Tag: Service Status

Nineteen of us for our Zoom meeting yesterday. Yes! I’ve managed to get the notes done quicker this time.

I introduced the meeting, welcomed Barbara to her first meeting, did a demonstration on how the website worked and encourages members to take part either by writing a post, like Sianed last week, or to use the Forums and Topics. I showed how you could change some personal information under the Profile tab and highlighted the Noticeboard where changes to the site are recorded; the information available under Help and the Guides that are viewable.

I then went on to run through the “latest news” that I had curated in the Flipboard magazine, mainly focussing on Facebook’s problems in Australia and Microsoft’s attempts to get Bing as a preferred search engine over Google. The best experience of Flipboard is on a tablet, so I’d recommend looking on your app store to see if you can install it on your tablet (or smartphone).

Round the screen, not the one above which is a screenshot kindly taken by Jim, but the one I had in front of me …

Mike reported he’d solved his Mouse problem by using a Mouse Mat. Who’d have thought such a simple solution would work. Once he told us, many of us remembered stories of mice not working properly without a mouse mat and as Mike’s table was shiny, it was likely that this has contributed to the battery usage. His keyboard, which I’d previously reported as being a problem too, is working fine as well.

Marie-Christine had nothing to report.

Owen reported that the Beacon Members Portal was playing-up for some members and he’d had to do a fair bit of user-support since renewal of membership started. Of the 780 members the branch had, over 600 had renewed so far.

David H updated us on his Times subscription problem with Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but announced that it was now working with Brave. A really strange one – could it be something to do with the way browsers handled pop-ups. I don’t know. David is going to try Edge next to see if that works! He also reported that M&S Bank was closing – Owen provided this link to assist David find an alternative.

Margaret reported that she’d tried to install LibreOffice on her Android tablet with no success. Owen came to the rescue again with a reference to Collabora for Android and iOS which enables Libra Office to run on those platforms. Refer to your relevant App Store for downloads and installs. She also told us about “the scam that wasn’t” – eBay have enacted their plan to move away from Paypal so an email to that effect wasn’t a scam. On another note a scam to try and phish personal information from a hacked contact list by saying someone was seriously injured in an accident – with links to follow-up – was just as low as you can get! Margaret also told us about an issue with women’s pensions which is highlighted in this BBC News post.

Barbara told us about a disk drive problem she was having with her MacBook. The advice was to get in touch with John Lewis first, because that’s where she got it from, before going to the Apple Store. A phone-call now might be a good idea, to prepare the ground for the enquiry, for when we can visit the shops.

John enquired as to whether the group had a view on whether anti-trust legislation on an international scale might now be more feasible given the number of bad instances of fake news and scams during the Covid pandemic. I certainly felt that something was more likely to happen in the US now and referred to a couple of articles I’d posted to the Flipboard magazine recently on what the new US President’s agenda might include.

Jim had nothing to report. He had finished a video however that I’d be able to watch. I hope he doesn’t mind but here it is …

[He’s added a Comment about the purpose of making the video in a Comment below this post.]

Don told us about some work he’d done as a consequence of looking on the Money Saving Expert (MSE) website in respect of a Power of Attorney application he’d made online. He’d found the process to reclaim quite easy and had recovered £46 (I think). He also reported that following Sianed’s experience he’d purchased a Firestick and got the BT App and YouTube running on it. He had a Gmail project ahead of him as a consequence of his wife’s account having been compromised.

Paul showed us a magnetic USB cable that held together. Awesome! Must have one – I’m afraid I can’t find the website.

Fred advised that he had downloaded Signal and would be installing/joining shortly. He and the rest of his Close in Cregiau were having TalkTalk problems – actually BT OpenReach problems – and after many minutes trying to contact them reported that once he’d found an 0800 number, it was much quicker to contact them than the published 0333 number. There were bow OpenReach vans aplenty in the Close. This gave rise to a discussion on complaining and Barbara was of the opinion that using twitter was the best method of getting something done – she could be right!

Ann asked a question about JPEG files. I was able to state categorically that a native JPEG file was not a bad image. It had just had some information removed from it through a compression algorithm in the camera. Usually this was to remove detail from highlights and shadows. Left at that you would probably not notice any problem. If the camera allowed you to decrease the amount of compression then there would probably be no difference at all. If you edited an image, as long as you saved at 0% compression (100% quality) then there would be no decrease in the quality of the image.

Steve asked a question about Signal and whether it was an issue of privacy alone. I referred him to this blog post. I had also sent an email to the Group about my decision to move away from WhatsApp to Signal.

