In attendance: 11.
Apologies: martin
Poor Jackie appealed to the group for a cure for her severe and painful
toothache without a dentist. Solutions rained down on her from whiskey,
bonjela, paracetamol to such older methods as a loop of thread and an open
door.
Jackie and Stuart reported a 3-hour outage of electricity in Sligo during the
week but, remarkably, there was no reference to the disruption in any media .
The result was that Jackie's Sky box failed to work until the internet was
restored and the onboard screen reader was able to work again. In the process
of reconnecting, Jackie had to press the WPS button. Adrian warned that
pressing the WPS button leaves the network open to anyone else from outside
to log in to the network. The password would be needed to close out this
exposure.
Ken reported the establishment of a new Insight support group for people with
hearing loss and visual impairment. Meetings are expected to begin early in
the New Year.
The rebranding of NCBI has meant that the Smart Hub skill, available on
Amazon Echo devices, has to change. Although the functionality of the hub
will remain the same, there have been a few changes made. The first of course
being that the hub is no longer called NCBI. This has changed to the Vision
Ireland (VI) smart hub. Simply say "Alexa, launch My VI" to launch this
skill.
The changes made to the existing skill are set to be released in January
2024. It is important to note that existing users of the skill will be
required to re-link their Amazon account if they wish to continue having
access to talking newspapers and magazines. More information will be sent out
closer to the release date.
Jackie reported that registering to My VI involved so many commands that she
found it confusing. She also felt that an older person, not fully versed in
technology would be unable to manage the registration.
Joanne noticed that Siri is sending out her text messages automatically
without confirmation since a recent update. Various members explained that
this is controlled by a new setting under Siri which is activated by default.
To access this setting, go to settings>Siri & Search> "Automatically send
messages">on/off.
A brief discussion of Bing, Gemini and ChatGPT observed that Google's Gemini
is not very good and in no way competes with ChatGPT.
Ann Marie found that she had not enough memory to allow her to install the
latest update. On checking the memory usage of her apps in IOS settings, she
saw that IOS claimed that she was using 6GB storage for 1 book in Audible.
One audio book could not occupy more than 600MB, Members who had experienced
that same issue advised that she remove Audible altogether from the iPhone,
after noting any passwords that were involved. A fresh instal of Audible
should reveal amore realistic account of available storage.
Adrian has initiated a usage of Mastodon. Four members of the Cork club are
signed up to it as an experiment. Adrian is tracking some hashtags that are
of interest.
Mastodon has a section called Explore which shows trending posts, trending
hashtags and trending links. Here's how to see it: On your server's website
or the Mastodon web app, click on the # Explore link or the # icon on the
right of the screen.
Look at the local feed of postings that will show all the users on your
group.
It may be that you will need screen recognition to identify buttons.
Cearbhall was trying to find a way to lighten the sound of the Alexa voice.
He found it to be muffled with too much bass. The next ten minutes were taken
up listening to various voices that Alexa could deploy as the Alexa voice.
Various attempts were made to find a voice that matched the lighter tone that
was sought. However, even though the voice was selected, Alexa seemed to
return to the default voice every time. To experiment with this, you can call
Alexa to change voice" Alexa will then offer the first voice to be selected
or move on to the next offering. Everyone should try this and see what they
find.
The group discovered that Zoom would not let music be heard through the
microphone in the meeting. It seems that the sound is filtered, to allow only
the spoken voice to come through. Ken was able to share some music from
YouTube with Zoom and that was heard clearly in the meeting.
as the sounds of the "Fairytale of New York" rang out, The meeting ended with
Christmas greetings to all present and to all users of the Cork Exchange Club
The next meeting will take place on the 6th of January 2024!
All the best,
Cearbhall
m +353 (0)833323487 e: cearbhall.omeadhra@xxxxxxx
