Owen led the meeting as David was on holiday. We did the usual round table followed by short presentations on Windows 11 and the Cardiff U3A website.
Fred: reported continuing problems with TalkTalk especially their email offering.
David H: David has bought a Samsung TV but struggles with multiple remotes. Jim mentioned an article in ‘Computer Active’ magazine describing an app to handle all TV activity.
Barbara: had an issue with her iPad failing to change screen orientation on rotation. There is apparently a ‘setting’ option to handle this but well hidden. She closed down the machine and restarted to solve her problem. [Jim chatted: To control the orientation of my tablet’s screen I use an app, Rotation-Orientation Manager, available in the Android Play Store. Jim]
Renee: was supposed to give a Zoom presentation but ended up in A&E! She has taught herself to use PhotoBooth to video herself and WeTransfer to send the file to others.
Don: is getting used to his new Dell PC. DH has encouraged him to use LibraOffice but every time he uses it he gets a popup about MS Office. He also wanted to reorder the email accounts that he uses to see a particular one first. No obvious solution was suggested except that he might remove all the accounts from his email client and re-add them in the order he wanted, but there was no guarantee this would actually work.
Sianed: asked for advice on the Brave browser as when trying to login to her online banking she receives a message which prevents her progressing. Others mentioned similar issues with other browsers.
Paul: has continuing battery drain problems on his phone. There appears to be an app or service ‘RCS’ which takes most of the charge. It was noted that the NHS Covid app also takes considerable battery usage as it is constantly scanning. [Renee chatted: iPhones don’t support RCS. They use iMessage instead.]
Jim: has been attempting to control his camera using his phone. He noted that when images are transferred to disc they no longer contain some of the desired information embedded in them.
Steven: Looking into removing duplicate files. Jim recommends ‘AllDup’.
Ann: mentioned that Zoom options seemed to have changed and her camera comes on automatically rather than asking her first. Owen said he would check if there had been any recent updates which might have altered this.
Christine: mentioned that emails don’t seem to archive properly. She has had a message from a spoofed email address but realised it in time and did not open any links. Celebrated receiving a date to have an extender from Virgin.
Owen then walked the group through the recent announcement by Microsoft of Windows 11 which seems to have a style revamp and the addition of a number of tools and features. Link is https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-11 .
Owen then followed on with a demonstration of some of the features of Google Sites which is the software he uses for the Cardiff U3A website. He demonstrated layouts, images, formatting text, the inclusion of calendars etc. In response to a question, he indicated that one shortcoming was the inability to give editor permissions at page level and had therefore had to restrict editor to himself until Google changes matters.
