Previous Meetings
From TMUG - The Triangle Macintosh Users Group
January 12, 2010 Meeting
— Talk to your Mac —
TMUG member Alec Whittaker will present a demonstration of Dictate and a look at some other aspects of Voice Recognition software. TMUG President Smythe Richbourg will present Dragon Dictation for the iPhone.
We'll also have the usual Question & Answer session, some door prize drawings, and the wit and banter of your fellow club members. What better way to start out a new year? We look forward to seeing you.
Members need to discuss and vote on a donation to our meeting location ( vote help at February meeting)
The meeting will begin at 6:30 pm on January 12th at the Hope Community Church in Raleigh. Remember, TMUG is the undisputed leading Mac User Group in the Triangle... & beyond! We hope to see you there!
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 Meeting — a Holiday Party… and a 5-way Raffle!
The December 8th TMUG meeting is almost here! (And it will be followed shortly thereafter by Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, Christmas, & Kwanza!) The Executive Committee is planning another holiday party with all sorts of fun and merriment, including refreshments, door prizes, and a raffle. We will meet upstairs in room 2060B near the far end of the Hope Community Church building. (This is not the room with the sofas, but the room you pass just before that room, nor is it the "Meeting Place" near the building entrance.) We will still begin with our normal Q&A session, moderated by Bob Chandler.
For the program, we are planning a few short demos. John Turner will show his iPhone app RPSXtreme (RPS <=> rock - paper - scissors or roshambo). RPSXtreme is available for free, specially for TMUG, on December 8 only at the App Store. It's normally 99¢. Allen and Smythe will give us a look at a couple of OS X apps that are often overlooked – Photo Booth and Address Book's print features. And Chips will show how MacScan can help keep your Mac safe by detecting, isolating and removing spyware. MacScan has also provided us with a licensed copy of the app to give away.
We have chosen 5 different items for the raffle — a Brenthaven laptop bag (donated by Roger Babson of TenPlus), an Aerovation checkpoint friendly laptop trolley bag (donated by Smythe & the gadgeteer), an Apple Time Capsule (1 TB), and 2 Apple Magic Mice. The raffle will work the same way as last December (but differently from our "standard" raffles). Tickets will be worth $1 each & will be sold in lots of 5 for $5 & 25 for $20. To enter the raffle (actually 5 raffles!), you will place as many tickets as you want to enter for a prize into one of 5 bags for the 5 prizes. Therefore, you can separately enter 1, 2, 3, 4, or all 5 raffles! And remember, you don't have to be a TMUG member to enter a raffle, but we hope you will join if you're not a member.
Thanks to Mary Ellin Eissel, Carl Ebhardt, & Cort Boylan for organizing the refreshments!
The meeting will begin at 6:30 pm on December 8 at the Hope Community Church in Raleigh. And, of course, we will have the usual drawings for several door prizes for TMUG members throughout the meeting. Remember, TMUG is the undisputed leading Mac User Group in the Triangle... & beyond! We hope to see you there!
TMUG Meeting Day Change Update
Even though the TMUG membership present at the October 13th meeting voted to change the meeting day, we had not posted that we needed to do this early enough to comply with TMUG's By-laws. (Read the original September 28th announcement below.) So, we are going to hold an "official" vote again at the November 10 meeting. Discussion will be reopened after the Q&A to give more people the opportunity to be present. We will explain the process that the Executive Committee (XCom) used to select the 2nd Tuesday as the replacement meeting night, and the constraints we have with the current location of Hope Community Church. If you cannot make it to the meeting on Tuesday, November 10th, or if you have any comments or suggestions, please let the XCom officers know by emailing the temporary address <meeting at tmug.org> (replace " at " with "@").
Tuesday October 13, 2009 Meeting
— Making a movie with an iPhone and iMovie… plus an iPod Nano Raffle! —
For the October meeting program, Allen Emory will demonstrate how to create a movie using an iPhone 3Gs and iMovie `09. (Allen created a "how-to" video with his iPhone when adding a deck onto his house.) As with many things Apple, it is really a simple task. Apple has been promoting making movies with the new iPod nano, which has a video camera built in.
