Owen led the meeting as David was on holiday. We did the usual round table followed by short presentations on Windows 11 and the Cardiff U3A website.
Fred: reported continuing problems with TalkTalk especially their email offering.
David H: David has bought a Samsung TV but struggles with multiple remotes. Jim mentioned an article in ‘Computer Active’ magazine describing an app to handle all TV activity.
Barbara: had an issue with her iPad failing to change screen orientation on rotation. There is apparently a ‘setting’ option to handle this but well hidden. She closed down the machine and restarted to solve her problem. [Jim chatted: To control the orientation of my tablet’s screen I use an app, Rotation-Orientation Manager, available in the Android Play Store. Jim]
Renee: was supposed to give a Zoom presentation but ended up in A&E! She has taught herself to use PhotoBooth to video herself and WeTransfer to send the file to others.
Don: is getting used to his new Dell PC. DH has encouraged him to use LibraOffice but every time he uses it he gets a popup about MS Office. He also wanted to reorder the email accounts that he uses to see a particular one first. No obvious solution was suggested except that he might remove all the accounts from his email client and re-add them in the order he wanted, but there was no guarantee this would actually work.
Sianed: asked for advice on the Brave browser as when trying to login to her online banking she receives a message which prevents her progressing. Others mentioned similar issues with other browsers.
Paul: has continuing battery drain problems on his phone. There appears to be an app or service ‘RCS’ which takes most of the charge. It was noted that the NHS Covid app also takes considerable battery usage as it is constantly scanning. [Renee chatted: iPhones don’t support RCS. They use iMessage instead.]
Jim: has been attempting to control his camera using his phone. He noted that when images are transferred to disc they no longer contain some of the desired information embedded in them.
Steven: Looking into removing duplicate files. Jim recommends ‘AllDup’.
Ann: mentioned that Zoom options seemed to have changed and her camera comes on automatically rather than asking her first. Owen said he would check if there had been any recent updates which might have altered this.
Christine: mentioned that emails don’t seem to archive properly. She has had a message from a spoofed email address but realised it in time and did not open any links. Celebrated receiving a date to have an extender from Virgin.
Owen then walked the group through the recent announcement by Microsoft of Windows 11 which seems to have a style revamp and the addition of a number of tools and features. Link is https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-11 .
Owen then followed on with a demonstration of some of the features of Google Sites which is the software he uses for the Cardiff U3A website. He demonstrated layouts, images, formatting text, the inclusion of calendars etc. In response to a question, he indicated that one shortcoming was the inability to give editor permissions at page level and had therefore had to restrict editor to himself until Google changes matters.
I’m indebted to Jim for remembering each meeting to take these screenshots, this one is a particularly good one of the 15 of us meeting virtually yesterday. Christine, Marie-Christine, Jenny Sims and Phil had let me know they would not be attending.
I’m also indebted to you all for your kind words and welcoming back, and can I thank Owen and Phil for stepping in to take the last meeting.
I started the meeting by giving an account of the procedure I’d been subjected to at UHW. I won’t say more. The matter is now officially closed! Owen gave an update on Beacon, and told us the new system (Beacon 2) was now not going to happen, and he was working out how best our Cardiff U3A website could work with the existing old Beacon membership system. I then talked briefly about changes to the website to make the Search box (for Posts) more prominent; a subtle change to the placement of the Flipboard link to make it easier to find; and a brief introduction to the Guides that were available to read online. I also encouraged members to look at the Forums and Topics area of the website and to add their own Topic, or Comment upon an existing one. It’s a much better way of recording help required and advice given than Signal (or WhatsApp for that matter) can provide. Please consider using it.
I then went through the Latest News items I’d stumbled upon and uploaded to the Flipboard magazine. I’m not going to mention any of them in particular again – go and look at the articles on Flipboard, and perhaps browse through old ones – I’m sorry there is no Search facility for Private magazines. The only drawback to a really good magazine interface.
We then went “round the screen” …
Barbara had taken her errant drive into the Apple store, having not had a satisfactory outcome from her visit to JLP (where she’d bought the MacBook as I recall). Success this time and she now had an external connector that had cost a bit, but which now enable her MacBook to read/write to her external disk. She also had a problem with her iPad seeming to shutdown when there appeared to be sufficient power – another trip to the Apple store was suggested as no one seemed to have a possible solution.
