Meeting Notes - 7 July 2015

by **bdahm** Mon Jul 13, 2015 4:12 pm

Chiang Mai 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.

Bits and Pieces
* Steaming music services experienced 135 B streams (that’s up 100% over the same time period last year) during the first 6 months of 2015 and with Apple Music’s kickoff on June 30, it can only grow even more. Digital music sales, on the other hand, were down 10% over the same period.

* When you use Gmail in your browser you can now Undo Send a message. This function was developed by Google Labs and has been available for some time. Now it is available as a standard feature. Of course, you can’t “unsend” a message. Instead what it does is delay the sending of a message for up to 30 seconds (you set the time), which gives you time to rethink sending an angry message in the first place, or maybe you see an error just after you hit Send or maybe you didn’t really provide that link you said you were going to include. Either way, Google is giving you a second chance. It has saved me any number of times. There should also be a function whereby the message would not be sent until the following morning. That might save a lot of embarrassing situations.

http://tinyurl.com/kskvrow

Google Contributor
Google Contributor is a way to support content providers in an ad-free environment. With the proliferation of ad blockers there have been cries that a “free” internet is doomed. People, it seems, want content and don’t want to be bothered by ads, which have become more bothersome and intruding, not to mention the privacy and tracking implications.

This is only in beta right now and only is being used on a couple of web sites, but the way it would work is that a donation, presumably on an ongoing basis would pay for content that ads formerly supported. In the places where ads would appear, and there are areas which will continue to be blocked out for ads, there would be a pixel pattern or a thank you notice.

http://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Of course not everyone uses ad blockers to begin with, but there are also efforts underway to block ad blockers. Let the arms race begin! Yet if ads didn’t scream, flash and jump up and down at you, probably more people would find them less intrusive. The other issue for ads is that they can take considerable time, up to a minute in some cases, to load all the ad content before the web site appears. This is a waste of time and bandwidth.

Pogue’s Basics
We viewed a number of David Pogue’s basic tech tips including purchasing cables at reduced prices, proof-reading tips, the hidden web address suffix key, identifying which side of the USB plug should go down and many more. Here they are.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/tagged/pogue's-basics

With that I’m going to call it a wrap, until next time.

-Bill