Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Online Class Notes 6-19-2019

We started with five online and had a couple join us in the Library. For those of you who know about or are even using Kodi, this may be on interest to you:



LibreELEC 9.0.2 (Leia) has arrived based upon Kodi v18.2, the 9.0.2 release contains many changes and refinements to user experience and a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability and extend hardware support. Kodi v18 also brings new features like Kodi Retroplayer and DRM support that (equipped with an appropriate add-on) allows Kodi to unofficially stream content from services like Netflix and Amazon.
https://libreelec.tv/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/creative-projects-reuse-old-pc/



How to Use Kodi: The Complete Setup Guide

How Do I Edit a Reply or a Forward?
Even though you might not see it, most email programs include the original message as part of your reply. If you don’t edit the reply yourself, your one-line response might be accompanied by the entire original message that everyone’s already seen. The problem, of course, is that exactly how to edit the entire reply often isn’t obvious at all.
http://tinyurl.com/y4rr4632

Speech to Text
Our phones let us speak into them and convert our words to typed letters. Well, Window 10 can do it too. Win+H and turn on the speech to text feature. What you say is typed into wherever your cursor is on the screen. Works in Email, Facebook message, WordPad… everywhere. Give it a try.

MailChimp is a great way to send multiple emails. If you send them using your normal email like comcast, embarque, yahoo, gmail, or whatever you can send multiple emails by inserting more than one email address in the TO, CC, or BCC boxes. However, each email service has a maximum number of emails you can send in a month without being considered spamming. Using a free service like MailChimp lets you maintain a database of names and email addresses and when you send using their service everyone gets an individual email. You can even write it now and schedule it to be sent in the future. After it is sent you can check the reporting feature to see how many were actually read and even who read it.

Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents or limits users from accessing their system, either by locking the system's screen or by locking the users' files unless a ransom is paid. Use an image backup application at least once a month to ensure that any attack can be removed by simply formatting the hard drive to eliminate it and restoring from the latest image backup file. I also use Malwarebytes (the free version) to check frequently that I do not have any of its code on my computers.

Win+U opens the Ease of Access window at the Display window. Here you can adjust the settings for your display. Many options to personalize including making text larger and animation and hiding scrollbars and more

I have turned off the following on my computer:



Life360 is a family networking app. It is a location-based service designed primarily to allow friends or family members to share location with each other. You can see where the other person is located and if driving you can see them move along the route and what speed they are traveling at.

A new shortcut allows you to capture a portion of the screen and saves it to the clipboard: Shift+Win+S. Prior to 1809, the clipboard only held the last item sent to it. Now it saves them all until you clear it or restart the computer. To access the saved items and use them use the shortcut Win+V.

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Online Computer Club Notes 6-12-2019

The library class was online today in Monticello, KY. The locals did not come but we spent an hour with the faithful from around the country using Hangouts once again. Thank for being part of today’s adventure. Will try this again next Wednesday at 3:30 and see who shows from Monticello.

Here are some of the things we looked at today:

WIn+U opens the Ease of Access window at the Display window. Here you can adjust the settings for your display. Many options to personalize including making text larger and animation and hiding scrollbars and more

I have turned off the following on my computer:




I demonstrated two new apps I have been using on my cell phone:
Life360 and Zello.


Life360 is a family networking app. It is a location-based service designed primarily to allow friends or family members to share location with each other. You can see where the other person is located and if driving you can see them move along the route and what speed they are traveling at.



Zello is an application that emulates push-to-talk walkie-talkies over cell phone networks. The apps are available for smartphones and your Windows PC. Reminds me of the old Nextel flip phones. I used their walkie-talkie feature all the time.

Restart File Explorer
One of the more common causes of a slow computer is the file system becoming overloaded and bogged down with things to do. The easiest way to solve this problem is to simply restart File Explorer.
  1. Win+E to open File Explorer
  2. Right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager
  3. Locate ‘Windows Explorer’ (which may also display as Explorer.exe)

4. Right-click and select Restart (be careful not to click End Task, because that will cause the PC to crash)

Your computer should now feel more responsive and any of the glitches that were appearing will hopefully have vanished.

A look at Win-X Menu 3.0 for Windows
Windows 10 users who invoke the Windows-X menu get options to launch a selection of advanced tools and common tasks when it opens. They may open Computer Management, PowerShell, or the Event Viewer from the menu directly, run searches, programs, or shut down the system.
http://tinyurl.com/yxw8w4hc

Show Seconds On Clock
Windows 95 was the last version of Windows to display the seconds in the System Tray clock. Microsoft’s reasoning when they removed this feature was since system memory was limited at that time. That memory restriction no longer exists which means you can once again display the seconds if you have a need to do so.
http://tinyurl.com/y2gqqdmw

A Keyboard Mouse?
Did you know you can use your keypad as a mouse? If your mouse conks out on you, here is a convenient quick fix.
http://tinyurl.com/y3fwyh23

Easy Photo Editor is a simple and free image editing tool that makes your pictures look more beautiful. The text tool allows you to add text to your image, select font type, font color and more to make your photo "speaks" for itself! Features: • Select image from your phone media library or camera.
http://www.easyphotoedit.com/

InternetOff allows you to quickly turn off the internet so that you can go offline. When you need the connection, you can enable the internet easily for some period (and it will be automatically turned off) or permanently in just two clicks. Besides the program lets you password protect and schedule access to the internet.
http://tinyurl.com/y6ph7qyn

How to convert YouTube videos to music filesWhen you want to save the music from YouTube videos it's much better to choose YouTube to MP3 software that can save and convert the file in one fell swoop. Any Video Converter Free downloads videos and saves them in virtually any audio or video format you can think of.
http://tinyurl.com/y5ncr7kb