A busy meeting with far too much chat from me. So much so that we had to postpone the promised AI discussion to the next and final meeting of the year on the 27th July.
We started off with a discussion of the email (below) that I’d sent to members with my suggestions on how the group should work from next year when we start-up again on the 14th September.
As I’ve already shared with you, I’m planning to do a session with discussion and thoughts on Artificial Intelligence at our next meeting on 13th July and planning to do the TV/Digital session on 27th July.
Thanks for all the kind words about my cancellation of the meeting on the 22nd June. You’ll be happy to know that our slabs were laid successfully and are no longer the trip/fall hazard they had been.
I’m into planning mode for next year and there are a few things I’d welcome your feedback on. Please drop me a line as a reply to this email with your thoughts.
1) I think it’s time to give the group a refreshed title to reflect that we do very little on or about computers, and a lot on general and specific digital issues; that is the internet, apps, mobile computing, home devices, security, privacy, digital exclusion etc. etc. I’d like to change the name of the group to either “All things digital”, or “Digital matters”. Your thoughts, and your preference for a new title?
2) I’m sorry but I’ve decided that I can’t facilitate a Zoom meeting on the first Thursday of the month any more – it hasn’t met for the past couple of months in any case. If Paul would like to facilitate it and organise it, I’ll certainly attend when I can, but I’d like to split it away from the main group. Is there a demand for this meeting? Your thoughts Paul, and the thoughts of others who might wish to take part in such a group?
3) At the start of this year I expressed the desire I had to learn more about the devices I use every day. I mentioned that my knowledge of iPhone, iPad and Macs (and iOS, iPadOS and MacOS) had not really developed in at least 5 years and that I was sure there was more I could learn to make my life easier if I just applied myself. Being forced to research a few hints and tips, new apps, and better ways of working every month would really help me, and might be of interest to others. I’m therefore suggesting a lunchtime session (at 12:00 probably) to precede the discussion meeting on the 2nd Thursday of the month which I thought I’d call “Apple pie”. It would be an informal session (bring your own lunch for instance) – venue to be decided, but possibly the cafe area in URC – and contributions would be welcome from anyone. This idea would have to go to the Committee for approval as it might be thought to be exclusive, but there is a precedent in Phil Edwards iPad group, so I hope they will agree to it. I could make it open to all of u3a members as well. Your thoughts on this idea? How many of you might be interested in attending?
4) I’m proposing we move back to URC for our meetings next year. Whilst I personally will be very sorry to leave Sight Life, we have not been able to cover our costs since Christmas with a subscription of £2 a meeting. We need a minimum of 15 attendees each meeting to break even. The alternative is to pay £2.50 a meeting. What are your thoughts on this – the change of venue, or an increase in charges to stay at Sight Life?
5) Finally (and related in a perverse way to the above), I don’t want to have the same self-enduced chaos of having too large a group a group at the start of the year and all that shuffling around which nearly drove me mad (esp. when trying to do hybrid meetings as well, it has to be said). I’ve therefore put a max size on the group of 25 and re-introduced a waiting list. If you know definitely that you won’t be coming next year, it would be helpful to know now. You will always have access to the Thought grazing website and the Signal group, unless you ask to be removed from it. The former is open to all u3a members in any case.
Apologies for the length of this message. Congratulations if you’ve got to the bottom of it! I’d really appreciate your thoughts and input in helping to frame the direction of the group for next year.
First of all many, many thanks to the 13 (or more) members who replied to this message. From those replies I got a feeling of the way the group was thinking. We then discussed the points raised above.
From a vote, the majority of the group felt that the group should be renamed “Digital matters“. We confirmed there was not currently a need for the Zoom meeting on the first Thursday of the month – I had been in contact with Paul about that. Quite a few members felt that the idea of “Apple pie” was a good one – but the form it would take was not confirmed. There was quite a lot of discussion about the venue, but in the end there was a unanimous feeling that we should continue to meet at Sight Life, and coupled with that we would start with a meeting subscription of £2.50 and reduce it if numbers allowed in order to cover the cost of hire of the room at £20 per hour. Lastly we accepted that a Waiting List was an inevitable result of the over-subscription last year, and that if the numbers wanting to join were greater than 25, and the Committee didn’t like the idea of a waiting list, that the Committee should approach someone (other than me) to convene another group.
So there we are. Consequent upon the decisions we reached and after thought over the weekend, I decided that Apple pie wouldn’t work with meeting anywhere else but URC, and so I ‘m offering a “virtual” Apple pie Signal group, and added a Android alert group as well. These have now been setup and you are encourage to join using the links below …
Apple pie –
https://signal.group/#CjQKIIc4-QxKAiTPe_mR-zXT75dTymdhGSt4LC0vZqcJiO_7EhD80veTdB5689YNazCzUZIc
Android alert –
https://signal.group/#CjQKIP693Zm9STWTQhVyJqiQWxoH2edCDj3r-dUD2whDQaHlEhB9ZZAyEoR0AaTjD-4RrzeW
It had been 5 weeks since our last meeting and there was quite a bit of news to review. I had trouble finding the link to the Flipboard magazine – so subsequently I made it a main menu link …
… more about that later.