David H retold his latest adventure … the re-discovery of a former life. His daughter had asked him to draw up plans for a barn refurbishment. He wondered whether he could find the CAD software he’d been used to using, was nearly scammed but had now found LibraCAD and he was working his way through the instructions/manual to find out how he could use it.
Renee had downloaded and installed Libby (ref. last meeting) and had accessed the Library for her first book.
Jonathan had no issues/problems – but his wife had! We then discussed the problem of an iPad either being too sensitive, or not accurate enough to record the correct key presses. Many of us seemed to have a similar problem. Some suggestions – clean the screen very thoroughly; the screen might be heat sensitive and this might be throwing the keypress off (we thought eventually this was unlikely to be the problem given the number of long figure-nailed folk using mobile devices); the co-ordinates might need to be recalibrated and Ann suggested that this could be done at the Apple store; we all thought it would be a good idea before any visit to accurately record where the problem on the keyboard was occurring. We hope Jules has success in finding out the problem, and for Jonathan reporting back on the solution!
Don had proceeded with his creation of new Gmail accounts for his wife. Hopefully this will resolve any issues with her old account being “pwned”, and the AppleID issue. [Phil (from the previous meeting) felt that a password change on the old Gmail account would probably be sufficient for the first problem, and he suggested that the appearance of the Gmail address in the AppleID might not have been a case of someone having the account, but might have been that the email address had been given by Don or his wife when purchasing an earlier Apple device.]
Steve had also downloaded Libby and was evaluating it. He’d prepared some text on photo books for the group, and I encouraged him to try and add the text as a Comment in this Topic.
Fred reported that he was getting “end of life” warnings on his HP “all-in-one” desktop machine. We re-assured him that this was quite normal and he should only worry when things stopped working, and then then Neil at We Will Fix Your PC might be able to work wonders. [He fixes mobile devices and Macs as well.]
Jim was working his way through old USB sticks, making sure he’d got the contents on his new laptop before discarding them. He was using a piece of software called AllDup to check whether the files already existed on the laptop.
Finally Ann told us about her experiences online shopping from Curry’s where they would bring the goods to your car, in the car park, outside the store; but more particularly she told us about an initial purchase to buy a cable to re-charge her phone (which was unsuccessful as she’d got the wrong USBs (remember my last talk on USB cables – the links to read are at the end of the Meeting Notes – but then told us about a Sandisk Dual Drive USB Type-C device which could store 16Gb and which was only a few pounds and which might prove useful in transferring photos from her phone to the computer as long as she installed the correct software. We look forward to hearing the results!
I contributed a rather interesting feature of Gmail which allowed you to create multiple addresses from your original address, and for adding an identifier to the end of the address that might be useful for filtering Junk mail when you have to provide an email address you don’t really want to have to. These links (on Flipboard as well) are How to create a Gmail alias and How to use Plus addressing in Gmail.
I also mused over whether I’d been wrong NOT to use the email service offered me by Apple as my primary email account and have Gmail as my second account, rather than my primary address; no right or wrong, just a thought. The same would of course be true if I’d been a PC/Windows user – perhaps I should have been more actively promoting Outlook/Hotmail as the primary email service. Who knows!! The one thing I’m sure of is NOT to use an ISP service such as Virgin, TalkTalk, BTInternet etc.
We closed the meeting by discussing what format meetings might, could and should take when Covid restrictions were lifted. It was felt that Zoom had worked well and that a regular cohort of members had experienced and got benefit from virtual meetings; it was a good tool for a digital group to use; that we ought to try and present any face-to-face meetings in the future in the same way as we had for the virtual (Zoom) meetings; that social (face-to-face) contact was equally as important and that members benefited from casual conversations outside the meetings and from being able to bring machines in with them; also the serendipity effect of the added things you can do in the city alongside a meeting – once you’re there; that we had a duty to consider those members who hadn’t felt they wanted to attend Zoom meetings; [I advised the group that I had sent an email to those members to try and find out if there was any reason why they hadn’t joined]; but above all we agreed that a return to the old room at URC was just not practical for large numbers, and that the quality of the WiFi just wouldn’t permit any pleasurable experience. We all agreed that possibly a hybrid-solution – one meeting Zoom, the next face-to-face, might be the answer.
