Meeting opened with Questions and Answers:. Q. After installing Tiger get a blue screen with lots of languages on it. Only happens with shut down. A: Welcome to your first Kernal Panic. Clean install was done. Try un-installing Nortons. If it still does that then unplug all external devices. If it still does it after that then try creating another User account and see if that has the same problem. If it still does it then it's something across all accounts and system wide. If it shuts down fine on the second user then it's something in your User folder. May need to look deeper at the your account.
Generally with most issues it's a good idea to create another user account. Just call it a test account, with no password. Then if issues arrive you can log in and try that account to see. If the problem disappears then you know it's related to your account only and makes it easier to look at the issues. If it has the same problem then you know it's system wide and you can look at hardware or something corrupted on the drive. Peta North from Camera Solutions then gave a talk on camera's. Most camera's these days are 5MP (mega pixel) so very good quality. The best thing look for is Optical zoom in camera. This is lot better than Digital Zoom. Battery power all is also a lot better these days. The Ricoh is the fastest start up time. So we find the cameras turn on a lot faster then they used to (ie first generation cameras.) These days the firmware are a lot faster, so you can work with it straight from turning it on. Once you move from compact camera's you go into a fixed camera. It has a wide angle, but a good zoom. It's still quite compact, and has good automatic features, but you can still use it manually. These allow you to "play" around with it more. Eg Fireworks setting for taking pictures at night with Fireworks. Form there you go to Single Lens Reflex (SLR). This means when you look through the lens you're getting a lot more. The Nikon has a magnification of about 1.5x so you can zoom as well as wide angle without changing lens. Most of the new camera's come with a wide angle so it works out cheaper to do it that way. What you find with camera's is that they also change, the same way as Mac's do. So if you find that it takes a while from clicking the button to taking the picture then it means it's not keeping up with what it has to do. Time to upgrade. The newer model's are designed to be a lot faster from turning them on. So how big of a Megapixel camera should you get? 3MP is a good starting point. If you go higher (6 or 7MP) then you're going to get a higher resolution quality. So you can print it a lot larger then a 3MP picture. Again this can also depend on the type of picture format your use. (eg JPG, TIFF, RAW etc.) Most picture these days you can print on paper (which some paper is 25 years or better.) You can also take it into photo labs (like Peta's work) you can still get pictures printed out using a chemical process, so these last just as long,..sometimes up to 100years! :o) Good to save for the grandkids. With a lot of things going to Digital these days Digital Video Camera's are also very big. Some of the models also have still ability in them, and come with a 4GB "flash drive" to store onto. These gives you straight DV to tape as well as taking up to 5MP pixels all out of the camera. So you don't need to take 2 camera's with you, you can take 1 camera and do both DV videoing and take still pictures as well. JVC are using a lot of technology and will more than likely end up going to this in the future. It comes with a little "hard disk" to store to, which is 4GB in size. Camera solutions can also do slide scanning and sell Slide scanners as well, for 35mm etc. For more info visit them at Shop 2, 169 Murray Street Matt, Perth. Call them on 9225 5966 or visit <http://www.camerasolutions.com.au Bob Howells then gave us a demo on his 7600 upgraded so that it can run Mac OSX. He gave a run down on what he did to get it to working. With working with his 7600 (and since he's retired and technically minded from his Telstra days) he thought that making his 7600 run OSX would be the way to go. The 7600 had an upgrade card in it (a G4/450 upgrade) and a good 18GB drive running Mac OS 9.1. If you put an OSX CD into the machine it will say it won't work with this type of Mac. There is a program that allows an older mac to read these CD's. It's called Xpostfacto. This means you can then get it loaded to work with. So with Xpostfacto in his "trial" machine and about 200MB of RAM he tried to install it. You need to run Mac OS9 on a separate partition to run and set up OSX. Once it was divided then the OS9 was installed and still OSX wouldn't install. So it was back to the drawing board..... After working through some termination issues it was Matt then spoke about Podcasting. With RSS (Really Simply Syndication) they allowed you to "syndicate" MP3 files. This means you could download sound files. Using iTunes 4.9 you click on Podcasts. It shows you a list of the podcasts you've subscribed to. Using the button in the bottom corner, you can see the directory of Podcasts. When you click on a section you can see all the podcasts for that section, eg Disney. Once you have a look at it you can click on the name itself to see/hear a preview of it. You can then subscribe to it and every time after that you open iTunes it will go and download any new versions of that Podcast. Everytime you open iTunes it will update all your podcasts. You can then listen to it, and when you plug in your iPod it will transfer it to your iPod. You can then listen to it on the go!! A very good way to listen to things on the go. You don't then need to go to the website and download the podcast all the time,...iTunes will do it for you. At the moment, not a lot of Australian content,..no doubt this will be added to later. There are a lot of podcasts under the directory, so well worth the look. From the online directory if you type in Australia you will infact turn up quite a few. Some Podcasts you can also get direct from other websites, eg JJJ, 92FM etc. Anyone can create a podcast, you just have to get Apple to approve your's and add it to their directory. Also worth noting, is that although there are about 3million podcasts, you can drag the URL into the subscription window and it will add it to the list. So really there is no limit to what it can do. You just find most of it relates more to talk back shows. Certainly worth a listen,..so make sure you've got iTunes 4.9. A free download from Apple. <http://www.apple.com.au/iTunes> The night ended with some giveaways, followed by Tea, Coffee and biscuits! Thanks again to the presenters,...much appreciated! I hope everyone enjoyed the night,...and remember, this is your meeting, so please feel free to email us with ideas of what you would like to see,...or if you've got something you'd like to share, let us know and you can present it. Enjoy! Kind Regards Daniel Kerr