To add some excitement to the meeting, we will raffle a new iPod nano. Tickets will be $3 each or 2 for $5. And we will purchase the iPod at the meeting so the winner can have his or her choice of color and the option to engrave it. If enough tickets are sold, the prize will be a 16 GB model instead of an 8 GB one.
The meeting will begin with a discussion about our need to change the meeting date or location. As President Smythe Richbourg elaborates below, there are basically 2 options. It will be up to the membership present to decide how to proceed. Afterward, we will continue the meeting with our usual fun & instructional Q&A led by Bob Chandler.
There were 72 tickets sold for the iPod nano raffle, netting $181. The winner of the drawing was Chuck Nall, who coincidentally was the winner of our March iPod Touch raffle! Chuck was lucky again! He selected a red nano. Congratulations Chuck!
(Attendance at the October meeting was 38, including 2 visitors.)
— October Meeting Day Change Notice —
There is a conflict with a new internal meeting at Hope Community Church, and they have cancelled all outside groups on Monday nights for the foreseeable future. They have set aside Tuesday nights for us, pending club approval.
Most of us have little or no memory of TMUG meeting on a night other than Monday, but for several years at the EPA, we had a similar situation: They rented the auditorium out to Wake Forest to use for an MBA program on Mondays, and we were welcome to Tuesday - period. Part of the problem of being in loaned space.
At the October meeting (which will start at 6:30 PM at Hope Community Church, as usual), we will vote on whether to officially change future meeting nights to Tuesday or to seek a new location that is available on Monday. Your XCOM is recommending Tuesday. Having sought out new space three times in the last ten years, I casually mentioned that anyone voting to stay on Monday be placed on the committee to find a new location, but I was voted down. But, should the motion to stay on Monday be passed, the XCOM will NOT be solely charged with finding the place. We will elect a group at that same Tuesday meeting from the membership to proceed with this search, and report back to the XCOM at their next meeting.
This is not dereliction of duty or blackmail (well, not in a bad way), but many of the members of this committee have moved us from the EPA to the Eno River UUF church to NCML to Hope, and are not wanting to play the game again. We have a fine facility that is free, near an Interstate, has great parking and security, and is between Raleigh and Durham. Sure, we all wish it was 5 miles west, to be more central, but this is current reality. There's not a lot in the way of free / cheap real estate out there.
We are wide open to suggestions in other directions, but we WILL be meeting on Tuesday, October 13, since the current location is not available on Mondays, and we were unsuccessful in finding even a temporary location for the night. (Francis Shepherd was already scheduled elsewhere on Tuesday, so cannot present Snow Leopard. We will bring in the new features of the OS little by little over the next few months.) I will be at Hope on the 12th to assist anyone who isn't on the list and doesn't check this web site. If you know anyone who does not stay connected in either of those two ways, please let them know of the change.
Thanks.
-Smythe Richbourg, President
September 14, 2009 Meeting
— Comic Life and Safari 4 —
The September meeting will be a fun, interactive preso of Comic Life™. Award winning Comic Life is designed to tie in with iLife™ or an iSight camera to let you create comic panels or strips using your images (illustrations or photos) to which you add speech balloons, text, & graphics. Then you can export your creation to a JPEG image or web site, send them to the iPhoto Kodak print service, or print them yourself. Comic Life runs on OS X 10.3.9 & higher. If you got a Mac in recent years, Comic Life may already be in the Applications folder. Smythe will show us how to make our lives funnier.
We didn't get to demo Safari® 4 in August, so Duane will show it to us this month. Safari 4.0 was released on June 8. It has numerous new features & innovations over Safari 3. Minimum requirements for a Mac are Mac OS X 10.5.7 or 10.4.11, a minimum 256MB of memory, and an Intel-based Mac or a PowerPC G5, G4, or G3 Mac with built-in FireWire®.
The meeting will start off with the always informative, member participatory Question & Answer session, moderated by Bob Chandler. No doubt, there will be some drawings for door prizes throughout the meeting, too.
Looking ahead for the rest of the year, we are planning to have a preso of Mac OS X Snow Leopard by Francis Shepherd in October, fun with iPhoto Cards & Photo Booth in November, & TMUG's annual Holiday / Christmas party with a new multi-prize raffle in December.
