Digital

Category: Archive

  • A new year starts … and finally we look at Evernote – 13th Sept 2018

    Boot-Up
    Welcome
    Issues & follow-up
    We had a demonstration of the Beacon member website from Alison Firth;
    David Hughes described the latest scam he’d been alerted to as it appeared to come from him and was going to a friend in the same membership organisation. As this person was a hotmail users, I suggested it was more likely they had had their email account hacked, rather than his gmail account. Last year we looked at Have I been pwned which allows you to check whether an account you have might have been compromised.
    Digital Projects – I explained the idea behind Digital Projects – I showed this list as possibilities or examples of projects …

    • Buying a new computer;
    • Building a website for a project, hobby or for the family;
    • Family history software;
    • Under the hood – breaking down a PC into its components;
    • Building a server;
    • Using Linux to bring life to an old laptop;
    • Adobe Lightroom Training;
    • Video-editing for beginners including on a tablet (iPad);
    • Audio – analogue and digital working together;
    • More with Google Photos – further steps to link cameras and computers, and working with tablets.

    News
    Apple event yesterday – new iPhones and a new Apple Watch. You might like to watch the keynote speeches on your computer.
    New privacy and security features in Google Accounts – you might wish to review your privacy settings in the light of GDPR legislation.
    BT hike costs of email offering – ways of avoiding the increased charges for an email service from BT. IT’s going up from £5 a month, to £7.50 if you don’t have a BT line/account.
    Fact checking – a review of websites that are allegedly “fair” and which have no obvious political leaning and also ones that debunk “fake news”.
    Split-ticketing – an article that explains how a group managed to save c.£950 on a return journey by using the split-ticketing website. [Sianed told us that some train managers are happy to do this as well !!!] Topics for today
    What is a browser? Look at this article which I wrote this week “Just Google it…” – it essentially suggests you should use a browser, ie Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera or Brave rather than the Google app on your smartphone or tablet for a better internet experience.
    Thought grazing – features and demonstration. I explained the difference between the Public-facing pages on the site and the Private area available for Cardiff U3A Computer Group members (and past members). I’ll write some notes on how to post a note on the site and how to comment on posts before the next meeting.
    Evernote – Here’s a Guide/manual to using Evernote. I gave a demonstration of how I use Evernote. Colin (I think) asked whether it could be linked to a Calendar – I said I would check and I’d report back in a reply/comment to these notes.

  • "Just google it …"

    Something I’ve only just recently become aware of is that people don’t know the difference between Google and an internet browser. Now this is a spectacular success for Google (the company) and drives their revenues up a lot, but means that users are potentially missing out on a lot in terms of their internet experience so this short note attempts to address that balance, albeit in a very small way!

    How did this come about? Well principally because Google introduced an app for the iPhone and other smartphones and tablets called (unsurprisingly) … Google. It presents in a nice easy to use interface a way of searching for information on the internet – that is how Google started after all, which is how they also managed to corner the term for searching the internet – “just google it”. [You don’t hear many people saying – “just bing it”, or “just yahoo! it” – in fact in the case of the latter they just gave up and decided to use the Google search engine and ditch their own one.] So … at a stroke, new users to digital devices thought that the way to connect to the internet was through their “Google” app.
    No, no – there is another way that presents you with so many other possibilities and no, no – you don’t have to restrict yourself to using just Google as your search tool. [In an earlier post I described some experiments with using DuckDuckGo and other search engines and I will return to that subject at another time.] So … what might you use?
    Well even using Google’s Chrome browser is better than using the Google app on your smartphone or tablet. It probably uses the same software  “under the hood” based on Google’s Open Source Chromium code base but it does offer the possibility of adding extensions, and allowing the use of alternative search engines.
    But what else could you use? On my iOS (Apple mobile devices) I tend to use Apple’s Safari browser. On my desktop/laptop I tend to use Chrome, or Firefox (another Open Source project) from the Mozilla Foundation. Then there’s Microsoft’s Edge – supplied with Windows, or Opera (a lean,  clean browsing machine), or I could be really radical and use something like Brave (and I am) which doesn’t track my browsing history … but I’ll leave that for another day, and for another post.
    For today, the message is simple … don’t use the Google app as your main internet browser, just use it if you want to for simple searches. Find a browser you like and use that … and maybe even choose which search engine to use, it doesn’t need to be Google – I’m using Chrome with DuckDuckGo as I write this. You won’t regret making a change to your internet browsing/searching experience – believe me!
     
     
     

  • I've now had an introduction to the SBOD

    Now I’ve been uber-charitable about Apple and their MacOS, but yesterday and today I was introduced to the Spinning Beachball of Death which froze me out of doing anything on my iMac whilst I trawled the internet (on another machine) trying to find out what could be wrong.
    I’d not left the machine on, in sleep mode, and yet it just crawled through boot and sign-in until it basically gave up the ghost when it got to the Desktop. What could it be?
    Obviously it was probably a hardware problem … wasn’t it? Well a bit of Cmd + R work, running disk utility showed everything was in fine fettle, many re-boots later things seemed to be improving, but not all was right. What could it be? Try logging-in to another account on the same machine I thought. Well I had one, but it wasn’t an Admin account, but it was worth a try. This seemed to be much better so I was now thinking about Corruption of the User Profile and the need to Restore from a Time Machine backup … maybe. But then, out of the blue, all seemed to be well again … until this morning, when the SBOD returned.
    This time I knew it was likely to be something to do with my User Profile, so I setup a new Admin account once I managed to get to the screen that allowed me to do that. Logged out, and then logged into the new account and, as I hoped, the login screamed through. I set up the machine and right at the end I was told that my Paragon NTFS for Mac (which allows me to read Windows files) needed to be updated as it was not optimal for my version of MacOS (High Sierra, 10.13.6). The penny dropped! This software wasn’t installed on my MacBook Pro. This piece of software was interfering with Finder on the iMac in some way to slow everything down. Quickly into System Preferences then, disable the NTFS for Mac driver, and re-boot. All seems to be well. Some hard lessons learnt and a lot of time wasted.
    The lessons learnt?

