Hello to all you people out there in quarantine land. Welcome to the San Carlos Computer Club; where we meet every Saturday to discuss the tech topics of today. Thank you for choosing to spend an hour or so entertaining yourself with what we have to say.
The San Carlos Computer Club is a group of tech enthusiastic expats that frequent an area in Mexico called San Carlos, Sonora. Because of the covid-19 virus, 21 weeks ago, we were moved to a virtual format, and we’ve been doing our club meetings with Google Meet ever since. Today’s meeting started out slow, but ended up with a lot of people showing up. We never have a very organized format and today was no different…We were a little bit ‘all over the board.’ We all wanted share our covid-19 experiences from our mutual locations, and make sure we’re all getting on well. Some of our other topics included the following:
- We spent a considerable amount of time talking about the antitrust hearing that Amazon Apple Facebook and Google were testifying in front of Congress.
- we got an update from Linda on her mesh Network the Eero system. Apparently, it came with a year of their security for free and so she’s been watching as her network takes down threats and patches holes.
- We got an interesting update from Chester and his Samsung smart TV. Apparently, Samsung has introduced their own set of channels called Samsung Plus and for Chester just there to be used. If you have a Samsung smart TV, then you might check and see if there is a Samsung Plus available on your set.
- Google One will backup iOS or Android devices for free.
Now for a couple of recurring themes from our podcast descriptions:
NOTE #1: Next week (for those of you paying attention I didn’t do it this week) I will be scheduling the Google Meet using Google Calendar with your Google account listed as attendants. The advantage is this will allow members (attendants) to enter the meeting without waiting permission, and will send a notification of the meeting through their Google Calendars. The disadvantage is that we will need to adopt a new regular Meet code. I will continue to send out the regular email notification and the Facebook post containing the numit code and the links to the meeting. People that are new to our club, or not on our list, will still be able to participate, but will need to wait for permission to enter the meeting.
NOTE #2: A CHALLENGE: Can you design a phrase or dialog to trigger and execute a smart speaker commands, while masquerading as conversation? #speakerhacker – Any command execution counts, for example: play a song, get the weather, turn on/off a light. The goal is to covertly execute the command with conversation. We’ll play with our speakers and check back in next week.
If you missed our meeting in real-time, then you can always listen to this podcast.
I hope you all enjoy this audio recording. Today the video is better because of the visual nature of the presentation. You can watch the YouTube video at: https://youtu.be/UPKkS_nO5TA.
Another thanks to all of you that have been helping in my endeavors. Without your support these things would not be possible.
Remember, you can always do something to help without costing you a thing. Please take a moment and go to YouTube and iTunes to like, subscribe, and review any of the videos and podcasts. When you do this it gives my efforts greater exposure. It is as valuable and appreciated as any contribution to the work I’m doing. Thank you.
I’ll talk to you next week!
Everyone take care and #techOn! (psst…is it me, or is our audio a much higher quality today?)
Scott, headNerd
at International Computer Solutions (internationalcs.net)
Please leave a comment if you find any of this info useful.
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