Monday, May 24, 2021

Computer Stuff


An exciting weekend in which I set up my external hard drive.

On a Mac this means buying a black plastic box the size of a good novel, fiddling through my barely finite collection of twiddly wires, and then blindly following the directions of Some Guy on the Internet.

The problem with getting advice from YouTube videos is that they're all for systems five or seven years old. Every two minutes the nice geek with the oddly untrained voice tells you to, for instance, "Click on Options" and you discover there is no Options key because they threw that out in the 2015 OS.

Once again, the world betrays you.

You prove inadequate to a task that is completed handily by 16-year-olds.
(Don't ask me about my cell phone.)

You lose.

So you go to Google to figure out where Mac has hidden the action you wish to undertake. And you

have to decide whether you want your GUID (whatever that is) to be a table or a map.

Half an hour later you close your eyes and pick at random
because the hell with it anyway.

This is like ordering in an Azerbaijani taverna far, far off the beaten path where nobody speaks any language with which you have a nodding acquaintance,
except less prone to moments of delightful surprise.

Or like when your car has an extra bobble on the PRSNL to put the stick in and you have no idea what it does but the car seems to run okay either way so you ignore it.

I now have an operating back up and a Time Machine
or I don't
and I am back to limping along with my severely crippled version of Word except for (probably) backup.

This is not exactly adulting, but I muddle along.

6 comments:

  1. You should probably remember to add the year when you search for the Youtube videos! That would get you the most updated version.

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    Replies
    1. Excellent suggestion. I didn't even know you COULD search by date in Youtube ...

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    2. Most tutorial Youtube videos would probably mention the date in the title. If not, you could press the "filters" button under the search option and use "upload date" or "sort by upload date" options to get the recent ones!

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  2. I just got a new phone, and spent a day trying to "activate" it. It was fine until I got to the point where it wanted the PIN of my old phone. I had no idea what that was, and every time I tried to go through the process to change it I ended up right where I started.
    The next day I went to the Verizon store and asked for help. The nice young man tapped a few keys in his machine and set my phone up for me. The problem, it seems, was that my old phone was so old that it had been set up before PINs were needed.
    Sometimes I think I must be past my sell-by date myself.

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    Replies
    1. The settings of my cell phone remain a work in progress.

      Fortunately, I'm happy to use it for making and receiving calls, with the occasional text message thrown in. My wants are few.

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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