Come to the September meeting to learn more from central North Carolina's preeminent Mac Users Group.
(Attendance at the September meeting was 44, including 2 new members & 1 visitor.)
August 10, 2009 Meeting
— TMUG Web Services – Present & Future —
We have moved from Durham to Raleigh, now it is time to move our web services. At the next TMUG meeting we'll look at the current TMUG web services and what a TMUG online community might be in the future. But more than that, we'll look at on-line communities, social networking, what works and why. And how it might work for TMUG.
Of course we'll have our popular question and answer period and a look at Safari 4. TMUG in August is about on-line. We'll miss you if you aren't there.
(Attendance at the August meeting was 37, including 1 new member & 3 visitors.)
July 13, 2009 Meeting
— Win an iPod Touch —
TMUG will raffle a new 8Gb iPod touch plus an $15 iTunes gift card. One lucky person will win both at the July TMUG meeting. Tickets are $5 for 1, $10 for 3.
There were ~48 entries in the iPod Touch raffle. The lucky winner was Charles Mangin, who also won a door prize. Congratulations Charles!
(Attendance at the July meeting was x, including y new member & z visitors.)
June 8, 2009 Meeting
— Digital Photography —
For our June meeting, we are going to look at digital photography — so that you can take great vacation photos and share them with your friends, family, and the world more easily. The preso will cover the taking, organizing, and sharing of digital photos with a little touch-up tossed in.
The program will begin with an overview of digital cameras – how to choose and use one. After you take your pictures, you will need to move them out of your camera, into your Mac, and organize them. Probably the most popular Mac tool to organize photos is iPhoto®. Pranav Patel will be the guest presenter for iPhoto '09. Pranav will focus on the new features including Faces, Places, and Events – the face-recognition, location, and event tagging organizational tools built into iPhoto '09.
One step after taking pictures is to edit them. iPhoto's editing capabilities have improved with each release – now including exposure, brightness, and contrast adjustment, cropping, red-eye removal, and enhancement of too bright or too dull pictures. We will also look at some rudimentary touch-up and editting techniques that can be done with Preview®. (Since Photoshop is so huge, we will leave that to a future meeting specifically devoted to detailed edits.)
After making sure your photos look good, you will want to share them. We will look at some photo sharing websites like Picasa™, MobileMe®, flickr®, SmugMug©, and Facebook©, and how to publish your photos to them. 
If you have any other photo tools or sharing sites you would like to have included in the program, or if you can help out as a presenter, let us know. Post your suggestions and desire to participate to the TMUG-list, or email Smythe.
The meeting will begin with the annual election of TMUG officers. The nominees for President, 1st Vice President (Programs), 2nd Vice President (Public Relations), Secretary, and Treasurer are listed below. And, as usual, we will have our always interesting Question & Answer session, moderated by Bob Chandler. Bring your questions and contribute to the answers. No doubt, there will be several drawings for fabulous door prizes, too!
(Attendance at the June meeting was 54, including 1 new member & 9 visitors.)
— 2009 TMUG Officer Elections —
The annual election of TMUG's officers is scheduled to be held at the June 8th, 2009 meeting. President Stefan Jeglinski appointed Duane Reaugh to act as a nominating committee to identify candidates who are willing to serve as officers for the 2009 fiscal year. Duane presented 4 individuals to the membership at the May 11th meeting. The nominated candidates are Smythe Richbourg for President, Duane Reaugh for 1st Vice President, Chips Chapman for Secretary, & Cort Boylan for Treasurer. A few days after the meeting, Allen Emory was offered as candidate for 2nd Vice President.
Prior to the election on June 8, any other nominations for officers will be accepted from the membership present. In addition, any TMUG member who would like to assist with the volunteer organizational efforts of the group, meeting planning, program presentations, or website contributions – at any level – is always welcome. Remember, TMUG is your group!
The annual election of TMUG's officers was held at the June 8th, 2009 meeting. Past President Stefan Jeglinski welcomed those in attendance, and presided over the election of the nominated slate of candidates who have agreed to serve as officers for the 2009 fiscal year. The newly elected officers are Smythe Richbourg as President, Duane Reaugh as 1st Vice President, Allen Emory as 2nd Vice President, Chips Chapman as Secretary, and Cort Boylan as Treasurer. They were accepted by acclimation, as no other nominations were made by the members present.
