We discuss how to effectively and safely use digital technology (smartphones, digital cameras, tablets and computers) with those 55 and older who join our club.
Refer to our calendar for details of events. To attend Computer Club events you must be a member of the Victoria Computer Club.
Memberships are $25 per person per year. Memberships last 365 days from the anniversary of joining,
Slides from the presentaton Never trust the unsolicited
Windows File Explorer Secrets
File Explorer is an indispensable app that has been designed to provide a simple user interface (UI) for you to navigate, access, and help organize the files, folders, and apps stored on your computer’s hard drive, external drives, and anywhere in your network. Ever thought you knew exactly where an item was, only to spend hours searching your home for it? Folders and files on your hard drive can cause the same chaos. File Explorer can help by putting you in charge of how you work with your documents. Just like a filing cabinet, you determine your filing method. Unlike a filing cabinet, however, you can change how files are displayed, grouped, and shared.
Presented by Bill James, Computer Club of Oklahoma City
Register to attend in person or
Join Zoom Meeting by clicking this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83338148237?pwd=S3ArYU5wakpueWFSSW4rZGNpaVl5QT09
Meeting ID: 833 3814 8237 with Passcode: 633639
DECEMBER WEDNESDAY WORKSHOPS 9am pacific time
December 1
Electronic Holiday Greeting Cards
Not Your Parent’s PowerPoint
December 8
Make Your Own 2022 Photo Calendar at Home
December 15
Learning Linux #11 – Software Installations and Removals
Have you experienced your own problems in the “supply chain dilemma” caused by the current crisis? At this time of year, not only are some things hard to find, but many of us don’t want to go “out there in all of that” and spend a lot of time searching for them. APCUG has come to your rescue with our first two December Wednesday Workshops. Rather than trying to “find” things like holiday cards or just the right calendar to give or use, you can create/design/make them yourself with a bit of help. Check out our lineup of DIY (Do It Yourself) projects.
December 1
Register here – https://forms.gle/
Electronic Holiday Greeting Cards
Bob Bowser, Director, The Senior Computer User Group of Greater Kansas City
Bob will show us several options for sending holiday greetings to our friends and family. He will take us on a visit to several websites varying from free electronic cards to membership-based electronic cards and options to purchase physical cards from home with ways to distribute them and/or get them sent to your home for you to mail.
Not Your Parent’s PowerPoint
Marcia Berkey, Class Instructor, Sarasota Technology Users Group
PowerPoint is more than just presentation software. This presentation will demonstrate many unusual uses for PowerPoint, from documenting your memories to creating greeting cards for the holidays. You will learn how to create a Photo Album for life events, not to be confused with Photo Books from other vendors. However, there is a cool trick that you can use in PowerPoint to make your Photo Books better. You will also learn how to narrate your slideshows, add music to them, and how to export your PowerPoint as an .mp4 video. You can share your creations through your favorite social media sites. Have fun with Marcia learning more about PowerPoint.
December 8
Register Here – https://forms.gle/
Make Your Own 2022 Photo Calendar at Home
John Krout, Presenter & Newsletter Contributor, Potomac Area Technology And Computer society
We are all awash in digital photos, not only our own but those of our relatives and friends. So why not make a calendar to show off the best ones? All you need is PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress and a color printer. Learn how you can download and customize the calendar table files (containing 12 calendar months and white space for photos) by adding your photos and calendar entries such as birthdays, anniversaries, and so forth. This presentation also includes information on how John prints and binds his calendar copies at home and ways you might work with commercial printing companies to do that. Note: As of April 2021, the 2022 calendar files are posted online for free downloading.
December 15
Register Here – https://forms.gle/
Learning Linux #11 – Software Installations and Removals
There have been numerous questions about software asked at previous Linux Workshops, where do you get the software, how do you install software, and how do you remove the software. At today’s workshop, we are going to focus on those very topics. There are several places you can get the software, and we’ll cover them (starting with the distro’s software center and going out to the Internet). And there are many ways to install the software, and we’ll cover them (starting with the distro’s package manager, the newest container packages, the command line, and even compiling them yourself). Finally, we’ll discuss reversing the process (uninstalling) based on the way you installed it. You can choose precisely how technical you want to get in this whole software process (including being safe).
Here is a link to the Times Colonist insert that celebrates 65 years of Silver Threads
November 10 at 9 am PT : Windows
November 17 at 9 am PT : Linux
11/10 – Windows Q&A
Register Here https://forms.gle/
Registration closes at 8:30 PT on November 9.
