Thursday, August 20, 2015

Class Summary 8-20-2015

We had a great turnout today with 8 people online. Lot’s of interaction between participants; more so than when we hold the live classes at the club office. Everyone is finding Hangouts very easy to use--just need to know the URL for our hangout which is:
https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/g2fvtzyyhzwt4wpccorxc3msdaa

BTW the new Edge browser does not run hangouts. So use Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer.

Our furthest away member was Donna hanging out with us from Hawaii! She teased us with a screen shot out her window. She had gone to a computer club there and brought back a couple of things she shared. One was the app for a smartphone called google goggles. The short story is that you can take a picture of a landmark and the app will bring up information about it by doing visual recognition.

I had a few links to talk about:

How to Turn an Old PC Into a Home File Server
http://www.howtogeek.com/190835/how-to-turn-an-old-pc-into-a-home-file-server/

Revive Your Old PC: The 3 Best Linux Systems For Old Computers
http://www.howtogeek.com/172987/revive-your-old-pc-the-3-best-linux-systems-for-old-computers/

5 Ways to Free Up Space on Your Android Device
http://www.howtogeek.com/112356/5-ways-to-free-up-space-on-android/



How to password protect a MS Word document
http://www.howtogeek.com/225780/how-to-add-an-open-password-to-a-word-document/

During the week I sent someone instructions on how to find out what version of Windows they had. Here is what I sent:



How do I know what operating system I have?
Control Panel > System

Donna had a number of questions on using an upgrade that just came out for her Android smartphone. All her questions were answered, but she would like to see more classed on using the Android phone at the club.

Daniel suggest using the site savefrom.net to save any video on the Internet, like on Facebook, to your PC. No software required. You just get the video URL copied from the browser address bar and paste it into the box on their site. Then you receive a screen with download options. The result is a copy on your PC you can watch later without access to the Internet.

I was asked how to capture screen shots from the PC. One answer was to use the SnagIt extension. And another is to use greenshot which you can find on ninite.com.

We talked about using VLC as a replacement for the missing (unless you pay for it) Media Center. And the new name for VLC is VideoLAN.

Donna reminded us of gazelle.com which is a site to buy and sell used cell phones. So if you just got an upgrade, why not sell your old one? However, always reset your phone to factory settings before letting go it. You want all your stuff cleaned out and resetting it does just that.

If you are looking to easily read articles, like news, in the browser add the Magic Scroll extension. It will show you the article without any peripheral stuff from the page--no adds, links outside the article, no web page banner, etc.

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