Author Archives: MrsGeek

Traveling the country in an RV with her husband, Jim. We present seminars at RV rallies and computer clubs all over the country and run this website.
Geeks on Tour June 2023 Newsletter Orchid photo

June 2023 News: Hawaii Cruise, Trim Videos, Group Chats, Chatting with AI,1984 Time Capsule, and more…

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What’s up with Jim and Chris – the Geeks
May
In May we took a quick RV trip to the Tampa area to present a seminar at Sun City Center Computer Club, see links to the class materials below. Then we were home in Fort Lauderdale for the rest of the month.
We’re excited to have orchids blooming in our back yard and the photo above is
an example of editing the photo. See the video of how it was done, using Google Photos.
Here is my original photo:

We did 2 of our Sunday Live “What Does This Button Do?” shows:

Update on our Hawaiian Cruise!

In case you missed it in the last newsletter – You are invited to join us in January 2024 – as we cruise the Hawaiian Islands on NCL’s Pride of America. You can find all the details at GeeksOnTour.com/Hawaii Reserve and make $125 per person deposit by June 10 to lock in the current group pricing. That deposit is refundable up until September when the full amount is due. The trip will include a whale watching excursion in Maui.

10,000 Subscribers

We’re so close! 9,978 subscribers on YouTube. We’ll be at that 10,000 milestone real soon. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please visit our YouTube Channel: YouTube.com/@GeeksOnTour and
click the Subscribe button. We’ll highlight our 10,000th subscriber and link to their YouTube channel in our next newsletter.

In this newsletter:

As usual, we have an eclectic mix of smartphone and technology tips for you.
  • Group Chat Apps
  • Chatting with Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat
  • Trimming Video on your phone
  • Time capsule moment: 1984

  • Thank you to our premium members for supporting us and making this newsletter possible! If you learn something from us, and you’re not a member, consider joining us now.

What’s coming up – Our Calendar June and July

The Geeks are staying pretty close to home for a while.

Jim is recovering from hip replacement surgery.

We have online classes, though

Let us know if you would like a Zoom presentation for your group.

June

July

  • “What Does This Button Do?” 2pm ET Sunday Live on YouTube
    • July 9 Episode
      260
    • July 23 Episode 261
    • Members Only Backstage Zoom after the shows
  • July 18 7pm ET Ask Chris Anything Google Photos Live on YouTube

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel, click on the bell for notifications, and Like us on Facebook.

That way you’ll get notified when we go live. And we’re almost to 10,000 subscribers!
Ask the Geeks

Ask the Geeks Q&A forum.

Anyone can read the forum, only members can ask questions. This is a valuable benefit of membership. Join Today! Here are some recent discussions

  1. Titan Authenticator
  2. Google Passkeys
  3. Google Saved Passwords
  4. Hacked Facebook

How to trim videos on your phone

You don’t want to miss a second of your granddaughter’s graduation ceremony, so you start the video camera rolling as she’s walking up to the stage. Now you wish you hadn’t done that! Nobody wants to watch the 3 minutes
of her walking, they just want to see her step onto the stage and get her diploma. And, you should probably cut out that part where she tripped.

No problem, if you took the video with your phone, you can use Google Photos, or even the Photo Gallery app that came with your phone, to easily trim the beginning or end of your video. It’s a little more complicated to
cut out a piece in the middle, but this article will show you how.


What is a group chat app? And, which one is best?

Today we have apps that allow groups of people to communicate with each other – instantly – like you are all in the same room at the same time. Group chat apps are oh-so-useful for communicating with multiple people at
the same time. You can plan events, brainstorm ideas, or just keep up with what everyone is up to. You can also share photos, videos, and files with everyone in the group chat.

The problem is, we have so many apps to choose from. In this article we’ll list several of the contenders, then we want to hear from you. Do you use a group chat app? If so, which one and how do you like it. Take just a minute to respond to our survey.


Chatting with AI a tutorial video:

Artificial Intelligence apps are all over the news. Many of you have taken ChatGPT for a spin, but how about Google’s Bard? or Microsoft’s Bing Chat. This video shows you how to get to each of them
and ask your questions. Best part, it’s all free.

Online in 1984? A time capsule moment.

I (Chris), along with my mother, Marilyn, opened a computer training center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1983. I wrote a quarterly newsletter for 14 years to keep in touch with the students who attended our classes. This was back when we had to get a newsletter typeset, printed, addressed, stamped and mailed! I kept a copy of
each one and it’s fun to thumb through them. The following article is from one of those newsletters in the Fall of 1984. It’s about my first use of online services. I used a personal computer and a modem to connect to a service called CompuServe so I could participate in an electronic bulletin board called Whole Earth Software Catalog. It’s really a blast from the past for me. I hope you enjoy it as you open this time capsule to 1984 …

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Online in 1984? A time capsule moment.

