainly uses his computer for playing music, watching movies, instant messaging and email/web browsing.
Michael also likes to experiment with overclocking his PC, which can be a way of getting faster performance for less money (if it works).
He has been able to run his AMD Opteron processor, designed to run at 2GHz at upto 2.GHz without experiencing any problems, and without increasing the voltage to the processor, which is a technique for maintaining stability at the higher speeds.
He has also started using OpenOffice, and Mozilla recently, both for the reduced cost of having a free Office package, and for added security.
I found the meeting very informative, and it clearly showed that we all have very different uses for computers in the club.
Gareth
Many thanks to Gareth for writing this report of the evening. I am sorry to have missed what was obviously a very interesting evening. Unfortunately I was laid up with a bad back and so was unable to come. I am now fully recovered.
Peter
In order to implement our plans for purchase of a projector, please don't forget to bring your cheques or cash for next year's subs to the AGM.
Not a lot to report this time. I hope you'll all come to the AGM which should be a good evening.
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| April 5th 2006 | AGM + Computer games | All |
| May 3rd 2006 | Printing with Uniprint and VA & GIMP print | Tony & Frank et al |
| June 7th 2006 | Outside speaker(TBA) | TBA |
| July 5th 2006 | File transfers | Tony |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8NP , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
11th April 2006 "Firewalls etc."
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"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."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
Following on from a brief discussion at the last club meeting it has been agreed that I should remove a lot of the old newsletters from the website and archive them to CD/DVD. I'll probably not do this before the end of February. If anyone would like a copy of the CD I'm sure this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk