Month: February 2017

Presented by Ron Fugazzi on February 23, 2017

Attendees: 21

Demo Ebooks Anywhere Anytime

Ron shared very interesting and practical information about how to use electronic books (ebooks). First of all, there is virtually no reason one cannot have one or more books with them anytime, anywhere if they are carrying a smart phone, tablet or a dedicated e-book reader. They are light, small and extremely easy to read.

If someone does not currently read electronic books, they can get started by downloading the FREE Kindle app for any brand of smart phone. Create an account and purchase books from Amazon.

However, Ron says getting ebooks is very easy at the public library and these books are FREE. A critical factor to easily obtain a desired book is to obtain a library card from a library that has the largest selection of ebooks. Ron’s experience is with the San Francisco and Los Angeles libraries although the Contra Costa library system is local it does not have the same, large quantity of ebooks.

Please feel free to click the above link to see Ron’s presentation to gather valuable details to enhance your reading experiences.

Presented by Jeff Hensel  February 9, 2017

Attendees: 26

Talking to your device now works great with speaker notes

Jeff shared how voice recognition and the ability for our phones to understand our voices has dramatically improved in the past few years.

It is much more difficult to type on our phones and tablets versus our computer keyboards and that won’t change. However, the technology has evolved so much that we can confidently speak to our devices and those words can be correctly interpreted. This means we can speak text messages instead of typing them. We can speak emails instead of typing them. Jeff’s presentation shows how to use the “microphone” key to initiate speaking within the desired app.

In addition, iPhone has Siri, their digital assistant who you can speak to and have “her” perform desired tasks like creating and sending text messages, creating and sending emails or even answering those texts and emails. However, Siri can do much, much more. Click here for a comprehensive list of Siri commands.

Fortunately, Android phones can do the same things and have their own digital assistant called Google Now. Click here for an article on those Google Now commands and how to turn on Google Now.

And lastly, Jeff shared how Amazon Echo and Google Homedevices are used strictly with voice. See how these devices work and the common things they can do. Both do very much the same things but there are some unique and even funny things they can do like tell jokes, play trivia games, etc.