We'd love to have you join us. But first, join the mailing list. Attend a monthly meeting or two. Get acquainted with your fellow Mac users in the Treasure Valley. Then join in! If you're ready to join, here's what you need to know:

• A single membership covers a family or a couple in a small business.
• Dues are $20 a year, for a calendar year. So members joining after January should prorate their dues at $1.65 per month.

Meetings are on the second Wednesday of the month. Location is currently at the Meridian Fuddruckers. (Click through to view address and map on their site.) If you are subscribed to our mailing list you will receive a reminder (or an alert, if we need to cancel the meeting)—another good reason to sign up for the list!

• Feel free to arrive at 6:30 p.m.

Two items recently crossed my desk: UsingMac is a site that was mentioned on the mailing list. There's an RSS feed to get updates by newsreader or in Safari (whatever you have set up). Looks like some handy, practical information and lots of good Mac tips. This company wrote the group to announce their Mac stress-reducing software which works in a sort of biofeedback mode from what I can see. Interesting.

Our scheduled demo of Scopebox will occur at our August 12 meeting. Gerry needed to postpone due to family obligations. We'll have a regular "no presenter" type meeting for July with Q&A and freeform sharing of Mac info. In the meantime, see if any of these 25 free Mac apps "that will boost your productivity" sound useful to you.

If you're interested in working in video on your Mac -- or just like to see what's possible -- you're invited to this (next) month's July monthly BoiseMacs meeting where Gerry will be exploring ScopeBox software. We meet on the second Wednesday of each month, so July 8 is the date to iCal. See our meetings page for more details. BoiseMacs members have access to special offers and privileges, but our meetings are always open to all our local Treasure Valley Mac friends.

We received a post to the list with LifeHacker's list of favorite free Mac applications. They include: Smultron, Quicksilver, Firefox, Adium, Postbox, Unarchiver, Transmission, AppTrap, Burn, VLC, iTunes, Dropbox and Mozy. (See article for links.) I've often thought it would be a fun meeting topic to have a member share their favorite free (or shareware*) softwares.

MacTips chimes in with an easy way to extract sound from a video.

In Save a YouTube video I explained one way to download a YouTube video. Others kindly chimed in with comments explaining alternatives. Once you have a video on your computer though, you may find you'd like to take just the sound and add it to iTunes.

Alerted by a tweet I read a post at AppStorm and realized that this is a great Mac site - focusing on applications and programs for your Mac and iPhone.

Thanks to Mark on the list for the heads up: there are critical vulnerabilities in Adobe's Acrobat Reader. It's suggested that you (a) disable Javascript in preferences and/or (b) use a different reader. Of course, Apple Preview (which comes with the basic software) has been able to read PDFs. It's what's the default PDF reader on my Macs because I find the Acrobat Reader to be "heavy" (though I do have the software).

Just looking around for a way to use my Avery 5160 labels and in googling found this iWork Community sharing site which had just what I needed. Looks like all sorts of templates for Apple Pages use.