    1. Have a spare Admin account on your machine so that you can check your user profile
    2. Disable, or Uninstall any software that you’re not using because inevitably it will go out of sync with something else
    3. Make sure that you know how to start your machine in a number of different ways to check for faults – I had to print out a cheat sheet to do this
    4. Make sure you have an up-to-date backup … just in case; I did, so that was my last option, and I’d have been OK … I think!

     

  • Windows 10 Update

    My laptop was running slow, so I decided to restart it.  It then took an hour to configure the update it had obviously been downloading.  You have been warned!

  • "Thought grazing" and the U3A

    This blog is one way I am offering to share with fellow Third Agers, what I have learned, and have experienced, through a lifetime of using IT.  I think of this as  ‘thought grazing’ by us ‘silver surfers’ – click on the link above for a fuller explanation – particularly for those members of the University of the Third Age in Cardiff.
    The two most recent posts to the Blog appear in the feed below. To see them fully and either Comment, or Reply to a Comment, you will need to click on the title of the Post first so that it opens in a window by itself.
    If you’re a Cardiff U3A Computer Group member, after Login, you will also see Private posts in the feed below, and be able to read the content of Member Posts, or Meeting Notes, from the Menu above.
    Once you’ve logged in you’ll also be able to view some guidance on how to use the site from the Cardiff U3A Computer Group menu.
    Enjoy!
    David Harrison

  • Sat Nav

    I have recently  bougt a Tom Tom Go 6200 Sat Nav, does anyone else have one of these ?

  • Amazon Echo one year on.

    Hi,
    After being an enthusiastic Amazon Echo user for the past year, I have to admit that I’m simply not enjoying her company so much any more.
    As an enthusiastic user, I took out an extra subscription with Amazon so that I could upload my music to their servers so that I could access my CD collection through the devices. Recently I’ve had an email from them to tell me that they are discontinuing that service. Hours of wasted effort.
    It was kind of cool asking Alexa to play certain tracks and certain tunes however once you realised that your success rate was only about 40% my enthusiasm soon waned.
    I took out the extra Amazon Prime Unlimited subscription for a while so that I could listen to just about any track ever recorded. Thing is; and you old folks might relate to this ….trying to think of something inspiring out of fresh air isn’t all that easy any more. It is far easier to see your albums displayed on a tablet screen, offering some suggestions as to what you might like to listen to.
    However, the most infuriating problem that I experienced was what I’ll call “The Tuesday Phenomenon.” My wife babysits on Tuesdays. Theoretically that gives me free time with my music collection. Often, on a Tuesday I’d ask Alexa to play a certain album only to find that it had lost network connection. It would then take about 30-45 minutes to get back into the groove by which time I’d often need some calming music to tend to my fraying nerves.
    Amazon Echo. Great for asking for spellings. Pretty good at sums. Turning lights on and off is really cool but the music player simply isn’t anything but frustrating.

  • Protected: My wife is a bit of a wildlife geek.

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  • IT on trips, or holiday, and meeting notes – 7th June 2018

    Here are my notes from the meeting; with a couple of additions from you …

    Issues
    News
    Trips and IT – Hardware
    • Smartphone, Tablet or Laptop
    • Power sockets or adaptors
    • Cables (Ethernet and HDMI cable)
    • MiFi – portable WiFi using 3G/4G
                MiFi from Three
                Huawei MiFi at Amazon
    Trips and IT – Software
    Trips … on the go
    • Want to do some fun geocaching? – Munzee
    • Want to hire a bike? – NextBike, it’s not available everywhere – but it is in Cardiff!
    • Cheaper digital banking overseas? – Revolut
    • and then there’s apps for Expedia, trivago, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, kayak, Hotels.com, Booking.com, etc
    • eBooks? – try the Libra eBook Reader with the Cardiff Library service, or the Kindle app for your tablet – you don’t need a Kindle!

  • Mapping, Google and geocaching and meeting notes – 10th May 2018

    Ocado
    Quick hints:

    • Getting short cuts for documents on your Desktop – Go into File Explorer, find the document you want to create a Shortcut for, single click on that document, right click, select Create Shortcut.
    • Format painter in Word. It’s the paintbrush in the home menu. Highlight the area of text that shows the format you want to copy. click on format painter. Highlight the area of text you want to copy the format to.
    • Bullets – highlight the text that you would like to add bullets for. Click on the bullets in the Home menu – about half way along in the top row.
    • Disabling touch pad – on a Lenovo machine press F6. Only works for that session.

    News:

    • Windows 10 update
    • Google launches
    • Broadband speeds

    Google maps

    • Getting coordinates – go into Google Maps. click on where you want to get the coords for. Rich click. Go down to What’s here? A box will appear at the bottom that includes the coordinates. These coords are often not in the format you want for your SatNav so have to be converted. A good website for doing coordinates conversion is: http://www.nearby.org.uk/coord.cgi
    • https://www.google.com/mymaps – this website appears to allow you to plan routes, whereas the https://www.google.co.uk/maps/ site does not
    • Saves to Google Drive – the route you plan seems to save to Google drive.
    • Saving as KML file – this seems to be the only format you can save a route in and not the ‘.gpx’ format that is often used. There is probably a way to convert KML file to a GPX file somewhere.

    GPS
    Geocaching