At the meeting on July 16, we had 26 members and 3 guests attending. Lon Hosford, President of the club, welcomed everyone. In a discussion with one of our guests, he said he was considering taking down our blog website and moving the blog to Facebook or Google Plus, which is a new Google service coming soon. More consideration will be given to these suggestions before a decision is made.
Upcoming presentations and events:
August, 2011: Paul Weeks — Google Picasa Photo Editing, organization and facial recognition software for individuals.
September, 2011: David Deutsch david@synergisocial.com – Why Fear Social Media?
The history of how social media came about; how social media is different from everything else on the web; basic walk-through on using popular apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yelp; address the issue of security in social media, and show a concrete example of how an organization can use social media to help them achieve their organizational objectives. David will discuss Facebook Fan Pages more than anything else on Facebook to minimize overlap. His website is www.synergisocial.com. The site uses Flash Player.
October, 2011: Club Fall Breakfast, Location, Clinton Country Griddle
November, 2011: John Warsinski, Virtual Box, http://www.virtualbox.org This software allows additional operating systems to load and run on your computer.
December, 2011: Club holiday party
Bruce Arnold told the club about a new feature on the Google Chrome browser. He said Google placed a small microphone on the search bar. Clicking the microphone allows you to ask a question and search results for your question will appear. The new features also allow one to search by dragging and dropping a photo into an image search. For more information, go to this article, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387351,00.asp from PC Magazine. Although, I use the Chrome browser, I was not able to find the microphone on my search line, so perhaps there are other requirements before it shows up, such as new updates to the browser.
Bruce also made us aware that Google Picasa offers 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos. Photos under a certain size or videos under 15 minutes won’t count toward your storage limit. If you upload photos from Google Plus, it automatically resizes them so they won’t count towards your 1 GB, although this service can be used by invitation only.
Presentation: Ubuntu, Bruce Arnold, Presenter
Ubuntu is a free operating system and is in public domain. To easily provide the details for this presentation, Bruce provided a summary handout sheet about Ubuntu titled “Things I like about Ubuntu 11.04”. The handout gives general information about Ubuntu and details about how to download a disk image (.iso) and burn it to a disk and then how to install the program to your computer. To read or print out a copy of this Ubuntu handout, go to http://barnold.us and look for the name of the handout above on the website.
If you follow his instructions and install the software, you will have the equivalent of a $220 MS Windows 7 program and can use it on any number of computers since the program is free.
Ubuntu does not run Windows applications. It runs applications written for Ubuntu that are similar and are installed free with the default installation package. The apps can be used for word processing, music, email, photo editing, and many other applications. Although Ubuntu cannot use Windows software, most likely there is a free software app on Ubuntu that can accomplish the same job. It can read Word docs and is compatible with Windows 7.
The hardware requirements are much less than required to use Windows, so Ubuntu can be used on older computers. This is a great way to put an old computer to use without any cost. Printers will automatically find a driver or go to a list of printers on the computer and select your printer model and download the correct drivers.
It is best to use Ubuntu on a second computer rather than the same machine using Windows, but if you have a dual boot system, you can use both Ubuntu and Windows and can read files from both.
For questions, speak to Bruce through our group messaging on Yahoo, at the Senior Center when he is working there, or at our next club meeting.