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Last Meeting
Dick Brown entertained our hearts and minds showing us how to make a calendar with our images. This could be a Christmas present, a useful object for our own use, or something that could be given away by a group such as BMUG!
Dick recommended using the commercial site VistaPrint who offer easy to use templates for you to add your pictures, and then they print and post to you, the products of your labour. The calendars are not expensive and come within a few days of your completing the set-up. See https://www.vistaprint.com.au/
Dick highly recommends choosing the images you will want to use before you start. He says to make a folder especially for the activity. Then you can choose the template you want to use. Making changes to individual pages so that images fit neatly, et., can be done once you have the images in the calendar and saved. You can continue to work on your calendar until it is perfect - and then send it off for printing.
News about the WWW
As we end the 30th year of the World Wide Web, perhaps we can learn a bit about how to make sure the next 30 years are safe and productive? 
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web as they say, has been actively working to develop a better online environment. His original ideas were the basis for what we have now, but as we all know, thousands of things have happened in the last 30 years and the Web is not exactly the wholly nice place we'd like it to be. Tim's presentation, available in a number of languages, is worth listening to. Tim has always been a 'good guy'. He chose to work for the community rather than himself and, with his huge team of helpers at the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim has struggled to help everyone, everywhere, get the benefits available from this technology. The Talk is available at https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/
Tim has initiated The Web Foundation, based in the UK, his natural home, and in an open way, is helping coordinate activities across the world to improve the Web.
There seem to be several 'histories' of the Web but perhaps the most reliable is from the Foundation. It is available at https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
Of interest in the same context, might be this year's annual Pearcey Lecture presented by Roger Taylor, UK government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.
Roger offers a broad look at ethics and innovation in an increasingly complex data-reliant world; the conflict between the general use of data for the benefit of all society compared to the damage of specific data that can be used against individuals, the challenge of huge data platforms and information-advantage systems and how these business models can be at odds with ethics.
This presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLIxsbOPc0
An Idea worth pursuing?
Recently, trying to get a sense of 'Texas'.
I tried searching YouTube. For all the nonsense that is posted online, perhaps YouTube is a good place to go. Facebook searches offer lots of Facebook pages that contain references to Texas, it's true, but YouTube is well worth a look.
I found short videos showing interesting tourist places and cities and some showing life in the outdoors, especially on ranches. This turned out to be good because some of these carried interesting stories about ranchers and their lives. Of particular interest turned out to be one about the Carlton family. Their story is of a family who are combining profitable farming, as we would call it, with significant regeneration of the land - what Australians often do under the banner of Landcare. Check it out for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt1cCss6v9s
The lesson from this exercise is in the search activity. Choosing search terms is not always easy because of language differences - we say graziers and Americans say ranchers, etc. Surprisingly, it is OK to use sentences in searches - Google does a good job of interpreting them and if you add 'YouTube' to your Google search, you get the best of both worlds. Apple Insider News
Each month, Peter Poteralski reads lots of Apple Insider articles and recommends a few for us to read. You can check them out via the app or at www.appleinsider.com
Oct 15
How to select, copy, and paste text in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
Oct 8
Hands on: New Tile Sticker, Tile Mate, Tile Pro, and Tile Slim are the best Bluetooth trackers yet (Apple purportedly releasing their own soon)
Oct 5
Tip: How to get more from Control Center in iOS 13
Oct 2
How to use Apple's new Reminders app in iOS 13, iPadOS 13, and MacOS Catalina
Oct 1
Updated Pixelmator Photo 1.1 brings iPadOS features plus batch editing
Sept 30
Apple News+ subscription launches in UK and Australia
Next Meeting
At our next meeting, November 12, Simon Pockley will come to show us how he used technology to 'do' history. This is part of the (slow) development of a website so that members can see how using web technologies offers a new and important way of combining documents for the future, or should we say, for longevity.
The magic in what Simon has to show is the ability to connect things - history, like lots of disciplines, is never just a matter of a dateline, or even an annotated dateline. Making sense of what we know, or can provide evidence for, and what we think might have happened; what are the circumstances as we understand them now and what were they understood to be at the time we are investigating.
Simon created an outstanding hypertext story about Australia's past. In his words:
"The Flight of Ducks is an Australian on-line documentary spanning more than 80 years. It has been continuously developed online since 1995. In January 1933, F.J.A. Pockley (my father) travelled to Central Australia as a student member of a Sydney University research team. Soon after arriving at Hermannsburg Mission he undertook a private camel expedition through the Western MacDonell Ranges to Mount Liebig. He brought back a pencil written journal, cinefilm, photographs and Aboriginal objects. The collection provides a unique window into the end of the frontier period when there were still isolated groups of Aborigines yet to experience contact with 'whites'. My father's companions on this journey were interesting and remarkable men. They were: Hezekial, a senior Aboriginal lawman and guide; linguist, T.G.H. Strehlow; artist, Arthur Murch and animal and skull collector, Stanley Larnach."
You can see for yourself at http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/
If you or your colleagues are interested in history, including how to do history, this should be a good session for you.
Following this presentation and questions, Peter Poteralski will update the group with information about new Apple releases.
Guests are always welcome.
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