PC Community Main Meeting
7:30 - 10 pm November 4 , 2016
Calvary Baptist Church 28924 Ruus Road, Hayward California
The meeting was called to order at 7:55 pm by President Chuck Horner. Get at least one $5 raffle ticket for this month’s raffle prize, a CyberPower Professional 2550 Joule surge protector with 4 standard outlets and 4 wide spaced outlets, safety outlet covers, and phone/fax/modem line protection, among other features.
The meeting began with a demo of installing Chromecast in anticipation of a presentation on Samsung phones. The Chromecast app synchs with a phone and allows the real-time display from a small screen via a projector or TV with an HDMI connector for the Chromecast dongle.
Lola Hunter was curious about general Samsung operating procedures. You can move icons by holding and dragging. Maps is the GPS app that comes with the Samsung. It gives audio cues and plenty of audio notification before turns and exits. Chuck was invited to use Waze and found that he couldn’t get audio, which was not very helpful.
There was some discussion of search engines. Andrew Tews reported that Google gets money for each click so it gives you a long list of hits, many of which are irrelevant. Bing gives more focused results. The DuckDuckGo search engine provides anonymous searching and pertinent results.
Michael Wong reported that Don Odle has been very ill and in the hospital. He has had a bone infection and has been in several facilities.
What about internet security? Good passwords and routers will slow down breaking and entering, but ultimately any device can be taken over. One way to cut out proliferation of junk is to, when you are forwarding emails, remove the addresses in the sender and CC lines and instead BCC folks. That way you don’t expose everyone’s email address.
Chuck organizes his contacts into several groups to facilitate sending emails. It is important to be consistent in naming groups and files. By choosing file names that will force the list to display in the order he wants (e.g, start with a character that will come before the random alphabetic name of individual files). By including the date in the yyyy-mm-dd format (Year-Month-Date), puts files in true chronological order. To search within a folder use the format *SearchTerm* to find file names that include SearchTerm. Very helpful if you can’t remember the exact wording.
To save information such as purchase records, use the Prnt Scrn button to capture your receipt, and paste the graphic into a program that will accept graphics–Word, PowerPoint, Paint, etc. Then save it to a Purchases folder in case you need the information later.
Door Prizes
HelloSign water bottle--Mimi Tse
Pepcom ornamints-- Michael Wong
Bowflex hat--Andrew Tews
USB to micro adapter--John Cordeniz
HelloSign tee shirt--Chris Yager
Oakland high Coin purse--George Kornbluth
Kingston gear bag--Chuck Horner
HelloSign bag--Yorkman Lowe
Raffle Prize
CyberPower Professional surge protector--John Cordeniz
Chuck made a request for additional candidates for the Board of Directors. There were no new nominations.
Thank you to Michael Wong for taking care of signage, to George Kornbluth for coordinating refreshments and to Mimi Tse for the special contributions to the refreshment table.
The meeting was adjourned at 9:30 pm.
The next meeting: December 2, 2016.
Respectfully submitted,
Bayle Emlein, Secretary