11/17 – Linux Q&A
Register Here https://forms.gle/
Registration closes at 8:30 PT on November 16.
Do you have burning questions you need answered about your computer? Are you having trouble finding those answers locally? Do you want to know whether others have the same questions or maybe someone else has the answer to your questions? How about the possibility that you have answers to someone else’s questions they are trying to find? Or do you like to know what other people are asking and what answers are out there? If so, you want to join our APCUG November Wednesday Workshops where we will “Ask Away” in an Open Q&A and spend time letting people ask questions and have other people answer those questions.
We’ll have two different Workshops. On November 10, we will focus on any and all questions about the Windows operating system. And then, on November 17, we will focus on any and all questions about the Linux operating system. We’ll have a team available each week to start the ball rolling with answers, and we will open it up to anyone in the audience that might have the answer if they don’t.
Please register for both if you are interested in both operating systems. And if you have a burning question you want to get to the top of the list, put that question on the Workshop registration form, and we’ll address those questions first. Then, after all those questions have been answered or tabled for further research, we will open the floor for additional questions and answers.
Click here to register– https://forms.gle/
Registration CLOSES at 11:30 pm ET on Friday, November 5
Club members with smartphone service contracts are often offered new phones by their cell phone service providers when their 2 year contract finishes, often at no extra cost. They sometimes retire their old cell phone to a drawer, sometimes to a stack of old phones. (We are talking about smartphones here, not very old clamshell cell phones. ) These smart phones should be worth no more than $75. (The markup by commercial resellers on these old smartphones seems exorbitant.)
In the mean time we have members without smartphones who need older low cost cell phones for emergency phone calls and for two factor authentication of a couple of important accounts, e.g. their email account and their password manager account.
The computer club can help bring these two parties together. We can wipe the old phone of any personal data, and help set it up with a phone number and authenticator, ready for use. The computer club would not buy or sell the phone, but help connect these parties, and offer technical support. The club offers no warranty.
If you want to be on either side of this trade, please give George Bowden a call at 250-893-7423.
Aww, someone is shredding documents I’ve stored in the cloud !!
I got some feedback to my slide presentation Backup the Easy Way
George B:
Backups have changed, because our device operating systems and apps are now so integrated with cloud storage. Today I restore from the cloud.
Consider the Google universe of devices, accounts and where data is stored. If my Chromebook or Android device becomes inoperable, or I replace it, I do a power wash, then I log in to my Wi-Fi, and then I log into my google account, and voila, all is restored except what was in the downloads folder. That leaves three backups for me to do:
Nowadays we need to backup our access to the internet, not the device. This mainly means backing up usernames, passwords, and account logins. Keep those in a password manager, be it in the browser synced across devices, or in the cloud like Lastpass.
Every device fails, so you want to get your documents off any single point of failure that can lose your data. Get your photos off your camera and off your phone into the cloud ASAP. SD memory cards fail, thumb drives fail, external drives fail, SSD drives fail. If my network fails, I can go to another access point. Google, Apple and Microsoft are the experts at redundancy.
On an Apple device, your Apple id is your key to reloading your Apple universe.
Windows and Linux are the holdouts. Windows has no phone in its universe, and the extensions to Edge browser are a bit limited, though they have Office and Outlook as extensions to the browser. With that, they have 99% of user needs fulfilled in the browser. So run apps that are browser extensions that follow you across synchronized devices. And play Xbox games in your browser.
Yes, you can be old-school and do system backups, and install your apps as .exe’s . And I do have a Windows box that would be a pain to restore from a new installation of windows, so I make a system backup of that. But it is a hold-over. My point is to have some server farm do backups for me. I don’t download emails to windows mail, don’t save my office documents to my computer’s Documents folder and do use a password manager, like Lastpass.
Ed:
My big fear is not that Google loses my photos and doc’s, but that *I* make a mistake and delete something by mistake. This is particularly true of synchronized folders, where a configuration error could wipe out data. Losing family photos would be a tragedy, so extra redundancy gives me piece of mind.
Michael:
I’m a bit of an old school person. With a large number of photos and some videos, moving to the cloud would mean spending money (I’m a bit cheap in that respect). I also have a hard time trusting corporate entities with my personal documents.
My PC has mirrored drives for photos (my most important files), a NAS for another copy plus backing up my other documents (taxes, important passwords, etc), and finally DVD’s of my photos reside at my parents place in Sidney. I don’t use a password manager, though I did register for nordpass. I do, however, have a secure USB drive in case of emergency.
Sure, it’s a bit more complex than saving to the cloud, but I’m more comfortable with this set up at this time.
