Mac Meetup - a legacy display, on Wed 15 Feb 2011: 7pm - 10pm (Fall of Singapore anniversary)

I've been telling Ivor I’d like to have an actual Mac meetup, since we do have notes to exchange about Mac software and hardware.

The MacLarkin meetups are great socials and during the last one, I didn't open my mac. Admittedly, some attention has shifted to the iPhone whose potential we have not exhausted.

Let me know in the comments if you are able to join us on Wed 15 Feb 2012: 7pm-10pm @ Habour Front Coffee Club. Confirmed so far: Ivor, Kevin, Kenneth, Airani, Puay Ann, Anand and Sivasothi.

I'll see if this can bait some of the old regulars who say the HV meetups are out of the way.

Come with laptops and iPhones charged. AND legacy items in working order to display for photography and bragging rights! I think I still have my first Apple ][ 5 1/4" floppy. I think someone will top that, just wonder with what!

“Eat cake and drink coffee!”

Another John Larkin induced mac meetup. Started with dinner at the usual hangout at Blk 40 and I took over the reins of making the orders in Alvin's absence.

Topics covered in random order during the meetup:

-Prisms (from a Physics open house)

-iOS5 (text expansion; instant camera; iMessage)

-Attention span - John realised that his attention span was getting shorter lately with urges to crack jokes during class when the students are quietly working on their stuff. A result of the use of smart phones and tablets with information at your fingertips and over stimulation of the brain with apps? Perhaps.

-Dropbox - How no one carries a thumbdrive anymore. But being the geeks we all are, we carry storage devices in one form or many others as demonstrated in the photos.

Stemming from the storage device mini showdown, “Legacy meetup” would be the theme for the next meet. The rule is to bring the oldest gadget you own and it only counts if you can show that it still works.

So what do we expect to see? The following were promised:

-First thumbdrive by Trek

-Walkman (the one using cassette)

-5 ¼ “floppy disk with portable USB drive

-3 ½ “ floppy disk and portable drive

-Iomega zip disks and portable drive

-Some hole punch card thing Siva says he has

-Apple 2 machine

-Apple Newton

To be inline with the legacy theme, the whole meetup would be shot with a 2mp digital camera (ya, the "vintage" Sony cybershot and it still works! I win!)


Pictures from the meetup from my camera and Kenneth's flickr:











































































































































Mini Storage Device showdown.

Unfollow John Larkin on Twitter (See why in the Starbucks Photo)

Friday, 7.00 pm. It just stopped raining. At the last John Larkin meeting, it had been raining too. This rain thing seems awfully coincidental. I met early birds Alvin, Kenneth and Ivor at Block 40. Ivor bugged me again on the "vintage" Sony Cybershot (I'm NOT letting it go!).

We knew Kevin wasn't turning up because Kenneth said he saw Kevin's check-in at a clinic on Foursquare in the morning. Aahh...wonders of technology, you don't even need to inform people that you are sick.

Alvin as usual did a great job of ordering dinner and the dishes came at the same time as John's arrival. Siva reached last after his practical and polished off the rest of dinner :-) Conversations of Singapore elections and old neighborhoods were pretty enlightening.

Alvin parted ways after dinner and we trooped down to Starbucks at Holland Village. It was their first night to be opened for 24 hours and it seems pretty empty much to our amazement.

New attendance at Starbucks in chronological order: bubblevicious, aramc and airani. Laurence is Down Under but tried to Facetime a couple of times unsuccessfully.

Did we talk about mac stuff? I just recalled the long search for the "yellow camphor medicated oil with a silhouette of a man" that Siva was reminiscing about turned out to be Sloan's liniment.

Many apologies to aramc and bubblevicious for omitting your photos. I'm just a bad bad bad photographer so the photos ended up really blur.

See John Larkin's blog for his post on the meetup and photos.

Photos from the meet up:

Mac Meetup w/John Larkin this Friday at Holland Village

We meet again, with John Larkin in town, this Friday 7th October 2011: 7.00pm. We'll have dinner at Block 40 and then move on to Holland Village Starbucks at about 8.00pm. Let me know if you’re joining John, Airani, Ivor, Kenneth and myself.

Steve Jobs, RIP

Thanks for the wings, Steve! Never confined!