We touched upon Threads – the latest effort to wrest control of the social media world from Twitter, but noted that it didn’t contain news feeds, and that if you deleted your Threads account, it would also remove your Instagram account – an unintended consequence, or a planned tie-in for future monetisation? We also noted that it was not yet available in Europe, only in the US. It’s take-up therefore was quite exceptional.
I noted the cessation of support for Firefox updates/upgrades on older versions of MacOS. This was regrettable, but inevitable – you cannot make software run for ever on older hardware or software.
I mentioned the Apple Rapid Security Response release and recommended that all iPhone/iPad users should make sure that they have these releases enabled. They are not the same as Updates or Upgrades which I continue to recommend should not be installed immediately, but delayed for a couple of weeks – at least – to ensure that other people find the bugs that are always present in new software releases. I also highlighted the furore over Apple’s increase in costs for iCloud storage. I didn’t think it was unjustified and felt it was still excellent value for money – if you’re a Mac user.
We then had a chuckle over the Fox News item that advised you how to check whether the microphone on your device might be listening to you through certain apps. You might wish to check this!
I then noted that the demography of Facebook was aging which might be why Meta was trying to find new ways (eg Threads) to maintain their user base.
Then a note about enhancements to the Chrome browser for iOS users, and a shout-out for Video as an alternative to YouTube for hosting videos that you might want to share with family and friends but not the rest of the internet, and not without giving-up copyright.
Apple has joined Google, Facebook, Twitter and others in condemning the UK governments’ online security bill. They have stated that they will have to exit from the UK if it passes into law. I’m truly surprised that politicians and civil servants don’t draft this kind of legislation in partnership with the tech companies so that they don’t try and enact something that’s technically impossible to implement. I also highlighted an excellent interview that was on Channel 4 News with someone from Signal with an MP – worth a watch.
I revealed that the EU – a champion of privacy and data security legislation had now relaxed their objection to data transfer to the US – I await to see whether there is enough control in the US to encourage me to drop one of my objections to Meta and use of WhatsApp.
I reported on more steady progress towards the adoption of Passkeys through the latest news from the Fido Alliance.
Finally, I pointed members to a series of recent articles from Which? Technology newsletters which are free and which I encourage members to consider signing-up for – support for LibreOffice rather than Office365; the pitfalls of purchasing anti-virus software; when to decide to switch broadband provider; arguments to persuade you that it wrong NOT to consider switching.
All of that took far longer than I’d intended it should, so we only had time to consider member issues.
Jenny had problems with the hinge on her laptop, we advised her to go to “We will Fix your PC” – they might be able to help; she also had problems with her printing after using supposedly compatible cartridges. They might be able to help her with that too.
Margaret mentioned an issue with twitter which has transpired since Elon Musk’s takeover. She formerly was able to view tweets that she’d been sent – even though she didn’t have a twitter account. This has now been disabled as the API to twitter has been withdrawn. She also told us about her saga with her anti-virus provider and the fact that she was no longer able to install the latest version on a device that she had previously had it running on. Advice to uninstall completely the previous version was suggested by Sianed. She was however now content to just use Windows Defender and probably not renew the package next year.
Anne was having yet more challenging times with VirginMedia. This time over the failure of her email system; which was due to a failure by them, not anything she had done, which was confirmed by the engineer who eventually came to see her. She also reported that by switching (due to takeover) from VirginMobile to O2, the Facebook Messenger app was causing charges for MMS messages, which she’d not incurred previously.
Ian told us about the “What3Words” service and app to pinpoint your location in case of emergency, including getting lost! He also reported a way of completely wiping a disk in a Mac computer before disposing it. Just press CMD-R whilst booting-up and that takes you to a menu which enables a number of possible options to reconfigure a disk. He also reported on problems that he’d had when trying to “rescue” his iPhone, only to find that he was required to provide 2FA to access the website to get through to the Apple store. It transpired that there is a way to get through directly to the Cardiff store from the Apple website.
Renee had bought a Smart TV and was still trying to discover its capabilities, and she asked whether anyone had tried Bard – some members had.
Finally Tony asked for the URL of Papercut, the company that produces “easy to follow” manuals for lots of things. Here it is – https://www.pclpublications.com/catalogue/
I hope you agree with me, it was quite an enjoyable meeting.
Following the meeting, I did a bit of re-organisation of the Forums on Thought grazing, introduced new menu items under the Forums menu tab to make Topics more easily findable. Please use Topics as a way of reporting interesting items to the Group – they’re much more useful there than on Signal. I will try to copy relevant posts into Topics but it would help if you could do this yourself.