Tag: 2024

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Notes of meeting – 22nd February

First of all my apologies to anyone who turned up at Sight Life on the 7th March. I was as surprised as anyone when I discovered that the shortest month in the year was going to have 5 Thursdays in it. We of course meet on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, so a gap of three weeks between meetings!

I rapidly went through the new Topics I’d added to the various Forums, reminding those present that this was the place I’d be putting links to items of longer term (reference) interest and/or hints and tips, leaving Flipboard to be the place where news items of shorter term interest would be posted. I thanked Iain King for becoming a Flipboard contributor – the more the better.

We noted this article from Scientific American that highlights just how much electricity will be needed as we continue with our quest for artificial intelligence; a theme built on by Iain and Ian in their recent posts on the Signal group.

Finally, I mentioned that u3a have communities you might be interested in tracking; one of which is a Computing Forum, and I passed on the information that Iain King had shared with me re. Benedict Evans’ newsletters. Maybe more slanted towards the business sector, but also a useful adjunct to our Flipboard magazine.

First Iain King presented some slides and led a discussion on his visit to the Google Accessibility Design Centre (ADC). He stressed that Google didn’t just look at issues of accessibility in IT, but in all design areas including spoons!


I then re-visited the presentation I’d done last year on How does the Internet work? I’ve edited and updated the blog post and so it should be reasonably up-to-date. I highlighted however the following webpages and videos.

First the BBC Bitesize webpage “What is the internet?” It contains a brilliant video which uses pigeons and nests as analogues for the internet and its users. A must watch!!

I then showed this video which explains very well how the internet works, but towards the end betrays the fact that it’s really, really in favour of scheduling and prioritising of traffic and moving away from the long-held philosophy of the internet – net neutrality. The importance of net-neutrality – the fact that all users should be deemed to be equal, and all content providers the same – should not be taken lightly. If this principle falls then you will find investment in the internet for everyone will decline, and those that get the faster internet will have to pay for it. Please watch the Vimeo (a streaming service) video to see the other point of view.

I then showed this video from TED talks. [I mistakenly said that these talks were available from a Smart TV app – that used to be the case, but maybe not now.]

It’s a really enlightening story from an architect who got curious and wanted to discover the physical manifestation of the internet.

Finally I showed this video, one of a series that are worth watching, produced by one of the “fathers” of the internet. Someone who was in at the beginning …

Next time we’ll look at Home Networking.

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Notes of Meeting – 8th February

We started off the meeting with a welcome to Chris Morgan; we hope he enjoys the anarchy that is Digital Matters – we put on a good show of that yesterday. Was it because Mario had chosen to attend for his first meeting this session? Seriously though, it was good to see you. We had apologies from Jo, Jonathan, Renee, Iain and Nita but still we had 18 present, only 1 down on the Artificial Intelligence session two weeks before. We thanked again, Jonathan, Iain and Phil for their contributions. I gave a brief summary of how the meeting had gone and asked if anyone wished to amend or add to the blogpost which I would then de-personalise and post on the Cardiff u3a website.

Between the meetings Iain had sent me details of a newsletter from Benedict Evans that he monitors from time to time. I’ve now signed up to get a weekly email of what he’s been “up to” – it certainly looks an interesting website. Iain was at the Google ADC (accessibility design centre) in London, and has offered to put his thoughts on his visit on the site. We’ll look forward to hearing from him at the next meeting.

On Signal, Ian (Cortical Silence) posted an observation on Artificial Intelligence …

“Generative AI has increased fraud risk.

(1) AI can tailor content, correct typos and grammatical errors, thereby reducing ability to spot fakes

(2) AI automates the work so victims can be targeted faster and further

(3) AI can mimic humans’ voice, image and video to dupe family and friends

We should expect more convincing phishing attempts, more frequent attempts, and deep fake impersonations (even Taylor Swift has fallen foul).

The traditional markers of scams are beginning to disappear.
The more content we place online the greater the risk of it being scraped, analysed and abused.

It is time to batten down the hatches.“

All observations that should be noted carefully, but we must surely still look towards the positives, the advantages of enhanced searching, and the ability to replace repetitive tasks, for instance.

I then went on to explain that I wanted to distinguish two classes of content for our Forums on Thought grazing (here) and that which would be posted on the Flipboard magazine of the same name. I intend to put news items that have a limited interest life on Flipboard, and try to put items that might be classified as useful for later reference in the most appropriate Forum as a Topic for members to comment, or reply, on. I then quickly went through the news items on Flipboard, and showed the Forums and recent Topics I’d recently posted on this website. I hope that you find the distinction helpful and I do encourage more of you to become Contributors to Flipboard, and Participants on Forums.

I recommended that members experiment with Forums by posting something to the “chit chat area”, and I demonstrated how to do it.

I have recently updated what I called (for the old Computer Group) a Toolkit. It’s embedded below and I’ll attach it to a Beacon email for you to download and print.

We then looked at Members’ issues.

Margaret described a strange experience she had been having with the BBC website, where she had chosen to read the News page in Welsh but that an auto-translation had then been generated which defeated her having made the choice in the first place. She was also getting a message that adblock was not working and the surmise was that Google Chrome was blocking a page if it was a different language than the default set. Sianed offered the solution of using two browsers, one for English, one for Welsh (which she did) to get round this issue.

Sheila alerted us to an issue concerning a passport application photo (taken in a booth) which appeared to show her with her mouth open – a consideration the Passport Office apparently doesn’t care for. She alerted them to the fact that she was an “elderly person” (joke!) finding the online application challenging and got her passport issued. Good outcome, and reminiscent of me being waved through border control at quick speed because I had a walking stick!!!!

Phil asked us if we’d heard of Elon Musk’s advocacy for implanting a chip in our brain to aid paraplegics and help to operate robot limbs. The future certainly looks interesting and one can see the real advantages of such work, but what about telepathy, and instant messaging from one implanted chip to another! Scary world ahead!!!

Chris asked if we knew any way of disposing of old technology (phones, laptops etc) safely and securely. I suggested that taking the hard disk out of a computer and smashing it was almost certainly secure; we remembered the offer from Curry’s to re-cycle old technology, but how would that handle the RAM on an old phone. After the meeting it was confirmed that a Factory Reset would wipe a phone completely and securely. This article from Which? gives useful advice and suggestions on how to handle old technology. For further suggestions, type “Disposing of old technology safely and securely” into your favourite search engine.

Paul was having difficulty with his browser and wanted to Uninstall it and then Reinstall it but it wasn’t available on the Apple Appstore. I suggested that he should first Export his Bookmarks to the Desktop, then drag his browser (Chrome) to the Trash, and then re-install it from the Google website. Many applications on MacOS are not in the appstore, unlike iOS which are “only” (for the moment at least) available from the Appstore.

Jim alerted us to a recent discovery he had made concerning his mobile broadband router (from Three). He’d always been unhappy with the performance of it in his living room, however moving it to his kitchen resulted in a dramatic improvement in throughput. This would appear to be both unsurprising – given the way the device would seek an aerial; and surprising – since you would think within a house there wouldn’t be that degree of variability.