Hello All,
Here are my Notes from the SLO Bytes Photo Group Meeting of 06/12/2022
TOPIC: New Skills, New Thrills Again

Ralph Sutter opened the meeting with images of his recent landscaping project as well as shots from his orchard and vegetable garden.  Ralph added a video of rocks sliding downward as he scooped them into a wheelbarrow.

Kaye Raul offered weather-worn barns, scenes from Oceano and Port San Luis before demonstrating the use of the level horizon tool in Adobe Lightroom

Alan Raul showed images shot with his Sony A7iv with a 35mm F2.8 lens of the north end of Pismo Beach at low tide. He then showed images shot with his 24-70mm F4.0 lens of the sand dunes and the Pismo Beach Creek area. Images were modified with a variety of image editing software to get the desired effects he wanted to share.
Alan's photography gear is listed on DP Review  https://www.dpreview.com/members/9828863162/gearlist

Stanford Brown found fractured trees and scenes high above Las Vegas before retreating to Paso Robles where he added angles inside his house and local landscapes.

John Waller demonstrated the use of luminosity masks inside Adobe Lightroom.  This technique allowed him to enhance yellow flowers in a field of yellow while affecting the flowers but not the field behind.  John then applied the technique to trees in Morro Bay and the iconic rocks of Yosemite.

Connie Sutter looked at trees and the shadows that they cast.  She then shifted focus to a rock outcropping that she excavated as part of her landscaping project.

The session closed with Kaye’s positive review of several lesser known lenses for her Sony A7iv camera.  Alan called attention to the free web space offered by DP Review where he posted details of his camera gear and showed samples of his photos. 
See https://www.dpreview.com/members/9828863162/gearlist 
Ralph showed some of the camera resources that he posted to his web site at https://www.fullbean.com/camera/camera.html

Our next meeting will take place on 07/10/2022 beginning at 2:00 pm.  The topic is once again New Skills, New Thrills; Learn and share that knowledge.  A Zoom invitation will be sent shortly beforehand.
The meeting schedule for the remainder of 2022 is as follows
   August 14
   September 11
   October 09
   November 13
   December 11
All meetings begin at 2:00pm
See the Links Page, https://www.slobytes.org/digital/links.html for tutorials and other resources
Ralph Sutter

Hello All,

SLO Bytes is a member of APCUG; The Association of Personal Computer User Groups.  The latter organization presents regular free workshops via Zoom.  Afterwards, they often post on line the content of those presentations.  I will mirror some of that content on the SLO Bytes website at https://www.slobytes.org/apcug/workshops/workshops.html.  For more visible access, I have also added the tab, APCUG Workshops to the left hand menu of SLO Bytes opening page.

Ralph Sutter

Hello All,
Here are my notes from the SLO Bytes Photo Group meeting of 05/15/2022

TOPIC: New Skills, New Thrills Again

Ralph Sutter began the meeting demonstrating focus stacking with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021. This required purchasing the after market add-on, Elements+; https://elementsplus.net/. Sutter then showed a video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdrkURWyRsQ of the flight, crash and recovery of his DJI drone in conjunction with the autonomous flight software, Dronelink; https://www.dronelink.com/

Kaye Raul shared images taken with her new Sony A7 IV full frame camera; https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1667800-REG/sony_ilce_7m4_b_alpha_a7_iv_mirrorless.html. Her subjects included shots of Guadalupe, Main Street Beach and local strawberry fields.

Alan Raul showed images of Shell Beach including the construction project of a new seawall, staircase and sidewalk along the oceanfront. Later in the day (when it was cooler) using his Sony A7iv with a 35mm F2.8 lens; https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=sony%2035mm%20f%202.8&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&sts=ma he ventured into the dunes near the Pismo Beach Creek to capture images of the creek and dunes area.

Stanford Brown used his Vikeri Trail Cam; https://vikeri.tech/ to capture images of 4 footed nighttime visitors around his house. He then reminded the group of the capabilities of the free Microsoft Photos app; https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/microsoft-photos/9WZDNCRFJBH4?hl=en-us&gl=US. It allows image and video viewing, slideshows and simple video editing. program,

John Waller introduced log exposure photography in conjunction with density filters. The filters allowed him to take much longer exposures and capture details of dark scenes that otherwise wouldn't be visible.

Bob Styerwalt shared several closeups of roses growing in his back yard.

Our next meeting will take place on 06/12/2022 beginning at 2:00 pm.  The topic is once again New Skills, New Thrills; Learn and share that knowledge

Here is the meeting schedule for the remainder of 2022
   July 10
   August 14
   September 11
   October 09
   November 13
   December 11
See the Links page for tutorials and other resources

Ralph Sutter

Hello All,
This is how I update Zoom when running it from Ubuntu

To find out if you are running the latest version of Zoom, open that program and click on your face icon.  If you are told that an update is available, do not download it now.  At least for me, allowing Zoom to download the newest version and install it always fails.

