The Mac User group I joined in 2003 hasn’t held a physical face-to-face meeting for two years, now using Zoom for its various meetings. Back in the day, we’d start at 9am and finish at 4pm on the first Saturday of each month, excluding January. The venue we used is a big Baptist Church complex & we used to hire three classrooms & an auditorium to run the interest groups held each hour in each classroom plus the auditorium for an hour-long main presentation conducted by our chosen guest speaker. Membership numbers have taken a big hit due to COVID and paying out over $1500 per day for that venue is unsustainable on just 300 members.
Nw we run the day on Zoom & members are missing the access to their friends and to the onsite café which the Church manned especially for us, normally it’s closed on weekends.
The Group’s management has come up with a hybrid structure to satisfy all needs as well as to save $1000 per hire day.
The interest group/classes will still be on Zoom on the first Saturday of each month, with no main presentation & a short lunch break, 30 minutes instead of the current 90.
Then, on the third Saturday of each month, we hire the auditorium for $400 for the day, run the main presentation for 90 minutes instead of the current 60. After that we can solve the problems of the world in the auditorium or café. The plan is to hire the room from 10am to 2pm only.
I really like this plan.
I’ve been using this device https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B01GHKL7HQ/ref=ppxyodtbasintitleo01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 to scan & save Dad’s slide collection, or at least those of which I don’t already have copies. It’s really effective with the thicker plastic-framed transparencies because one of the feed-in attachments is a quick change magazine that can take up to 12 slides in its hopper. That attachment is useless with the thin cardboard-framed slides, they get jammed in the mechanism. For those there is a hinged frame that holds four slides at a time and you manually insert that into the slot in the side. There are indentations to enable accurate placement of the images to be copied. You can select between 5 MP & 10 MP jpgs which are stored on an SD card.
Very fast & effective with slides.
@whoisashygirl And of course, the late Qld Premier Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen referred to news conferences as “feeding the chooks.”
// @variablepulserate
@sumudu An Apple TV is compact enough to do the TV connection. Just use AirPlay to connect to it.
One of the larger sub-groups of the Mac User Group used to have a bag of various dongles for presenters to connect to a laser/LED projector. About six years ago they started using an Apple TV 3rd gen connected to the projector via HDMI cable. The audio section is covered by a battery-powered PA system connected to microphones or a 3.5mm audio plug.
This way you don’t have to worry about the limited port selection (Thunderbolt3/USB 4.0) on the current M1 MacBook Air/MacBook Pro.
In truth, I doubt you’d even meed a MacBook Pro: a MacBook Air with 512 GB storage, 16 GB Unified Memory & the 8 graphics cores that comes with that combination should be plenty powerful for you.
I’m basing this recommendation on my base model M1 MacBook Air - that has 256 GB storage, 8 GB Unified Memory & 7 graphics cores. All M1 Macs (except the M1 Pro & Max models) have 8 processor cores.
Neighbours at the other end of the block of units who have set up a snooker table in their garage are playing something weird that’s possibly distantly related to a cross between (c)rap “music” & a demented race-call.
Folk often ask “how long will my Mac last & still be relevant?” Well, I bought my 2017 4k iMac (quad-core 3.0 GHz i5) with a dedicated graphics card & 16 GB RAM just six weeks after that model update was released, July 2017. That’s 5 months shy of five years. It’s still going strong, meeting most of my computing needs & has the newest available OS variant installed. One major change made was exchanging the 1.03 TB Fusion drive with a 1 TB SSD.
If I need more capability or speed, I also have an M1 MacBook Air.
@matigo I was getting that way about the middle of 2018, almost collapsed while interstate at my aunt’s funeral. I was diagnosed as anaemic & needed an iron transfusion 3 weeks later.