Do you remember 1984? No, not the book – the actual year. You might need to close your eyes to imagine yourself in a world in which there are no smartphones, not even any cell phones! 1984 was even before email! The IBM PC was only 2 years old, Microsoft Windows did not exist and the World Wide Web was not even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes – he was the Web’s inventor. The World Wide Web would not enter general use until 1993-4, when websites for everyday use started to become available.

I (Chris), along with my mother, Marilyn, opened a computer training center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1983. I wrote a quarterly newsletter for 14 years to keep in touch with the students who attended our classes. The following article is from one of those newsletters in the Fall of 1984. It’s about my first use of online services. I used a personal computer and a modem to connect to a service called CompuServe so I could participate in an electronic bulletin board called Whole Earth Software Catalog. It’s really a blast from the past for me. I hope you enjoy it as you open this time capsule to 1984 …

Fall 1984 Computer News and Views

TID.BITS 

by Chris Van Valkenburg (now Chris Guld)

I don’t know about you but I’ve had some real computing fun this last month. I have found an on-line special interest group that I can’t wait to log on to each week. It’s called Whole Earth Catalog and it’s on CompuServe

ONLINE FEVER 

If you’re scratching your head over what you just read you probably don’t have a personal computer with a modem. What I am talking about is hooking up a computer to the telephone using a device called a modem and letting your computer call a distant, BIG computer which has all sorts of information stored in it. Using a computer and a modem you can call Dow Jones Information Service and access an electronic version of the Wall Street Journal or ask for current stock quotes; or you can call CompuServe and access the Official Airline Guide for rates and schedules or look up information in an electronic encyclopedia. These services are called various things – Databases, Databanks, Videotex, & Information Utilities. A local example is Viewtron, however, Viewtron cannot be accessed with personal computer yet. You need their special terminal called Sceptre. CompuServe also sponsors a variety of electronic bulletin boards where people who all share a common interest can post messages, leave information about topics of interest or chat with each other through their computers. Whole Earth Catalog is a printed publication which recently expanded its coverage to computer software topics in a magazine called Whole Earth Software Review. I subscribe to WESR and it is by far and away my favorite computer publication, so when I learned that they operated a bulletin board on CompuServe, I jumped right “online.”

When I log on to CompuServe (you have to be a subscriber to do this) I go directly to the WEC (Whole Earth Catalog) bulletin board by typing “GO WEC.” A message appears on the screen welcoming me (by name) to the WEC sig. SIG stands for Special Interest Group. I then ask for the latest messages on the bulletin board to be displayed on my screen so I can read them: someone in Seattle is telling us about a radio station that broadcasts free software!(??), the editor of WESR asks for comments from users of a new program because he is writing a review on it in the next issue, some- one else asks if anyone out there knows how to get rid of the glitches in his communications program and the next message is an answer! I was then a “little birdie” listening in to someone else’s conversation as an online discussion ensued between the person with the questions and the person with the answers. And I learned a lot too! 

Pretty soon I saw a question that I had an answer to…so I left my first message -electronically- to someone I don’t even know! I don’t even know what part of the country he was from. The next time I logged on, I was greeted with a note that said “you have 2 messages waiting”! I felt the thrill of a kid who has been given a surprise party. In case you can’t tell, I’m hooked. Excuse me while I go log on… 

What is a group chat app? and which one is best?

Do any of you remember phone trees? That’s when you had a group of people who shared a need to communicate. A few of those people volunteered to make phone calls and the people they called would then call others. This worked ok if there was just one message that needed to get out to everyone, but if one of the call recipients then had some information to give back it becomes a mess quickly.

Today we have apps that allow groups of people to communicate with each other – instantly – like you are all in the same room at the same time. Group chat apps are oh-so-useful for communicating with multiple people at the same time. You can plan events, brainstorm ideas, or just keep up with what everyone is up to. You can also share photos, videos, and files with everyone in the group chat.

The problem is, we have so many apps to choose from:

  • iMessage – the texting app that comes on every iPhone
    Pro: easy and every iPhone already has it
    Con: can’t include non-iOS users in the group chat
  • WhatsApp – must download the app, but lots of people already have it. People are identified just by their phone number, no account necessary.
  • Google Chat/Spaces – must have a Google account, but that’s all. Great features, but its relatively new and not a lot of people use it yet.
  • Facebook messenger – must have a facebook account, lots of good features
  • GroupMe – from Microsoft
  • Signal – very secure, can set messages to disappear after specified time.
  • More???

We’d like to hear from you if you use any of these apps, which one is your primary group chatting app and why?

How to trim your videos on your phone

You don’t want to miss a second of your granddaughter’s graduation ceremony, so you start the video camera rolling as she’s walking up to the stage. Now you wish you hadn’t done that! Nobody wants to watch the 3 minutes of her walking, they just want to see her step onto the stage and get her diploma.

No problem, if you took the video with your phone, you can use Google Photos, or even the Photo Gallery app that came with your phone, to trim the beginning or end of your video.

