The meeting opened with a welcome to new members – Ian, Kate, Sue, Fred and Marion Poyner, and to Mike Payne making his first meeting (if my memory serves me well). We had David Hughes, Paul, Renee and Ralph join us on Zoom. John, Jonathan, Jim, Don, Stella and Fred were with us as well. Tony, Marilyn Barrack, Linda, Mike Chapple, Christine, Sianed, Margaret, Jeanette, Seifi and Sally presented their apologies.
I started by explaining that we had been overwhelmed by the interest in the group shown at the “Meet the Groups” meeting the previous Tuesday where 20 members, or prospective u3a members, had expressed an interest in attending group meetings. I felt duty bound to admit 12 members as we had no Waiting List policy in place at that time – this has now been introduced and some of the prospective members of have now been placed on that list. With a membership approaching 40, I felt it was necessary to review how we operated. I thank Pat, Marilyn Guest, Owen Parry and Phil Edwards for stepping down as active members – they do however continue to have the ability to use this website, the Signal group and have access to the Flipboard magazine.
I reiterated that we don’t attempt to resolve members’ hardware issues – other than perhaps problems with printers, or connectivity issues, eg routers. We do recommend using “We will fix your PC” – Neil has done a wonderful job in supporting and helping us by resolving problems for several years now. It might be worth mentioning Cardiff u3a and the Computer Group should you chose to use his services. I also repeated what I’d said to many at the “Meet the Groups” session … namely we are not a training group. We cannot train you how to use Word, Excel, or whatever. We DO however focus on internet issues, applications and anything that is not machine/device dependent. In that way all meetings are usually accessible to all users who have access to a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, Safari, Opera, etc.).
We are fortunate in that we have established, quite quickly, a workable hybrid (ie Zoom) meeting format. This is in no small way down to the excellent technical support offered by Craig at Sight Life, and the overall welcome and excellent facilities they are offering us.
I am proposing, and circulated a pro-forma to start the ball rolling, to allocate members to either a 2nd or 4th Thursday preference group, with them being able to attend via Zoom on the alternative Thursday. Hopefully, this will keep the in-person group a manageable size whilst we still struggle with Covid-related issues. Some members who are essential contributors to the group will be able to attend in-person all meetings, if they are able to.
To that end, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Sianed who will facilitate the “issues round the table/screen” part of the meeting; Don who has taken on the meeting attendance/subs task; Jonathan who will help me by screening Windows/PC news and issues; Paul (via Zoom currently) who will do the same for Android matters; and Jim – our official photographer and my adviser, proof reader and frequent contributor to the website.
We’ll just need to see how this plays out. Hopefully, in time I will be able to remove restrictions on in-person attendance, but please be supportive of the difficult situation we have put ourselves in, by virtue of meeting a need. Perhaps a second group is the answer, but that would mean finding another facilitator.
Starting the meeting proper, I explained to new members how we usually operated, the way the Thought grazing website operates, the benefits of the Signal group and the existence of the Flipboard magazine that I encourage all members to browse occasionally, and contribute to if they so wish (after creating an account).
I then launched into a description of the theft and fraudulent event that I’d mentioned at the previous meeting and had written up as a blogpost earlier that day. I won’t repeat what I’ve written, I’ll just repeat the warning and the recommended action you should take – don’t keep your credit/debit cards near to your phone, and seriously consider activating a SIM-lock to lock your SIM to your phone – so that it can’t be taken out and put in another phone on which a banking app can be downloaded and possibly a password obtained from your bank. The case in point here was Santander.
The issue of reporting scams to ActionFraud was mentioned, and the action you might wish to take if you receive a phishing phonecall is described here. Otherwise, I recommend you subscribe to the free Which? email scam alert service, and to look at other advice on the Which? website, and the Citizens Advice website.
Turning to members issues …
Fred reported the latest fortunately unbelievable text scam he’d received. I think as group members we’re getting much, much better at identifying these – the parcel that couldn’t be delivered, the transaction that know we couldn’t have made, the offer that seems to be too good to be true, the offer to help with obtaining a refund/grant/subsidy/entitlement which wouldn’t come via a text message. Just stay alert everyone, and remember … if it’s really important, the organisation will contact you again and not usually by text!
Paul reported issues with TalkTalk and their new website. Sue had a similar issue (see below). it is disappointing that he may need to change the settings on his talktalk.net email account to get it to re-direct (as it had done previously) to his gmail account where he aggregates all his emails.
Sue had a similar problem. The old TalkTalk website from which she’d accessed (occasionally) her email had stopped working. She hadn’t received any emails since before July. The solution hopefully, would have been to “upgrade” to the new website, but unfortunately as she’d moved to Sky (??) it was unlikely that she’d be receiving any emails from her talktalk.net email address anymore. This highlights an issue we’ve discussed before. It is advisable to move to an email provider that’s not connected to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). I used Google (and Gmail) for many years and have never used VirginMedia – my current ISP – to provide an email service for me. I migrated all my old BT email messages away from that service to avoid paying an annual charge for retaining the account after I stopped using BTinternet. I now aggregate most of my emails on iCloud – Apple’s service, as it is EXTREMELY unlikely that I’ll ever move away from them, but I retain my Google email accounts … just-in-case. Ian and Sue both used aol and asked whether this was a viable service. It was confirmed that now aol was owned by Verizon, it’s future was probably very secure.
John wondered whether the increase in “promotional” messages he was receiving was connected to his use of his Kindle advice. You can set your communications preferences from Amazon here.
Kate raised an issue of connecting to iCloud to delete “stuff”. I described (and demonstrated) how to login to iCloud.com using your AppleID and password.
Ian asked the question on whether stuff deleted on iCloud was also deleted automatically on a device. I had to admit I wasn’t sure. I’d written a blogpost on the situation with Google Drive (particularly for Google Photos), but had to check-up on the situation with Apple, which I reported back to him here. I told him that I needed to do further tests to satisfy my own curiosity. I can confirm that deleting a file on iCloud Drive from the Files app on an iPhone will delete it from icloud.com and your iCloud drive on MacOS as well – which is what you would expect should happen. He also asked (after the meeting) whether his daughter could change the account name/details on an O2 account, since she was now in a position to pay for it herself. The issue being she would want to keep the phone number. I had to admit that I didn’t know, and the O2 website was less than encouraging for what seemed to be a reasonable use case, so I recommended visiting the O2 shop in St David’s Centre (I believe). I also suggested looking at GiffGaff (operating over the O2 network and owned by the parent company of O2 – Telefónica UK) as a good pay-as-you-go (PAYG) alternative. She might be able to port the number to that network (or any other network) after obtaining a PAC or STAC code.
Here ends nearly the most rapid Notes I’ve ever written up – have to impress the new members.
