Thanks Owen and Phil for holding the fort for me. I understand that you had a great meeting and that Phil gave you a presentation on the subject on Online Reading and using the Library service, the PDF of his talk (with notes) is available here. Owen had to handle a number of “strange” Zoom problems. Beyond the call of duty – many thanks!
Jenny opened the meeting with a report of the NPC’s Response to a House of Lords Select Committee – the Covid-19 Committee- and she advised that they will be lobbying to make sure that they are not by-passed in consultation in preference to the usual suspects, ie AgeUK. The report is on the Cardiff U3A website at this link – https://data.cardiffu3a.org.uk/documents/groups/computer/HoLReportBeyondDigital.pdf – I’m sure Jenny would welcome comments on the Report.
Don needs to buy a new computer and hoped to view a Which? report at a neighbour’s house. He was also hoping that he could persuade his wife to get a new email address as it had been “pwned” and also that there was a problem with her AppleID – she needed to change it urgently!
Paul then had problems with his audio.
Renee had some success at date-stamping her photos for the iPhone – she had found an app Date Stamp Camera – which gave location, time and date on the photo. This might be of use to the Photography Group as well. The basic version is freel!
Marie-Christine had no progress yet with BT and her “deliberate feature” problem. Owen commented that he thought all keyboards should have a key “Just Do It!”
Stella advised that she was having problems with highlighting links so that she could highlight, copy and paste. Owen then shared his screen to demonstrate how that could be done.
David H was thinking of re-furbishing his flat and was waiting for the Conservative party to offer the funds.
Steve had prepared something on Photo Books for the website and was wanting to post it to Thought grazing. [I obviously had forgotten to give him rights – slapped wrist!] Owen thought he might have rights to post, and would look into to it. He also wondered about Chrome Books as a possible replacement for a Laptop – had Don thought about this as a possibility? Phil advised that they had been around for 8-9 years, operating system always up-to-date; data stored in the cloud. He thought at first they might be a good idea for us, but actually a laptop not much more expensive. Not a replacement for a tablet – a very different type of machine! Paul backed this up!
Fred still “bouncing along” and visiting family in England; not much computing in terms of computing needs.
Paul (after re-booting his machine) had reduced his Google Storage, and seen that he could reduce the amount stored as attachments to Gmail reasonably easily. Most of them advertisements. Photos for instance were still in gmail even though you’d saved them to Google Photos. Jenny asked how she could see how much of her storage was being used. Paul said that you could click on an image and select “Manage Storage”; the other alternative was to look at the bottom of the Gmail window – Owen suggested that perhaps he could do a presentation for a future meeting.
Owen reported that quite a few members were not urgently requesting face-to-face meetings before the autumn. There was an “in memorium” page now on the Cardiff website.
Phil then commented on Stella‘s “copy and paste” problem; he was a strong advocate of the MacBook Air (supported by Renee); he also suggested that the AppleID problem might be down to the Gmail account provided to Apple at the time of buying an Apple product; also a simple change of Password might solve the Gmail “pwned” problem. He then led a presentation on On-line Reading, which is referred to at the top of this post. You need to download an app called Borrowbox – but this has been superseded by a different app which you can use for magazines as well called Libby. He then went on to describe buying books for the Kindle, and he told you that you could load some books for Apple devices as well, [DIH: you don’t need to buy a Kindle device to read Kindle devices – you can just load them into the Kindle app which you can download to your mobile device – and buy them from Amazon]. Audio books can be obtained by subscription using Audible; Apple books can be bought as single purchases, some “classic books” are free.
Owen reported that he was an Audible subscriber and it costed £7.99 a month which allowed access to one book a month, but you can for £6 get more. Renee advised that she thought the Library system seemed not to be working just yet. Jenny also reported that Grangetown Reading Club was able to lend books. Paul was quite excited by the prospect! Don advised that he’d been able to download old Parish maps through Llanishen Library, and Owen reported that the National Library had an online collection of Newspaper Articles.
Owen then indicated that the group would send “good wishes” to me!!