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Recent Programs
Starting a backup with SuperDuper! June 17, 2010: SBMUG president Jim Tinsley showed us how to set up and use MozyHome’s on-line backup storage, one of five “cloud” backup services reviewed this month by MacLife Magazine. Jim also compared features of the various services, some of which work only with Intel Macs while others work with PowerPC models too. Most offer 2 GB of storage for free and charge for larger amounts of storage. Mozy’s preferences include shceduling when to do backups and how long to wait when the computer is in use, what bandwidth to throttle to and when to throttle, and which folders and files to include or exclude from backing up. Pia Oliver showed us how to set up and use SuperDuper! for copying to a local external drive. The external drive can be “bootable”, so it can be used as a startup drive if the computer’s internal drive fails. Before the initial backup, use Disk Utility to erase the new drive and reformat it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) to make it bootable. SuperDuper!’s easy-to-read help manual explains how to set various options (including scheduled backups and backing up over a network), how to recover from a disaster, and how to test new updates with a “sandbox” partition. Remember, disasters can happen to backups too, so it’s good to have at least 3 copies, in 2 different media and in 2 different places. For example, a SuperDuper! bootable backup copy, a Time Machine backup, and a backup to “the cloud”. 
Scrabble on the iPad, an ideal board game for traveling May 20, 2010: SBMUG member Harold Adams described his road trip to Florida with his 17-year-old son Ben, a MacBook, a 3G iPhone and a WiFi iPad, to deliver a client’s dog to her new home. The trip took them through Goodyear Arizona, New Mexico, Van Horn Texas, a visit to the Alamo, The Riverwalk in San Antonio, Baton Rouge Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Lake City Florida, and finally to West Palm Beach. The trip took six days, traveling about eight hours and 480 miles a day. Harold showed us a slide show of images made with the iPhone camera while they were on the road and taking roadside breaks, including scenery and greenery along the way, the Alamo, and even some fast food places! With only WiFi connectivity, the iPad worked in some hotels and not in others that didn’t offer it. (Same with coffee shops, of course.) Sometimes it was necessary to get the internet on the iPhone. And sometimes WiFi worked on the iPad but not the iPhone. WiFi service, which usually covers only a few rooms or a building, was always free and without password on this trip. 3G (as used in cell phones) works out in the wild as well, but there are fees involved. 3G cell service on the iPhone was good the whole way. 
A postcard from the road The iPhone has the advantage that it fits in a pocket, the iPad and MacBook don’t. The iPhone has a feature in the Map application that uses GPS to find your current location and helps you reroute your driving directions while you’re sitting “shotgun” in the car. The iPhone was great for taking pictures on the way. Harold used a $1 app called Postman to compose and email photos to friends as picture postcards. After arriving in Florida, Harold transferred the postcards to the iPad to show to others. (The MacBook stayed in the bag most of the time. They could have easily made the trip without it.) Where there was WiFi, the iPad was good for email and the web. A 3G iPad would have been better for connectivity and driving directions. On the return trip, the iPad was great for playing Scrabble on the plane, passing it around from one player to another. Harold and Ben watched a Seinfeld episode on the iPad. It looked much better than the seat-back screen on the plane. When not on the road, Harold is the force behind Santa Barbara Life – SBLIFE.COM and Adams Technical Media Services and Macintosh consulting. 
The sensational new iPad! April 15, 2010: This month, three SBMUGers gave us a hands-on look at their new iPads! Jim Tinsley began with the basics: the controls and connectors, including the switch that keeps the orientation from flipping when you’re reading on your side in bed. The iPad has no phone technology so it doesn’t do instant messaging, but it can make and receive calls with Skype. Synchronizing with an iPhone makes it easy to install the same applications on the iPad, even newer versions if available. Though the touch interface is the same as on the iPhone, the iPad’s larger screen makes it practical to work with documents, revealing a new paradigm: using your fingers instead of a mouse! Harold Adams showed us a game that uses the iPad’s motion sensor as the controller, and parts of videos and a Bugs Bunny cartoon. We could hear the sound easily from across the room. Harold keeps his iPad, iPhone, MacBook and iMac all synched with MobileMe, so a calendar entry on any one of them shows up on the others. He showed how a copy of USA Today looks just like the print edition, and how easy it is to select an article and read it. Once the latest edition is downloaded it can be read anytime even when there’s no network access. We also had a look at the iPad versions of iPhoto and Mail, which take advantage of the large screen size (five times as many pixels as on the iPhone). Richard Eigen showed us the iBook and Kindle reader apps. iBook displays your downloaded books on a bookshelf, and reading a book on the iPad is very much like reading the paper kind, even in the way pages turn. There are controls to change type face, font size and screen brightness. The Kindle reader is similar, but works with books bought from Amazon.com. Apple has thousands of books available for free. Richard showed us one of them: Winnie the Pooh, with illustrations! 
Roger Millikan’s Avian Bits and Pieces March 18, 2010: Local photographer and “birder” Roger Millikan talked about how digital photography works, what camera choices are best for bird photography, and how post-processing the images can make a big difference. (See Avian Bits and Pieces for some of Roger’s bird photographs.) Roger is a retired chemistry professor from UCSB and teaching is obviously his calling, as he explained all sorts of things very clearly and well. We also learned a bunch about local birds, and had a great time! Roger’s new book Birds of Cachuma Lake is available now, and you can order copies here. February 18, 2010: SBMUG member Randy Reetz showed us some of the amazing things you can do at home and in the office in his presentation “FileMaker – A Database for the Creative Soul.” FileMaker Pro can do much more than help you keep track of your books and CDs. It also does audio, video, emailing, dialing, and stand-alone kiosk apps! Randy showed us a very impressive variety of projects he created, including a recent project on local history and the visitor center kiosk, all done with FileMaker Pro. January 28, 2010: SBMUG president Jim Tinsley started us off with a Q&A session discussing cable internet problems. Following a break with delicious fig bars and other refreshments, Jim turned to the subject of backups. Here’s a very brief summary: 1. Make at least one copy of your personal files, test your copy, and do this often. Even backup drives fail, houses burn down, equipment is stolen, so more than one copy stored in more than one location is better. 2. Organize — know what’s been backed up and where. 3. Archive for long-term storage (on CDs or DVDs, for example) old files you want to keep but don’t want taking up space on your computer. Software to make regular backups more convenient (so you won’t procrastinate): Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper (both highly regarded, can make bootable backups); Prosoft Data Backup; Dantz Retrospect. Utilities: You can make a zip archive of your backup with DropZip, which comes with Mac OS X (in the Applications > Stuffit folder). Backup media: External hard drives (Firewire is faster than USB), internal hard drive in a spare slot, CDs & DVDs (good for archiving, but limited capacity and slow compared to hard drives), USB memory sticks (convenient and fast, but can wear out with lots of use), iPods, network backup services (MobileMe iDisk, Jungle Disk, Mozy, CrashPlan.com, DropBox.com). Another idea: Send a compressed archive as an attachment to a friend, or even to yourself, to make copies available in more than one place.
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