Meeting Notes - 20 January 2015

by **bdahm** Mon Jan 26, 2015 4:09 pm

CM Geeks - Notes

No free lunch - We’ve heard this expression time and again. It’s true. It’s equally true here. We don’t charge anything for our meetings, perhaps on the philosophy that you get what you pay for. Be that as it may, the River Market is providing us with a place to meet every week. They are providing us with parking, a projector and a screen and even a sound system for our videos. All they ask in return and all we ask in return is that you purchase something from the menu, even a cup of coffee or a soft drink. Information wants to be free. Food is something else. For those who may have eaten or are not hungry, a tip for the wait staff would be appreciated.

Not So Welcome Upgrade to Smartphone
I mentioned last week that perhaps the single most significant tech event to come to our household in 2014 was my wife’s upgrade to a smartphone. There has been a one-time downside to that move.

Since she was upgrading from a “feature phone”, essentially a voice only phone, to a smartphone, she merely popped the SIM card out of that phone and into the iPhone I gave her. So she was going from a voice only environment to a voice and data environment. Since she was on a voice only plan with DTAC at that time, there would certainly be some consequences to using the same plan with data as well. I had her call DTAC and upgrade her plan, but that upgrade would not go into effect until the new billing period, which was about a week away. The result of this was about 1,500 baht of additional charges.

Without a defined data plan DTAC charges by the minute so every time an app, mail for example, goes to check for mail either in the foreground or in the background, that’s at least 1 minute regardless of whether there is actually mail to be downloaded. And this could happen every couple of minutes if you have your options set to check that often. Multiple this by all the other apps that can run in the background and that’s a lot of minutes regardless of the bandwidth actually used.

There are a couple of ways to get around this. First, would be to upgrade on the last day of the current data plan to minimize any per minute charges. The second thing, which could be done in conjunction with the first, or not depending on how long it is to the end of the current billing period, would be to shut off cellular data services in your settings until the new data plan is in effect. Lesson learned.

Graphene: The New Miracle Substance
As far as electronics is concerned conductivity and transparency are the holy grail. There’s a new substance called graphene discovered by British scientists a couple of years ago that is just that. Here the video describing those features.

http://tinyurl.com/ohjn39d

YouTube
Chris began his YouTube presentation by going around the room and asking everyone to think of one word that best described YouTube. There were a rather wide-ranging number of responses. He then went on to explain a number of features that most people were not aware of include managing comments to posted videos, determining who could view those videos, how to use the video editor and how to add background music among others. At the end of the presentation Chris provided a URL for the presentation. Here it is.

http://goo.gl/S7qbgw

With that I’m calling it a wrap. Catch you again in two weeks. I don’t provide notes for the Show and Tell. You’ve got to come to the meeting to get that.

-Bill