July 6, 2010

About a dozen members and guests attended a short presentation by Linda on several iMovie projects she had created. Her montage of old family photos was especially interesting with the voiceover narration provided by her father to fill in the family history. She also showed us video of the new structures beginning to rise out of the Twin Towers site in NYC.

John's photos of his trip to France, passed around on his iPad, were all well-shot and entertaining.

Thanks as always to Donna for bringing cookies, berries and lemonade.

June 1, 2010

A small group of members assembled for discussion of digital photography centered around John's imminent departure for France. Donna provided cookies and punch.

We are anticpating a presentation on digital video for the July meeting.

May 4, 2010

The device that may revolutionize computing was a guest at our meeting. In other words, we had our first look at the iPad. Everyone wants one!

We also discussed hard drive issues such as upgrading and partitioning.

April 6, 2010

Members enjoyed a freeform discussion about printing from their macs. Then the conversation moved to all the free things available on the internet, such as Google, Facebook and Dropbox (for free storage).

Roger noted that the club now has a Facebook page, with the group name PaMUG. Drop by leave your comments and questions.

March 2, 2010

Tonight's theme was photography. First John gave us an introduction to his GigaPan, a robotic instrument that controls your digital camera and sweeps it across your view, generating a panorama with potentially thousands of individual overlapping shots combined into one image. If your camera has a good zoom, the resulting picture will have astonishing detail. He suggests the following sites for more information and a sampling of what photographers have accomplished with the device.

http://www.gigapan.com- commercial site for "giga-gear"
http://www.gigapan.org - non-commercial site for posting gigapans
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/42850/ - direct to my test gigapan

But wait, there was more - A guest, Brian, also demonstrated his "lens baby". This is a lens that can be tilted in relation to the plane of the sensor, producing a pleasant vignette effect.

Thanks to him and John for very interesting demonstrations, and a tip of the hat to Donna for providing refreshments.

February 2, 2010

Roger brought up the idea of our group being involved with the planned Discovery Center in State College. This could work well for all concerned.
He also started a financial discussion. It has been some time indeed since we've paid much attention to dues and expenses.
He would also like to see us start four special interest groups: Make, Mode, Mold, and Medium.
We are hoping to have a return visit from Dave Marra this spring. His program was so jam-packed, we need a repeat to absorb it all.

January 5, 2010

There was no meeting scheduled for this month.

December 1, 2009

A small but lively turnout for our Christmas meeting. IPhoto in particular was a topic of conversation. Donna played Santa with a nice selection of Christmas cookies, candy and punch.

November 3, 2009

At this meeting we bid farewell to John Hiester as club president. He did an excellant job for over five years, but he felt it was time to let someone else bring a fresh perspective to the position. Roger Daugherty has kindly agreed to step up and take over the leadership of one of the longest running mac user groups anywhere.
Donna brought candies and tea for refreshment, and promises a special offering for the Christmas meeting. Thanks to her as always.

October 6, 2009

Dave Marra, a systems engineer for Apple, entertained us with a terrific presentation of the latest software. From Snow Leopard to Quicktime he covered many angles of Apples system and iLife package. Many of the latest advances are downright amazing, such as facial recognition in iPhoto and the ease of constructing a musical passage in Garage Band.
Dave is definitely high on our list for encore performances in the next year.
Not surprisingly, he could not reveal what is next for Apple, but it's intriguing to hear of all the new construction going on in Cupertino, as the company expands.
Donna and provided some excellant brownies and other refreshments.

September 1, 2009

John presented an overview of Synium software's MacFamilyTree, a package for creating family histories. The software supports almost every conceivable family context, and allows for text, audio, and video.

There was no meeting in August.

See the Minutes Archive for notes from meetings over a year ago.