Instead, I proceed as follows

First uninstall Zoom
From the Ubuntu Terminal, enter 
sudo apt remove zoom

Download Zoom from the Terminal typing
wget https://zoom.us/client/latest/zoom_amd64.deb
 
Go to the Downloads folder (or whatever folder to which you extracted Zoom) and enter the following command
sudo apt install ./zoom_amd64.deb
It may be necessary to restart the computer for Zoom to recognize the update
Check to see if you successfully updated as indicated at the beginning of this post

Ralph Sutter

Hello All,
For a long time, my Dell 8930 computer has had issues with sound quality.  Out of the box, the sound quality was distorted.  Rather than solve the issue, I simply installed an external USB sound card.  That solved the issue but eventually the external USB sound card failed.

Since I wasn't after studio-quality sound, I bought an inexpensive Logitech USB powered speaker pair.  That gave acceptable sound.
I later added a Blue Yeti USB microphone and paired it with a OneOdio Pro 50 headset.
The Yeti/OneOdio pair worked well.  I connected it to a USB hub and switched between it and the Logitech speakers without incident... at least for a while.

Lately, if I tried to switch between Logitech and Yeti/OneOdio, the latter didn't work.  Fiddling with Sound via Control Panel and Device Manager, I usually got everything working again.  Sometimes, the only sound source that appeared was the audio that I disabled long ago.

After much frustration, I learned from a Google Search, that I could access various sound settings directly and troubleshoot them if I simply right clicked the speaker icon found on the Windows 11 Task Bar at the far right.  Running the troubleshooter from that location fixed the issue that hadn't been solved when I drilled down at Control Panel or the Device Manager. 

Simpler is better.  For repairing sound issues, start by right clicking the Task Bar Speaker icon

Ralph Sutter

Hi Stanford,
It seems that your post didn’t contain any actual .3gp files just icon thumbnails.
To test my ability to open a .3gp file, I downloaded a sample at https://filesamples.com/samples/video/3gp/sample_640x360.3gp  (no audio)
and https://filesamples.com/samples/video/3gp/sample_960x400_ocean_with_audio.3gp (contains audio and video)

I was able to open them with Irfanview, VLC, Movies and TV, Windows Movie Player and Adobe Premiere Elements 2021. 

I suggest that you either try opening these on-line sample files or find other .3gp files.  If you can open them but not the files you copied from your phone, the copied files are the problem.

How did you get the .3gp files from your phone to your computer?

At Alan’s suggestion, I use Wi-Fi Photo Transfer; https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wifi-photo-transfer/id380326191
However, it is only available for Apple products.

I found the following listing for Android equivalents; https://www.coolmuster.com/android/transfer-files-from-android-to-pc-wifi.html

Ralph Sutter

Hello All,
This is a re-post of an announcement from SLO Bytes' parent organization, APCUG
Ralph Sutter

APRIL 2022
WEDNESDAY WORKSHOPS
9am PT, 10 am MT, 11 am CT, 12 pm ET
 
April 13, 2022
Cyberwarfare and cyber security in view of the war in Ukraine
and how we can protect our computers
Tom Sweet, North Texas PCUG
 
Windows 10/11 Security and Privacy
Bill James, Computer Club of Oklahoma City
 
Register for this workshop here -- https://forms.gle/RyF7RCbA65gaDd6v8
 
Cyberwarfare and cyber security in view of the war in Ukraine and how we can protect our computers. This presentation will seek to allay some fears, set the right size for some real risks, and reinforce past lessons to practice our good computing habits. Tom has followed the history of cyber aggressions through the Baltic and former CIS states beginning in the late 2000s, now primarily through the work of Cisco Talos. This period has seen the rise of strategic disinformation campaigns, criminal malware, and overt attack tools.
 
Windows 10/11 Security and Privacy. Windows 10 and 11 have many privacy, and security settings turned on by default. However, you can customize them to suit your specific needs. We will review these settings and show what Windows is doing by default, why you may not need anything other than Windows Defender, and the Privacy settings built into Windows 10 and 11.
 
April 20, 2022
Linux for Beginners – Everyday Activities, Part 2
John Kennedy, East-Central Ohio Technology Users Club
 
Register for this workshop here -- https://forms.gle/j3XBRwaa752ftLwHA
 
Last time, we looked at what kinds of Linux users' activities and programs are similar to what Windows users do. This time, join John as he goes down to the actual everyday tasks that users do on Linux computers and see if they aren't basically the same as what you do on Windows PCs, which makes for easy transitioning over to Linux. We'll spend time in the file management system, creating/saving/opening files, dealing with external drives, doing system checks, and other similar "everyday" tasks. In addition, there will be time during the open mic discussion to ask about any everyday tasks that might not have been covered. After having attended these two workshops, it's the goal that you'll feel confident that you can use the free and secure Linux operating system as your everyday operating system.
 
April 27, 2022
Taking Better Pictures
Bob Bowser and Ray Martinez
Senior Computer Users Group of Greater Kansas
 
Register for this workshop here - https://forms.gle/spVmxcMYVJcRojTRA
 
Not a deep dive, but Ray and Bob will wade in with Settings and Basic Functions for picture taking on both Apple and Android devices (phones and tablets).
 
 

 
 



 



   



   










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