May 11, 2009 Meeting
— Just What's In That Utilities Folder??? —
Important Note: We are back to our regular 2nd-Monday meeting day; however, due to other events at the meeting site, we will not be in the front auditorium, known as the Gathering Place. Instead, we will meet upstairs in room 2060 (A & B). We plan to post signs, but if you wander around enough, you should find us.
For the program, Stefan will be discussing and demonstrating the various programs in Leopard's Utilities Folder, an underutilized and often mysterious place for many Mac users. Come be amused and impressed with a number of items that get little press, even from Apple, but which can be used to discover many things about your computer and what it's doing. [Stefan was under the weather & unable to present. Smythe & Bob carried on in Stefan's absence.]
In preparation for our annual election of officers at the June 8 meeting, Duane Reaugh will report on the search committee's nominees. Nominations will also be accepted from the members present at the meeting. TMUG's officers are President, 1st Vice President (Programs), 2nd Vice President (Public Relations), Secretary, & Treasurer.
As usual, we will start with a Question & Answer session, moderated by Bob Chandler. Throughout the meeting we will have some drawings for door prizes, too!
Unfortunately, we have been informed that the trial access to the food area in the Gathering Place is being cancelled. We just didn't have enough interest to make it worthwhile for the church to keep it open. We thank Hope for being willing to try it out!
(Attendance at the May meeting was 38, including 1 new member & 2 guests.)
April 20, 2009 Meeting
— TV on your Macintosh! —
Important Note: Our Hope Community meeting site will be closed on April 13!! We therefore have changed the meeting time to one week later – the April Meeting will now be held on Mon Apr 20. We are sorry for this rare inconvenience!
For the program, we will be showing the Elgato EyeTV 250, and broadcat service Hulu, for starters. As we get closer to meeting time, we will post more details for the meeting.
As usual, we will start with a Question & Answer session moderated by Bob Chandler.
New this month is that we have arranged for the food area in the Gathering Place to be open from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. This will give attendees a chance to get some food & / or drinks either before the meeting or during the Q&A. 4 choices will be available by pre-order for $5 each:
- Chef salad & cookie
- Veggie salad & cookie
- Turkey & cheese sandwich, potato salad, pasta cup or chips, & cookie
- Ham & cheese sandwich, potato salad, pasta cup or chips, & cookie
We will need to know if you're planning to get food beforehand, because they will only fix enough for those who pre-order (and maybe a little more, just in case). Contact Smythe directly with your preferred meal choice before 5 pm on Thursday. Pay directly to the café at the meeting. This is the first time we have experimented with food at the meeting. We'll see how it works, and hopefully there will be few if any glitches.
(Attendance at the April meeting was 46, including 4 guests.)
March 9, 2009 Meeting
— Local Network Syncing and Sharing… and a TMUG Stimulus Package —
TMUG's Program Vice President Smythe Richbourg will present the March program devoted to local network syncing and sharing. Some of the apps Smythe is planning to show us are Fliq, SyncBook, FileChute, File Magnet, EverNote, & Jing.
As usual, we will start with a Question & Answer session moderated by Bob Chandler, who coincidentally was the iMac Give–Away winner. The discussion is sure to focus on the newly updated products that Apple announced on March 3.
New this month is that we have arranged for the food area in the Gathering Place to be open from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. This will give attendees a chance to get some food & / or drinks either before the meeting or during the Q&A. 4 choices will be available by pre-order for $5 each:
- Chef salad & cookie
- Veggie salad & cookie
- Turkey & cheese sandwich, potato salad, pasta cup or chips, & cookie
- Ham & cheese sandwich, potato salad, pasta cup or chips, & cookie
We will need to know if you're planning to get food beforehand, because they will only fix enough for those who pre-order (and maybe a little more, just in case). Contact Smythe directly with your preferred meal choice before 5 pm on Thursday. Pay directly to the café at the meeting. This is the first time we have experimented with food at the meeting. We'll see how it works, and hopefully there will be few if any glitches.
