Quick out of the blocks today – probably as I don’t have so much to write given the excellent contributions from Steve, Phil, Ted and Jenny. I had to do very little; I didn’t even have time to do anything on LastPass – but more about that later.
We started off by reviewing the Notes from the last meeting (finished only about an hour previously – many apologies). Fred noted that the Institute of Government have a series of podcasts which are free and worth listening too, and after the meeting Phil offered a list of a number of podcasts that he often listened to … Dan Snow’s History Hit; The Battersea Poltergeist (spooky); Mark Steele What the F #### is going on (bit sweary but hilarious); and Aaron Mahnke’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
We then launched into a demonstration of Trello, a piece of work organisation software based on Japanese Kanban principles. It seeks to help you manage small projects, and other aspects of your life. Steve guided us through its basic principles and offered to provide assistance if anyone wanted help in using it. We then went on to hear about Phil Edwards’ experience of using Google Sites to build a website with the useful additional piece of information that Google will provide a domain name (eg thoughtgrazing.org) for c.£10pa. This is not out of line with the pricing of other domain name registries. Phil showed and told us about the family history website he’d just finished called Rum and Gunpowder, I encourage you to go and give it a look, and Phil would like feedback on it as well. Then Ted who’d written a post for this site, talked about the Virtual Travels he was doing, I urge you to have a look at the inventive activities he and his wife have recently started. Finally Jenny gave us a short updarte on the article she’d written for the Cardiff u3a Magazine, which should appear in the digital version at least. I’ve added it to the post I wrote on the Analog to Digital switchover and will now transfer it across to the “public”Thought grazing site.
That was a great start to the meeting and the individual contributions were somewhat limited due to time. Please excuse me for not mentioning your name if you didn’t contribute in this section.
Jenny reported that her freebie (except the cost of a lunch) monitor was not working and she might have to ask for help at the next meeting.
Steve had of course been working on Trello and we thank him again for his demonstration.
Jim continues to work on adding information to the EXIF data in his photographs; currently he’s been labelling works of art that he has photographs of – adding titles and locations. He also raised an issue of whether instructing the deletion of material from external hard drives had to be done separately from that of internal drives. I didn’t know the answer for Windows/Chromebook machines, but thought in the MacOS world, although the recycle bins, or trash, were separate they were all cleaned out as long as the disks were attached to the computer at the time the instruction to delete was raised.
David Hughes raised the interesting point (that we’ll add to the webpage that Jenny and I have setup on the “PSTN switchover”) that some Households in rural areas don’t have a mobile signal, so that in the case of a power cut they would have no means of raising the emergency services. This was the case in point just recently in NE Scotland after the storms that brought down the power lines. Apparently this was raised as an issue in a recent episode of RipOff Britain too.
Renee picked-up on a point I’d earlier raised about the NHS Portal. This was something new that Cardiff and Vale Trust is using to record their Correspondence with you as well as your Appointments. Here’s a link that tells you more about it. We had quite a few discussions relating to health at the meeting. There was general agreement that not all GP Surgeries were the same; not all practices used the MyHealth Online Portal – in fact one had stopped using it as it was deemed to be “unfair” during the pandemic to not have the same “vanilla”service for all patients. Duh!; that not all health boards were working the same way; that the eConsult service was generally “a good thing” and often allowed access to your GP (usually over the phone) in much less than the 48hrs promised; and that finally telephone and video consultations were definitely “a good thing” to have come out of the pandemic.
Margaret reported that her TalkTalk service had gone down and that after switching off all devices and having found that made no difference , the service came back the next day. It was frustrating. A lot of work is being done by OpenReach currently in North Cardiff and they really should communicate to their (and associated service users) customers when ourtages are likely to happen.
Stella told us about a really alarming episode involving Alexa which had suggested as a challenge that an 11yr old girl should short-circuit a plug inserted in a socket. Here’s a link that tells you more about this shocking episode.
Ted informed us that he’d recently come across an app that transcribed speech to text called Speechnotes. This is a very interesting idea and it raises the possibility that all group members should examine the apps they use and see whether there is an inbuilt speech-to-text facility that they might use. A challenge for next time then – all group members to investigate the possibility of using speech-to-text on their smartphones and report back for the next meeting. He also mentioned there was a facility built-into the Chrome browser to provide Live Captioning. This is how you do it …
Open Google Chrome
Click on the dots on top right hand side
then:
Settings
Advanced
Accessibility
Toggle on Live Caption
(it will probably only work for windows you have open in that Google Chrome session)
Paul reported (with glea) that his road was now fully fibre. He also showed us a multi-connect SD-Card Reader that could plug into USB-C, USB-A and mini-USB sockets. He also told us he’d now got a much more sophisticated Dashcam which even had a parking mode, and which could transmit recordings using WiFi to the house. He offered to do a presentation, an offer that was gladly accepted.
Don noted that he had to re-format his SD-Cards for DashCam and wildlife cameras to avoid corruption. I reported that I always re-formatted cards on the external device as it was just as easy to do that as delete them in the computer.
Fred suggested that we meet in person, a couple of other members also expressed that wish. I explained my thoughts and feelings on the subject and told the group that I’d been in contact with Nonn (the Groups Liaison Officer) and had suggested that a suitable venue with WiFi was still required before we could start regularly to meet in person. However the Group felt it would be “a good idea” to have a social meet (perhaps in the Castle) sometime soon. I agreed to plan for this in the near future.
Sianed advised us of our Consumer Rights under the 2015 Act, and that this over-rides the expiry of a Warranty if you can demonstrate it to be unreasonable for a device to be not working in an out of warranty period which was deemed to be reasonable. You might need to have expert opinion to press home your case to the retailer.
So … homework for next time.
- Please (if you’re interested) watch this LastPass video and then we can have a discussion about issues, questions, etc at the next meeting.
- Look at the applications you use on your smart devices (in particular) and see which of them a) have speech-to-text provided, and b) which ones you think you might find useful. [This is in addition to all the AI speech facilities such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.]