First of all my apologies to anyone who turned up at Sight Life on the 7th March. I was as surprised as anyone when I discovered that the shortest month in the year was going to have 5 Thursdays in it. We of course meet on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, so a gap of three weeks between meetings!
I rapidly went through the new Topics I’d added to the various Forums, reminding those present that this was the place I’d be putting links to items of longer term (reference) interest and/or hints and tips, leaving Flipboard to be the place where news items of shorter term interest would be posted. I thanked Iain King for becoming a Flipboard contributor – the more the better.
We noted this article from Scientific American that highlights just how much electricity will be needed as we continue with our quest for artificial intelligence; a theme built on by Iain and Ian in their recent posts on the Signal group.
First Iain King presented some slides and led a discussion on his visit to the Google Accessibility Design Centre (ADC). He stressed that Google didn’t just look at issues of accessibility in IT, but in all design areas including spoons!
I then re-visited the presentation I’d done last year on How does the Internet work? I’ve edited and updated the blog post and so it should be reasonably up-to-date. I highlighted however the following webpages and videos.
First the BBC Bitesize webpage “What is the internet?” It contains a brilliant video which uses pigeons and nests as analogues for the internet and its users. A must watch!!
I then showed this video which explains very well how the internet works, but towards the end betrays the fact that it’s really, really in favour of scheduling and prioritising of traffic and moving away from the long-held philosophy of the internet – net neutrality. The importance of net-neutrality – the fact that all users should be deemed to be equal, and all content providers the same – should not be taken lightly. If this principle falls then you will find investment in the internet for everyone will decline, and those that get the faster internet will have to pay for it. Please watch the Vimeo (a streaming service) video to see the other point of view.
I then showed this video from TED talks. [I mistakenly said that these talks were available from a Smart TV app – that used to be the case, but maybe not now.]
It’s a really enlightening story from an architect who got curious and wanted to discover the physical manifestation of the internet.
Finally I showed this video, one of a series that are worth watching, produced by one of the “fathers” of the internet. Someone who was in at the beginning …
I started off the meeting with an apology for not doing the notes from our last meeting on the 8th December. I had the beginnings of a cold on that day, and the notes I took were indecipherable by the time I had recovered after Christmas.
I briefly went through the latest News – not that there was much as Jonathan and Paul attested to as well. Their additions to Flipboard and mine can be found here.
I then asked the group to consider using the Forums/Topics area on the website as an addition (not a replacement) to using Signal for issues that might be of interest to reference in the future. I suggested that Signal might best be used for getting quick responses to issues, and then copied to the most appropriate Forum as a Topic later. Or … perhaps just add them as a Topic if no response was immediately required and you just wanted to promote discussion on a Topic. I stated that I’d be reviewing the structure of the Forums and the Topics within them [Update: now completed], and that I would also be looking back at posts on the website that I thought ought to be promoted more for easy reference and access [Update: now done under Blog posts menu item].
I proposed to the group that we might review the way the group was working, and to discontinue doing hybrid zoom meetings which I was finding quite stressful. The group agreed with my proposal which I later circulated as an email …
I am grateful to those of you who attended the meeting yesterday and who accepted my suggestion to re-structure the programme of meetings for the Group.
We will still meet on the Second and Fourth Thursdays of the month at 2:00pm at SightLife, but without a Zoom hybrid component. Doing this was becoming a stressful addition to the meeting that I was finding it hard to work with, so I felt that if the group was going to flourish in the future we had to find a different way of working.
What I came up with, and which was agreed by the members present, was the splitting of the discussion/advice/issues component from the presentational/information component, so that the first will take place on the Second Thursday of the month, and the second will take place on the Fourth Thursday of the month. Doing this will mean that I don't need to prepare stuff for more more than one meeting a month - and I am keen to encourage others to "present" also; and I need not "chair" every discussion-style meeting - concentrating just on taking notes and inputting thoughts, inmformation or even sharing advice!
To support the Zoomers and maybe even extending the online community, a Zoom meeting will take place on the First Thursday of the month. This will essentially be a discussion-style meeting, but it's up to members to take it in any direction they wish. I will host this meeting from the comfort of my own home, with technology I'm more confident with.
Yesterday, I talked about "How the Internet works", and I'll be sharing an updated post on the subject, on the website asap. At our first proper "presentation-style" meeting in a fortnight I will be talking about "Home networking" - updating the various sessions we've had over the past 6 years or so. There should be time for anyone to raise a pressing issue/problem at the end so we're not dispensing with that and we will still do a News and Follow-up bit; we just won't go "round the table/screen" seeking input as we've done in the past two years (plus).
I'm looking for suggestions for other "presentation-style" subjects. I have it in mind to do one on photo-sharing in February, but any other ideas are welcome. Just drop me a line.
Finally, I'll be providing a bit more structure to the website so that the more useful posts are more easily found; and I'm also encouraging members to use the Forums and Topics, and you will see some changes to the Forums provided over the next two weeks. I don't want to replace our use of Signal. It's brilliant for keeping in touch and getting instant answers to problems; but I am keen to capture some of the issues/solutions as Topics so that they can be more easily retrieved. I am also keen to encourage members to start their own Topics and for all members to participate with Comments and Replies.
Apologies for the length of the message. I hope you all understand where I'm coming from. I'm confident that with these changes the group will be invigorated and work even better than it has in the past.
Then after totally confusing some of you in attempting to describe how I’d sorted out my son’s network (changing a router to a bridged connection, and creating a single WiFi network with one SSID is the quick description of what I did), I moved on to showing three short videos which aimed to explain “How the Internet works” …
These three videos I think provide a sound basis for understanding how information gets to you when you send an email, or do a search from your browser, or use an app on your phone to buy something. An earlier article on the public Thought grazing covers the ground too – I aim to update it shortly. This forms the basis for helping us to start looking at our Home networks and how they work, how they perform, and whether there is anything you can do to make them perform better. That’s for the next session – our first presentation-style meeting, on the 26th January.
Vimeo video on Net neutrality which they are supportive of (unlike Google & YouTube)
As the meeting closed Ian asked about Backups on Apple Mac kit. I strongly suggested there was an inbuilt, free, solution offered by Apple called Time Machine which he should investigate with an external hard disk. I offered the opinion that this was much better than cloud backup solutions which were slow and which would slow down other internet activity you might be doing. This is not to say that cloud storage is not important – I use iCloud, Google Drive and have used Dropbox and One Drive in the past – but it should be mainly thought of (imho) as a way of sharing documents (in the widest sense) between systems, between users and for long-term storage (archiving) of important documents.