Stella asked how she could delete an app from her iPhone. I showed her in a practical demonstration. Press down on the app, wait until you see the icon wiggle and the ‘x’ appear. Press the ‘x’ and it will be removed. You can then press on the Home button to stop the app “wiggling”.

Christine announced success with her WiFi problem but she couldn’t be certain how she’d solved it. Barbara suggested that as a VM customer he might qualify for free Wifi extenders and encouraged her to follow that one up.

Renee said that VM appeared to be slow today, I suggested that she (and others) might like to look at their ISP’s status page.

For VM this would be – https://www.virginmedia.com/help/service-status

You would get taken to something like this …

You can also use this website to detect service outages – https://www.downdetector.co.uk – which links to many popular services.

Phil was just so excited by his new M1 MacBook Air that he had very little to say apart from some comment about Bing, the Rhondda and someone singing. It had been a long afternoon.

Finally Sianed introduced her post on LastPass. Anyone using LastPass, or thinking of using this password manager – which I recommend incidentally – should look at this blog post too, and if there are more than one user of the service in a family, you might consider taking out a Families membership which cover up to 6 people and an unlimited number of devices.

I’m afraid the what had become the norm, delayed posting of notes has returned, so apologies for the late publication of these notes.

We welcomed a new member – Steve Jones – and I notice that there are a couple of new members hoping to join us for our next meeting too. So you’ll all have to be on your best behaviour!

I quickly followed up some issues from the previous meeting. Marie-Christine’s problem with Lightroom and Windows I’d dealt with in an email exchange but it might be that a bug-fix update to Lightroom was necessary to get a proper resolution. Jenny was not present at the meeting but Fred reported back on the National Pensioners Convention launch event on Tuesday 9th February. David Hughes had been challenged with his phone switching away from WiFi for calls and pushing his 4G calls bill up – we had advised on settings for WiFi calling and this now appeared to be working fine. Renee reported that her problems with alarm services and TV satellite were now fixed. Sianed was pleased to be able to report that she’d followed up our advice on howe to get her TV SMART once again by purchasing one of the many devices we’d suggested.

I quickly ran through some of the more interesting “news” items I’d posted on the Flipboard magazine.

I also quickly ran through the Thought grazing website, membership options (if people left the group, or if they were non-members but members of Cardiff U3A). I talked briefly about WordPress editing, commenting on posts and encouraged people to use the Bulleting Boards (Forums and Topics).

We seemed to spend a lot of time talking about COVID-19 and Jabs at this meeting – I wonder why. To that end, there were less than normal problems, issues, challenges and questions to discuss.

Marilyn had bitten the bullet and upgraded her iMac to BigSur. All was fine with her Lightroom Classic installation.

Owen gave further information on the Pixel issue mentioned in a Flipboard post and suggested we might like to consider using Pixel Block as a way to prevent information about us to be sent back to marketing departments of shops such as Sainsbury.

Stella was very unhappy about the WiFi service in her house and wondered about signal boosters. As she was using a 4G internet service to her router we felt that the problem should be reported to her ISP – Three – before any additional kit was purchased.

David Hughes reported on his interesting adventure into the world of online paying-in of cheques which was both instructive and interesting. His other query related to shared access to the apartments in his community at Penarth. Several solutions were offered. Whilst the popular option of a Keysafe got a lot of support, the possible insurance aspect of this must be taken into account. An alternative suggested by Fred were using a MasterSuite from Tunstall key set (all locks would have to be changed). Fred suggested contacting the Local Authority as they might have a preferred supplier.

Steve had a strange problem which seemed to involve phonecalls re-booting his WiFi. I’m not sure we really got the bottom of that one.

Jim was using Animatica to create slideshows of images with music coming from audacity. I look forward to watching the outcome of this project.

Paul had been looking at his Google file storage with the intended changes to the way Google was going to charge for what had previously been free high-resolution (ie not original quality) images. As with most of us the world of Backup’n’sync is a bit of mystery too!

Christine was still suffering problems with her WiFi when trying to play online bridge. The devices seem to freeze after 1hr 10mins when using Zoom – and yes it’s a paid-for account! Would Powerline Adapters help? She also commented upon Facebook ownership of Content – I disagreed with her son’s interpretation.

Don Roadblocks – games???? He reported that a grandson was happy to download animation software and create a Lego film in about 3hrs. Incredible!

Mike was having problems with his Bluetooth mouse and keyboard dying. We suggested buying a pair that would share the same USB port on his computer.

Ann was examining the cost of her phone contract and weighing up options. EE against Skynet; 4G vs. Broadband. We await her conclusions.

Me – I’d been mainly working on cataloguing videos and changing them to .MP4 format and archiving them onto the family website.