Oh, and one more thing… XCom is announcing a TMUG Stimulus Package – we will be raffling an iPod Touch! Tickets are projected to be $5 each or 3 for $10. As a reminder, TMUG raffles may be entered by members & non-members alike.
There were only 48 entries in the TMUG Stimulus Package iPod Touch raffle. The lucky winner was Chuck Nall! Congratulations Chuck!
(Attendance at the March meeting was 38, including 2 guests.)
February 9, 2009 Meeting
— Some Quickies... and the TMUG iMac Give Away drawing —
The February meeting promises to be exciting on several levels. We'll start with the always-exciting Bob Chandler doing Q&A, and the program this month will be "quickies."
Quickies are short presentations by various people of utilities, programs, concepts, or tips. Each quickie will be strictly limited to a certain amount of time, such as 5 min. We will have a clock running and when the time is up, the time is up! So, presenters, please organize, or even practice. As we get closer to the meeting, we will post the quickies and announce how much time you will get to do each (probably 5-7 minutes each). Each presenter can do more than one quickie. We currently have 3 presenters and about 9 presentations; we'd like to encourage members to volunteer as well. (Please contact Stefan or Smythe off-list to let us know.) We'll post again soon with details of the presentations and presenters.
The other terribly exciting thing (especially if you're Smythe... or British) to happen is the TMUG iMac Give Away contest has come to a close. As per the rules, we achieved our goal of 80 new and renewing members at the January meeting. All that's left is the drawing to determine the winner of the iMac, which will be done at the end of the February meeting.
Since the announcement of the iMac Give Away at our June meeting through January 12, 2009, there have been 364 entries in the contest, logged by 94 TMUG members. (Be sure to check the Win an iMac LeaderBoard page before Sunday, February 8 for a recap & to confirm that all your entries are logged!)
And the winner is… Bob Chandler! Congratulations Bob!!
- The give away will proceed as follows…
- You do not need to be present to win.
- We will assign ticket numbers to those who are entered, and publish the ticket numbers here.
- At the meeting, we will have the physical tickets numbered from the first to the last required.
- Everyone will be able to see us separate the tickets and put them in the drawing receptacle.
- It will not be necessary to have your "keep this coupon" end of the tickets, but we can supply them if you prefer.
- The winner will receive a base model iMac, which will be ordered after the drawing.
- The winner may upgrade the prize at his / her expense.
Of course, we will also have a few door prize drawings, plus you will have a chance to visit & share stories with fellow TMUG members. We look forward to seeing you at the Hope Community Church building at 6:30 PM, Monday, 9 February. Don't miss it!
(Attendance at the February meeting was 61, including 8 guests.)
January 12, 2009 Meeting
— Apple Update & Macworld 2009 Report —
Oh, what fun this next week will bring!
Sure, we're got this nice, shiny new year we're all playing with, as well as those lovely gifts we exchanged over the holidays. But this week will bring Apple's last hurrah at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, which will almost surely bring changes to Apple's product line. Other vendors will announce Mac-specific items of interest and special sales around the event, so pay attention to places like Macworld and DealMac for your share in the loot.
To finish the week and the year, and to look ahead at the coming year, the program at our TMUG meeting on 12 January will be our own local Apple System Engineer, Francis Shepherd. He'll bring us the news from Macworld (with some idea of the implications of both the new items and the ending of Apple's involvement in the trade show), a look over the past year and, finally, what the next year will bring. In true Janus fashion, we'll look backwards and forward together.
We'll also have the usual Question & Answer session, some door prize drawings, and the wit and banter of your fellow club members. What better way to start out a new year? We look forward to seeing you all at the Hope Community Church building at 6:30 PM, Monday, 12 January. Don't miss it!
(Attendance at the January meeting was 47, including 4 new members, 4 renewals, & 3 guests.)
December 8, 2008
— Holiday Party… and a 4-way Raffle! —
It's less than 2 weeks until the December 8th TMUG meeting (and less than a month until Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, & the Winter Solstice)! The Executive Committee is planning another holiday party with all sorts of fun and merriment, including refreshments, door prizes, and a raffle. We will meet in the upstairs room with sofas at the far end of the Hope Community Church building. (This is not the room with the tiki bar where we met in April - July, nor will we meet in the "Meeting Place" near the building entrance.) We will still begin with our normal Q&A session, moderated by Bob Chandler.
