At our Saturday August computer club meeting, Lon Hosford, President, welcomed everyone. Twenty-five members and three guests attended. Lon brought us up to date on the club’s functions and referred us to an article in PC Magazine on how to tune up XP, Vista and W7.
David Deutsch, http://www.synergisocial.com/, will present the September program on “Why Fear Social Media?” He will cover 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. His website is www.synergisocial.com. The site uses Flash Player.
The October meeting will be the club’s fall breakfast meeting to be held at the Country Griddle, 190 Center Street in Clinton. More information on this will be provided at the September meeting.
Perry Snyder brought up the problem that the Flash Player’s cookies cannot be cleaned by CC Cleaner. Flash Player stores cookies from the web sites you visit and that information is used to place ads on web sites that you visit of things that attracted your interest. There is a way to manage the cookies stored by Macromedia’s Flash Player. To protect your privacy and delete these Flash Player cookies, download the Flash Cookie Cleaner. This software allows you to select which cookies you want to delete, save those you need, schedule automated cleaning in the future and, best of all, it is free. Download the Flash Player Cookie Cleaner at http://www.flashcookiecleaner.com .
Q: A member said he was doing research on his computer and he received a message that he had a virus on his computer. How can viruses be stopped?
A.: Keep virus definitions up to date. Have the anti-virus software update automatically daily or at least weekly. Set your anti-virus to update automatically rather than doing the updates manually.
Some members are afraid to order items from internet websites. But several members bought items from Amazon and found the site to be reliable. Some items were shipped directly from China and arrived quickly and in good condition. One time when an item was received damaged and the buyer reported the damage, the item was replaced quickly without a problem. Be sure to deal with reliable, well-known companies and web sites and you can be sure you will be satisfied with the results.
Presentation: Google Picasa, Paul Weeks, Presenter
Picasa is Google’s offering to manage digital photos. Since memory cards used by new digital cameras can now store thousands of pictures, it’s important to have a way to organize and manage these photos. The Picasa software can be downloaded free from Google and offers photo editing, facial recognition, albums, and much more.
After downloading the software, you will have to select where you want Picasa to look for your photos, such as on your computer, your external hard drive, flash drive, or elsewhere. These photos are then scanned by Picasa. Picasa can then categorize the people, after you identify who they are, and group them by individuals or groups. People are treated as an album and the pictures are sorted by date. Picasa does not move your pictures into Picasa; it is basically an index of where your photos are and helps you find them without having to search all the folders on your computer or elsewhere.
Geotagging on smart phones can tag the location of where the pictures were taken. This information gets sent along with the picture when it is loaded on a computer unless it is removed before loading to the computer or internet. So remove this data if you do not want others to be able to see it.
Picasa is very handy when you want to design photo gifts or put together group composites of certain people.
You can access his entire presentation though our Yahoo group messaging. The link to access his message in Yahoo Groups with his presentation is http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hunterdoncomputerclub/message/888
You can also link to his presentation here. It uses Open Office Impress software. http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/12001552/920975708/name/GooglePicasa%20Presentation_modified_for%20HuntCompClub.odp
Thanks, Paul, for another very interesting presentation on how to use the features of Picasa.