Meeting Topics

Our club Wiki is an ideal place for a dynamic list of what we would like to have as topics for club meetings. We can all put in our ideas and refine the ideas of others. Feel free to contribute any thoughts you may have for meeting topics, however sketchy or "off the wall". As other people join in with additional points, the ideas will take form and become more substantial.

Meeting Topic Ideas

The space here is a free-form area to just throw ideas onto the page. Below is a more organised list of topics by catagory. Even if you don't have any ideas of your own you can help catagorise the ones already here.

Andre:

I'm still looking for some good photo album & photo management software.

A tour of the new Mac OSX release "Tiger" would be interesting, probably would be me doing it though as Steve's in forrin parts these days.

Maybe a home networking specific open meeting (would be topical) you may have done just that last week though.

Or even a wireless specific meeting, everyone seems to have or want this.

Steve:

In favour of brief and informal tour of Tiger. Also interested in under the bonnet features; developer technologies such as Core Data and Core Image

Pam:

Should we do something about blogging and that voice stuff that bloggers are on about too?

  • Firewalls (Andrew)
  • Virus checkers & spyware etc (Andrew)
  • System backups (Trevor)
  • Clever addresses like Trevor's (Pam) What do you mean Pam?
Automatic language translation really only involves providing a few URL's. Not a whole session on its own. Effective searching is very vague and very much a matter of experience I think. Maybe we could roll these together?

Firewalls are definitely something we should look to cover but there are so many different implementations available it may be hard to cover any syntax. The same goes for virus and spyware checkers.

Linux distro comparisons could take up a year of meetings and could get very technical very quickly. Perhaps the Linux using members could do a "what I use and why" instead.

Using PCs for Genealogy & Family History

  • Look at Calico Software's family Historian family tree software (Windows)
  • Anyone use other (freeware) programs? What is available on other platforms?
  • As far as RISC OS is concerned a commercial package called Ancestor+ (version 2) is available
  • as are some well used PD utilities (more information when I am back at my Risc PC) (Vic)

Sound

  • Audacity
  • Cool Edit 2000 (now Adobe Audition)
  • Cubasis
  • Logic Audio
  • Wavelab
  • Goldwave
  • Also audio facilities in video editing programs.
  • MIDI
  • Sequencers
  • Synthesis
  • Composition

Podcasting

What is one? It's a kind of audio blog I think.

e.g.

The World Wide Web

  • Peoples favorites
  • How to "everything" not just pages and links (Niall)
  • Something on DHTML, CSS etc. (André)
  • Could do something on web content filtering along with a demo (the church still want their content filtering set up). (Andreé)
  • Automatic language translation (Ken)
  • Effective searching
We would want to leave some space before considering doing favourite websites again. We also learned an important lesson from the previous attempt which is: People who propose a site download the example pages.

The "how to everything" seems a bit wide-ranging. Perhaps we could clarify exactly what the everything is. CGI forms and Flash are probably two common things that most beginners can't do. It is possible that what was meant was by "How to everything" was the whole process, i.e., what to do after you've written the HTML. In other words, uploading to your ISP.

The "how to everything" web page idea could have legs. I think what is sought is help in uploading web pages to an ISP's FTP server. However we could expand it to cover Geocities and other free site hosts.

Instant messaging

  • Yahoo chatting
  • Other chat networks (MSN, AOL, ICQ etc)

Effective Information Exchange

  • Good use of groups + lists + easy access to shared info without flooding peoples email boxes
  • Using my computer as a phone (Pam)
  • Voice input - what is best? (Pam)
I'm not entirely clear on what's needed for "Good use of groups" but I think the best we can hope to do is present options and leave Pam to sort it out for herself. As for voice input, I've always found a microphone to be the transducer of choice when audio frequency compression waves are concerned. Not really a topic on its own.

File Sharing Over the internet (Vic)

  • How? Why?
  • Discussion of the different protocols ( Gnutella, BitTorrent, eXeem etc)
  • What is Legal? - What is not?.
  • How to compress and split files before sharing and how to de-compress and rejoin the files that you have accuired.

Linux Basics (Nick)

  • Linux distribution comparisons (Andrew)
Demonstrating how to install a basic Linux distribution, and what (not) to do. Bring in Linux systems you have, and demonstrate what they can do...? (Nick)

2006 Draft Meeting Schedule

2007 Draft Meeting Schedule