A very active meeting today but you managed to capture everything so
well!, Cearbhall. Thanks.
Just a quick note on the WPS button.
That is needed to connect to Wifi smart devices that don't have a way to
input the wifi password. When pressed, the WPS button will release the
password lock of the network for several minutes and broadcast this for
the device to know it's time to connect. This is where the security risk
is. When pressing it and not necessary, you could end up with someone
else connected to your network but silently waiting for you to play with
that WPS button. Even phones can use WPS to connect.
Luckily there's no need for a password to turn off this function. It
turns off by itself in a few minutes, or just power cycke the device
immediately.
Anyone looking forward to experimenting with the Mastodon instance we
test, reach out to me over email to get an invite. Mastodon works like
Twitter to socialize and share information but in a much more private
way.
Happy Christmas to all members of the Cork Exchange Club, I'll see you
in January and on Monday with the Dublin group.
Cheers,
Adrian
On 2023-12-16 16:10, Cearbhall O'Meadhra wrote:
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