MacWorld looks back, 06 Oct 2011

John has a couple of jugs...

Friday 15 Apr 2011: 7.00pm - it was a muggy evening and NEA had already reminded us about the prevalent inter-monsoon evening storms - it rains ALL the time, it seems. I intercepted Alvin at Block 40 Holland Drive and we secured a table out of the rain. Next Kenneth plonked down to report the MRT line was suffering yet another hiccup again.

When John Larkin appeared, he was radiant, even after battling a jam from the "ulu" west to reach our regular kopi tiam haunt. We can’t blame the beer at Block 40 for his euphoric mood John. He's just high on life, and even after complete newbies infiltrated his iPad class today.

The conversation was colourful to say the least and food sumptious. I had wisely left dinner orders to Alvin. He handled the job with his famous expertise, that John wanted to postpone his return Down Under so that he'd have time to sample the local fare he relishes and knows so well.

After evaluat
ing John's fitness to visit Holland Village, we marched over, in an infantry section formation along the pedestrian walk until Ivor appeared out of the night to report that Starbuck's Holland Village was any other Starbucks joint this time of the year - full of students.

Happily Kevin had secured a seat and fought off marauding students before reinforcements arrived. And eventually the thesis-writing Anand showed up to rant against a decadent system which was making him repeat his presentation. Since he's writing up, we dutifully ignored his rant.

I think we did talk about some mac stuff at some point. And wondered if Laurence would be back for the next meetup and what they would do with the mugs with the old Starbucks logo.

By the next session, we hope OS X Lion will be stalking prey!

Photos from the meetup.

Mac Meetup with John Larkin, Fri 15 Apr 2011: 7.00pm @ HV

It's been over half a year since our last MacLarkin meetup with John who drops in to town every now and then. I'm especially looking forward to this one as we have a lot to catch up.

And yes, some of us will bring our macs to tinker with and exchange notes about apps and devices. It is a mac meetup afterall.

Laurence is Down Under still, so he sits this one out.
We'll makan at the Block 40 coffee shop in Holland Drive and
then we'll stroll over to Holland Village Starbucks at 8.30pm thereabouts.

It's being held in the west again, since the regular are all staying or working here. We'll venture out in future meetups and we'll figure out where at this one.

These days, arrangements get sorted out pretty quickly first in the twitterverse:

End of year Mac Meetup @ HV Starbucks

It is not easy to spot newcomers when you stroll into a Starbucks for a mac meetup these days. Apple laptops are much more common. So no more secret nod and winks but a careful peek. However with the me@n meetups which limp along as quarterly meetups, well, I get to see mainly familiar faces who gather. The nine of this evening were mostly either recent regulars or decade-old veterans. Roll call:

1. Kenneth Pinto
2. Marcus Ng
3. Loh Choon Chai
4. Loh Kian Chai
5. Ivor Khong
6. Airani S
7. Yezdi D.
8. Anggra
9. N. Sivasothi

With a brief accidental appearance by Khairil Anuar for some iWeb consultation!

The iPhone fever is over and it was an OSX application heavy discussion. Partly because I have been catching up with reading and have been trying out mac applications. I shared with the rest my current list of apps, listed at: macapps.sivasothi.com.

Some of the apps I've downloaded recently to try out are: Art Text 2, Caffeine, Chicken of the VNC, Chronories, Deeper, Default Folder stuff, Desktop Curtain, DevonThink stuff, Droplr, Echofon, eMaps, EtreTask, F.lux, Fiwi, flickery, Flux, Maintenance, Mendeley Desktop, MenuEverywhere , MenuPop , MoveAddict Accessibility, moveAddict, OnyX, Papaya, PDF OCR X, PhotoBook, PhotoStickies, Remember , teleport, Tembo, VelOCRaptor, and WhatSize.

If these prove useful, I'll migrate them to the apps page above with a description and link. Well, it wasn't all mac-talk, there was a considerable diversion to the Hindi blockbuster "3 Idiots" which exhorts people to follow their passion, pursue excellence and assuage fears by a meaningless but reassuring phrase!

Befitting an end of year meetup, we reminisced our meetups which go back to 1999 - see the photos and links in mac.sivasothi.com or at the sidebar on this blog.