Hello Folks,
Well here we are, the last meeting of the Dublin Tech club for 2023
It has been a good year, with many fine contrubutions from a wide variety of
people, and many people had some very annoying tech problems solved and ironed
out.
So thanks to all those who took part in some way or other.
Our next meeting after Christmas will be on 8th January 2024 at the usual time
of 11 am.
We will start the notes today with the discussion we ended up todaywith,
That was a discussion by and about those people who use Guide dogs.
There was a mention of a girl refused entry to a restaurant with a Guide dog.
Also many instances of taxi men refusing to pick up people with Guide dogs.
Some customers took cases against those taxi men who broke the law by refusing
to take customers with those wonderful dogs.
They were fined and had to pay a charge for their behaviour.
One taxi man gave the reason that he had spent 70€ on getting his car cleaned,
but as Tom said that they could have a cover ready for occasions like this, and
simply cover the seats.
We also had a lively chat about Bus Connect.
Paul who uses either the 15A or the 150, wanted to know what bus or more likely
busses , he must then take if
These busses are discontinued.Going to the city centre seems twice as
difficult as before.
It looks like that one has now to take 2 or more buses to do a journey , ,
which one bus could do for customers , before the arrival of Bus Connect.
Not sure if this is progress on the transport front or not !.
Given that this was the last meeting before Christmas, things were a little
less technical and some more interesting discussions ensued on a number of
well known topics. .
Adrian explained all about Cookies, and whether one should accept them or
not.
He said that there were 3 different types of cookies, but the minut taker
cannot remember what they were. However, if one accepts cookies like myself,
one can get a heavy load of advertisements based on what they were looking at
on the Internet, perhaps looking for a particular type of holiday, or hotel.
Then they will most probably get adverts aimed at them in various countries
and hotels similar to what they were looking at while browsing.
This also happens when people use their credit card to buy an article, then
alternative manufacturers/retailers will off better value to add to their
purchases or perhaps to get them to buy their products instead.
Adrian and Eamonn usually click the not accept button for the cookies, or
clear their history from the browser shortly afterwards, without any real
downside.
Then a chat about VPN, and the branded search engines like Google or Safari
were compared.
Adrian explained that a person who wanted to complain or praise something and
not to be recognised could use VPN (Virtually Private Network)
And they could not be identified as using VPN, (Which cost some money to
use),
Cannot be traced as their IP address is not their, IP stands for Internet
Protocol.
We discussed some books and the minute taker plus Mary recommended two books,
1 Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, a lively read.
2 The booker prize winner Prophet song by Paul Lynch, this is a very good book,
but a difficult read, it’s a dystopian story.
Our man from the West , Tom, recommended Banishing Margaret Small.
That’s all Folks for 2023.
May I wish all my friends and colleagues in Dublin and Cork tech clubs, a
very happy Christmas and a healthy new year.
Paul
