To everyone who receives their SMEE Journal by post…
The reason you have not yet received the June issue is due to a problem the printer had with the supply of the special paper used for the cover. This has now been resolved and they have been sent out, so by the time you read this, you may have received it, but if not, at least you now know why not!
Alan Wragg, Membership Secretary.
The latest copy of The Journal (June 2022) is now available online. You can see a list of all available online copies of The Journal here.
The SMEE competition rules have recently been updated and the latest version can be found here.
Thanks to the sterling work of Mike Tilby and Chris Hammerton, we have now completed the process of making stored copies of The Journal searchable. This means that if you download them as PDF files, you can use your PDF viewer (Adobe Acrobat Reader for most people although other readers are available!) to search for specific words or phrases.
Chris is also looking at possible ways to add an index to the set of online Journals to make them even more useful.
Subject to any new coronavirus restrictions in 2022, Society General Meetings, Rummage Sales and other meetings will be at Marshall House. Where possible we will also live stream the meeting online via Zoom, allowing members the choice to attend in person or to participate online. For security reasons, Zoom links are not online but will be sent via e-mail.
The Society’s Training Programme for newcomers to the hobby will resume this year, with the Basic Training course starting in February. Details are on the training pages.
The workshops are now open, subject to Covid restrictions. Online meetings of the Digital Group and Engine Builders’ Groups are also continuing as normal.
Following a period of restrictions. the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers (SMEE) is planning to run its popular training courses for newcomers to model engineering, in 2022, starting in February. See our training page for more details.
This web site has now been moved to a new server platform, which we hope will fix a number of the long-running problems that we have been experiencing. In particular, you should now be able to get notifications for new forum postings, and the password change mechanism should be working again. I am optimistic that the other changes will be invisible to you – it should just work! However, this will give us the opportunity to introduce some new features.
It is possible that a few things have been broken during the transition, so if you see anything odd, or you find something that does not seem to be working, please contact me so that I can investigate.
Many thanks,
Brian
Thanks to the good offices of Mike Tilby, the online collection of back issues of The Journal now goes back to 1976, and right up to the latest version hot off the press (April 2021). Many thanks to Mike for his work in scanning back copies which are now easily available to all of us via the web site.
The index to the list of available issues of The Journal is available HERE.
I have had reports from several members that they have received emails which mention “SMEE” in the Subject: line, usually with mention of a general meeting presentation topic or similar. However, the “Sender” address is unknown to the recipient, and the addresses that I have seen have nothing to do with SMEE members.
I cannot see any obvious connection between these emails and the SMEE website, and the most likely explanation is that a SMEE member, or possibly a non-SMEE member who has a number of SMEE members in their email contact list, has had their email hacked and a copy of their contact list taken. How or when is impossible to tell. Scammers will then use these email addresses to send emails which either have malicious content, or which have pointers to web sites containing malicious code and encourage the reader to click on the link.
The best advice for any email that you receive from an unknown source is to regard it as suspicious unless proved otherwise. In particular, do not click on any attachments in the email or on any links to other web sites unless you are confident that you know the real sender of the email. You can also report suspicious emails to the National Cyber Security Centre; more information on how to spot and deal with suspicious emails is available from their web site here.
Brian Neale
SMEE Webmaster