No photo of attendees this time as Jim presented his apologies as he was attending a re-scheduled and re-arranged Poetry and Prose group. I will need to find a “deputy” for those meetings he can’t attend, or alternatively Owen perhaps could prompt me to take a shot myself 🙂 I also had apologies from Ted and John who were not able to make the meeting.
We started with a quick review of the last meeting. Renee had downloaded Trello, and was going to look at using it, as was Jenny – who hadn’t yet had time to download it. Thanks Steve for the presentation again. I’m looking for more offers but during the meeting Stella told us about MapQuest which certainly is worth a look. I believe I’ve got it on my phone, but I also have Strava, PlotaRoute and Walkmeter, for walking – none of which I use to much I’m afraid to say.
I mentioned that I’d seen an item on the Welsh News on the “disappearance of copper from Ceredigion” – a reference to the PSTN switch-off and move to digital. I also mentioned that I’d move the post under Jenny‘s authorship to the public Thought grazing site where I will try and keep news up-to-date as the project proceeds. I also referred to Jenny‘s article in the Magazine (Page 81 she tells us).
Then we had a reference to Sianed‘s article on Printing Digital Photographs – which I found very interesting and which left me wondering how and why they do it for free! Finally I welcomed Jim‘s amplification as a Comment under the Notes on what he’d described at the last meeting in reference to deleting items from trash on external hard disks. I asked everyone to look at my notes and correct them in a similar way. Thanks.
I then reviewed a more interesting set of News which I’d sent to the Flipboard Magazine. I encourage you all to take a look occasionally.
We then went round my screen – I’m just picking up those that contributed in this part of the meeting.
David Hughes told us about his travails in negotiating anew contract with Sky, which ended with an upgrade to his Broadband speed from early March without an increase in cost. S0mething others (including me) commented on with VirginMedia and TalkTalk as well. He then told us about an interesting issue/problem the residents of his apartment block were facing – how to get EV charging points in shared landlord-owned buildings. He referenced this website which provided some guidance, and he’d been in touch with someone from Pontyclun who had some knowledge of installing EV-points in similar situations. Someone mentioned that there might be a WiFi solution that linked back to your apartment. Definitely a case of “watch-this-space”. He then finished with a mention of his grand-daughter’s website that worked perfectly on his phone and web browser, but not his iPad. After a bit of scrabbling about, I advised that he need to tell her to investigate Responsive web design technologies – this is often a feature of themes in WordPress for instance.
Owen advised us that his wife was recovering well after the shock of a hospital admittance at the time of the previous meeting. He had progressed with his investigations of using WordPress for the Cardiff u3a website, was re-visiting his knowledge/use of PHP as a programming language and had come across a piece of software called LocalWP that allowed website developers to build a fully-blown WordPress website on a local machine without need for hosting. I offered when he wanted to trial a hosted site that I could provide a sub-domain on my hosted account for testing purposes. This environment might be of interest to Ted and Philip as well as me. I saw the possibility of archiving all my sites onto a machine for posterity!!!! [Or at least my family’s attention]
Paul had been “hit” by a scam suggesting he invest in Anti-virus software – that didn’t go too far!!! He then advised us that within the browser-version of Gmail, you could click on the three dots above a message and Report it as a Scam. This could be very useful to members. In similar vein (but later) Don told us he’d used the Print function under the “three dots” to print an email out, rather than get a screenshot with sidebars added.
Steve updated us on his “negotiations” with TalkTalk which had also led to the cancellation of his NowTV. He had also spent sometime looking at LastPass.
Stella was beaming!!! She’d purchased a replacement 2-in-1 machine from eBay but it had come without being cleaned-off and she found out she would need to re-set it back to Factory Settings. This she had done successfully and she thanked members of the group for giving here the confidence to attempt it herself. She then did the same thing to an older machine. It took longer but she was impressed at how easy it had been to do the task just by watching a YouTube video. Well done Stella.
Renee had a conundrum which hadn’t been resolved by Apple. The number of photos on her phone and laptop didn’t coincide. This was disturbing because sjhe wanted to move the photos off her phone and through the laptop to an external hard disk. I said I’d had a similar experience recently but couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d done to resolve the problem – but I had. I said I’d try to get the little grey cells working a bit better and let her know if they came back with anything of any use!!!
Don told us he’d been reading a Customer Satisfaction report from Which? on Broadband suppliers. He noted that some of our members would not be that impressed by some of the suppliers (no names, no pack drill). He’d also come across a definition of phishing and had been amazed by the different flavours and terms used.
Christine had also been talking to their broadband supplier (VirginMedia) and had been advised to change their mobile contract (part of the package) to O2 – which were partners of VM to get a better deal – you can’t make up these stories can you! She had also pulled-out of a Lloyds Bank scam when it asked her for the “number on the back of the card” – no, that’s not right!!!!
Ann reported that she’d solved the camera on her Lenovo not working. She inadvertently must have toggled the F8 key on the machine which is a “privacy feature” to switch-off the camera. Glad that one’s been resolved.
Fred reported that he’d been puzzled by a GreenCard Travel email that would appear to be a scam. Something to look out for now that we were all perhaps looking to start driving abroad again.
We then had a discussion on the LastPass video which Sianed thought had been quite good. Several questions were asked and I attempted to answer them as best I could. Some of these I answered subsequently (mainly on subscription costs) on Signal. I refer everyone to their website which has a quite good set of FAQs.
Lastly we went round the screen again to find out if anyone had used, or discovered, useful speech-to-text applications. Owen reported that he’d discovered the wonders of CarPlay on their new car. Messages went from the iPhone to appear as text on the screen of what we used to call the SatNav – but it’s far more now. Paul told us he used the microphone in Text, WhatsApp and Signal (and Notes and Word, etc) to prepare messages, which were surprisingly accurate. I tried to do a demonstration, but failed – I must do some revision on how you can switch to share an iPhone screen over Zoom. That was not the case for Sianed. She found the speech-to-text failed miserable with a Welsh accent. Ann agreed. I suggested they try speaking in Welsh as there might well be a more accurate result. It will be interesting to see. Steve on the other hand was more interested in text-to-speech and he’d been looking at Speechify, but it was costly. I investigated other options and sent a message to Signal. Renee had tackled Siri – she’d meant to do that for some time and found it acceptable, and did arithmetic well!! She also advised Steve to have a look at text-to-speech on Safari – one for me to check out as well. That plus Reader View is making Safari my browser of choice at the moment. Finally, Don had been trying out talking to Google (using the Google Assistant) – we must have another go at this really useful tool again.
