What has been going on?

It has been some time since I have reported. I am truly sorry, but much has been going on: here is a short update.

Note: there will be no DIY workshop between the 7th and the 21st of June. Sorry!

 

Association help

Ham and Petersham Association

They got in contact with me because they needed a quick help to send an email to their members. My name came up because of the help I will provide to the Neighbourhood forum. The problem they had was that the list of contact was written in a spreadsheet format and there is no easy way to import all those contacts to an email clients.

I learnt several things with this:

a) Email clients normally like the contacts in csv or vcard format. Now I thought csv (coma separated values) would suffice. So took the spread sheet program and opened it up with libreoffice calc (the spread sheet program) and saved is as *.csv. The problem with this is that the email client did not know what column was the email what column was the mail and what column was the address. It was of no use!

b) Thunderbird is an awesome email client. Thunderbird has incorporated a smart address book! you just select import... chose your csv file and then it will show you the title of your columns and ask it to match it up with given fields and costume fields. It is better to stick to the normal fields: that way the contact card export is easy. Minor note: remember to make the first line of the csv file the name of the columns.

 

Supporting Wildlife

You may have noticed that I have added a web page on the left. Here we will leave a special area that John Hatto our enviormental expert will continue to populate

 

Meeting minutes

I have uploaded all the meeting minutes to the web page. This meant that I had to convert all the files from a writting document format to a pdf format so that everybody can read easy and not edit. We had loads to convert and the slow way to convert files would be to open each one and then select to export it as a pdf document. this takes for ever. So you do is install the "unoconv" program*, move all your files that you want to convert into a folder. And type the following command in the folder.

$ unoconv --f pdf *.doc

In less than 10 seconds I had converted all the documents.

The slow and tedious part was to upload them all. I could have bundled it all in a zip file but it is not very user friendly. I took care to try to upload them in cronological order. so if you want to find a file it will be easy if you click on the date heading.

Now even if you are not a member you are aware of what we are upto.

 

one two one

Web page

We found out how to create a forum in a evoice website! Stay tuned for sponsored links to a beetle website!

Web browsing

We had a quick chat on how to use the web browser to adjust the size of the letters to be able to read better what was said.

There was an error with a web email client that was not working. This had to do with not having an up to date web browser: this is very dangerous! I would recomend to install Firefox. But be careful and make sure you have the official version! Also make sure you check that you download the proper english UK version.

Twitter

We discussed how to get on twitter! Stay tuned for tweets during the Neghbourhood forum and the Ham Fair! The twitter account will automatically link to the Facebook page so you can follow us there!

Slow computers

we found out how to speed up the time to get your computer to a usable state: mainly you need to remove start up programs that you really do not need. By removing these programs that run when you do not need them you also make your computer quicker. Also we learnt about the importance of defragmenting your drive if you are a windows user. OK, this is one of those places where Mac and gnu/Linux users can look smug because those problems are not as important.

HUG computer

I had a moment of panic when the computer did not start up! it would not load any operating system and I was unable to do a memtest. The latter gave me the clue as to what went wrong. I opened up the back of the laptop where the RAM memory is kept I carfully pushed it in a bit more. And voilá! it booted!

I updated the operating system of the HUG computer to trisquel 6.0. It looks really lovely. Take a look at the destop look!

A screencapture of Trisquel 6.0 Desktop

 

 

 

Maintaince of this web page

You probably did not notice but I fixed some issues going wrong in the background. For example broken links. This website is run via a content management system (CMS) this means that it helps and does a lot of the hard work for you. In this case it makes a report of the web pages that have links that do not go anyware (broken links). I went through all the report and finally have 0 broken links, yay!

 

 

 

Sorry there is probably more stuff I have done but today's time is up. See you next time!

 

 *Edit 2013-0824: the unoconv command to work with *.doc documents it needs libreoffice writer intsalled (it uses one of sub packages).