We have chosen 3 different Apple products for the raffle — an iPod Touch, an AirPort Express, & an iPod Nano, plus a license for the 1Password app. The raffle will work differently from those we've held in the past. Tickets will be worth $1 each & will be sold in lots of 5 for $5 & 25 for $20. To enter the raffle (actually 4 raffles!), you will place as many tickets as you want to enter for a prize into one of 4 bags for the 4 prizes. Therefore, you can separately enter 1, 2, 3, or all 4 raffles! And remember, you don't have to be a TMUG member to enter a raffle, but we hope you will join if you're not a member.
NB There were 4 happy winners in the December holiday raffle. Murray Silverstone won the license for 1Password, Rick DeNatale won the AirPort Express, Bill Oldham won the iPod Nano, and Jim Fussell won the iPod Touch. Congratulations to the winners! And thanks to everyone who participated!
If you would like to help out with the meeting organization & preparation, contact an XCom member or post to the TMUG-list. Your participation will make the evening even more exciting!
Our iMac Give Away is getting closer to concluding! Since the announcement of the iMac Give Away at our June meeting, 56 TMUG'ers have renewed their memberships or joined. There are 247 entries logged as of 11.24.08. (Check the Win an iMac LeaderBoard page to confirm that all your entries are logged.) We will hold a drawing for a new iMac at the meeting after the 80 member goal is reached. It presently looks like this will be in January or February. We need only 24 additional renewal & new memberships to meet the goal. If your membership is due to expire in the couple of months, or has expired already, don't put it off – renew today!
The meeting will begin at 6:30 pm on December 8 at the Hope Community Church in Raleigh. And, of course, we will have the usual drawings for several door prizes for TMUG members throughout the meeting. Remember, TMUG is the undisputed leading Mac User Group in the Triangle... & beyond! See you there!
(Attendance at the December meeting was 55, including 9 new members, 4 renewals, & 5 guests.)
November 10, 2008
— Recovering a Stolen Mac, and Considerations for Keeping your Mac and its Data Secure in the Event —
Based on recent TMUG-list discussion, the executive committee has decided that a program on securing and potentially recovering a stolen Mac will be useful to our general audience. Charles Mangin will cover the common mechanisms available in OSX to secure your data in the event of theft or other compromise. We'll move beyond this to methods of contacting and communicating with your stolen computer, hopefully acquiring enough information so that authorities stand a good chance of recovering it.
And if that isn't enough somehow, we will still begin with our normal Q&A session, emceed by Bob Chandler. And we will premiere a short segment right before the break that highlights new or interesting iPhone apps. We will also be discussing the Christmas meeting, including the proposed events & giveaways we are planning with excitement.
Our iMac Give Away is getting closer to concluding! Since the announcement of the iMac Give Away at our June meeting, 51 TMUG'ers have renewed or joined. We will hold a drawing for a new iMac at the meeting when the 80 member goal is reached. We hope this will be in December... but only if 31 additional renewal & new memberships are received. If your membership is due to expire in the next 3 months, or has expired already, don't put it off – renew today!
The meeting will begin at 6:30 pm on November 10 at the Hope Community Church in Raleigh. We will have the usual drawings for several door prizes for TMUG members throughout the meeting. Remember, TMUG is the undisputed leading Mac User Group in the Triangle... & beyond! See you there!
(Attendance at the November meeting was 39, including 2 new members, 2 renewals, & 5 guests.)
— Older Meeting Announcements —
– March 9, 2009 Meeting Announcement –
– February 9, 2009 Meeting Announcement –
– January 12, 2009 Meeting Announcement –
– December 8, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– November 10, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– October 13, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– September 8, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– August 11, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– July 14, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– June 9, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– May 12, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– April 14, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– March 10, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– February 11, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– January 14, 2008 Meeting Announcement –
– December 10, 2007 Meeting Announcement –
– November 12, 2007 Meeting Announcement –
– 2007 TMUG Meeting Announcements –
Velomac 17:33, 27 October 2009 (EDT)