  1. Google Photos App: View the video, tap the Edit button and you will see a white vertical bar on either end of the video, drag them to your desired begin and end point, then tap Save Copy. If you’re using an Android device, you can also “stabilize” by tapping the button before Saving Copy.
  2. Samsung Gallery: View the video, tap the pencil Edit button, then the scissors icon at bottom and you should see the frames of your video with white bars at the beginning and end. Drag those bars to your desired beginning and end points then Save at the top. Notice the little clock icon where you can tap and and change the speed of the video to Slow or Fast.
  3. Apple iOS Photos: View the video, tap the word Edit, drag the beginning and ending markers to your desired positions. These markers are not white lines like the others, it’s the arrows on either end, when you move them you’ll see a yellow border. Then tap Done and Save or Save as new clip.

What if you want to cut out the middle?

Cutting out the middle is not just a trim and it can’t be done with the simple photo app edit tool, but there is a way with Google Photos using the MovieMaker tool. Usually you use the MovieMaker tool to combine several photos and video clips into one movie complete with music. But, you can also use it just to combine 2 parts of the one video to create a new clip. Let’s say you have a 3 minute video and you want to cut out the middle minute, here’s what you do:

  • Using the Google Photos App on a mobile device
  • Select the 3 minute video, tap the +Add To and choose Movie
  • Notice how a piece of that video has been placed on the first video segment – it has automatically trimmed it to a tiny piece. Tap the 3-dots to the right and choose “Show entire video” You now have the full 3 minutes.
  • Tap the 3-dot menu and choose Duplicate
  • You now have two segments with the same 3 minute video. In the first segment, drag the white markes to highlight the first minute. In the second one drag the white markers to hilight the last minute.
  • When you save this movie it will consist of the 1st and last minute – leaving out the middle.

What’s the difference between a video and a movie?

  • Video = video footage you took with a camera
  • Movie = a file that is created from a combination of videos, photos, and music

Now, go take more videos!

To learn more about making movies, see these videos:

Show257: Hodgepodge of Tech Tips for Everyone

  • 0:00 Begin
  • 2:15 Editing with Google Photos
  • 6:11 Hello and Intro
  • 10:21 List of tips for the day
  • 11:53 How to leave a review on Google Maps
  • 20:10 Android navigation bar – buttons or swipes?
  • 22:18 ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard
  • 31:39 Google Translate
  • 35:00 Google Lens to identify contents of a photo in Google Photos
  • 40:48 Solitaire on any device without an app – just for fun
  • 45:31 Google Photos magic eraser
  • 51:43 Review Questions

Show notes for Premium members will be below.

For Members Only
Smartphones 101

Show256: Smartphone Basics 1 – Know your device

  • 0:00 Begin
  • 1:54 Tip on rotating phone’s screen (Tip030)
  • 5:56 Hello and Introduction
  • 11:20 Smartphone Basics 1 – Android or iOS?
  • 14:06 How to find the model of your phone
  • 16:41 Where to find your user manual (Tip043)
  • 21:48 Find your account (Tip052)
  • 26:28 Find a lost phone (Tip001)
  • 33:49 Organize Apps into Folders (Tip028)
  • 39:10 Stop the Ringing (Tip010)
  • 41:06 Force Quit misbehaving Apps (Tip053)
  • 48:13 Copy and Paste (Tip046)
  • 50:27 Don’t go to sleep so fast (Tip040)
  • 52:53 Turn Flashlight On/Off (Tip035)
  • 54:29 What are those Tip numbers?
  • 57:29 Review Questions

Detailed show notes for Premium members below:

For Members Only

May 2023 Google Photos Live Q&A

  • 0:00 Begin and Hello
  • 5:10 Saving photos from email attachments to Google Photos
  • 10:05 How to move images from Google Photos to your computer
  • 17:35 Upload photos directly to an album in Google Photos
  • 21:02 How to know what albums an image is in
  • 24:19 Copying photos from Google Drive to Google Photos
  • 26:54 Do you get more than just Magic Eraser by subscribing to Google One?
  • 30:09 How to see Google Photos on my computer
  • 32:10 Where are saved creations?
  • 36:26 Do my phone’s filenames stay when uploaded to Google Photos
  • 37:27 If I share a photo within Google Photos where does it show up?
  • 39:53 What is 3-line icon in lower left of photo thumbnail?
  • 41:06 Why did I lose all my photos when I got a new phone?
  • 42:57 How do I copy all photos from one Google account to another?
  • 44:22 Does Google create duplicates? and how to delete them.
  • 50:24 How to change the date of scanned photos
  • 53:25 Magic Eraser
  • 58:22 Adding text to photo
  • 59:50 Moviemaker on Chromebook
  • 1:01:20 How to find or sort albums

May 5 2023 DBCC: HodgePodge of Tech Tips

Thank you Barry for inviting us back to speak to your group again. You suggested we just give a HodgePodge of Tech Tips, so that’s what we’re doing. Notice that we have a new feature on the website called “NeverEnding List of Tips.” We’ll be using that during the presentation. Below is the YouTube recording of the meeting and below that is the slide deck.

Private link for Geeks to edit