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#166
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Simple backup option non-techy person Change Subjec Slightly
Mike Easter wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote: You can even use it to make phone calls.Â* :-) That is correct; wifi googlevoice. FTR, Given this is an international newsgroup, GV is only available in the US (& Canada?) And googlevoice has more features than many cellphone providers offer. |
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#167
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Simple backup option non-techy person
Mike Easter wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote: Mike Easter wrote: You are a more experienced administrator than I. Maybe but there are a lot of help info out there. And with Linux if there is something special you want your system to do there is someone out there too and you can script something. You 'administratively' planned and configured their usage.Â* The only opportunity I had to administratively plan someone's usage was for the guy who visited and who I provided a linux computer to and who did fine here. "'administratively' planned and configured their usage"? Not sure what you mean there. This: Once setup, often setup with auto-updates, and for the dementia-afflicted individuals their own non-admin profiles allowed trouble free computing. Also rather that having to painstakingly walk thought: "see this, go to the upper-right thingy, now click..., then click..." I can just send them a cut-n-paste command string to fix it. Also, I assume that you also initially configure your parents rig and can also look in remotely. I used to use TeamViewer but I helped to many friends and they cut me off. It doesn't take too many... Most times it is not needed. For many I only get a call one every couple of years! Most times when a LTS release upgrade comes and many have done it all by themselves without assistance. Looking at the number of issues popup here on MS-6-month-terror-day. Well it was my stepfather that had the cognitive issues when he was alive. First thing is always make separate profiles for each family user... Only make administrator for users that should be administrator. You can give selected sudo access to specific services or applications as needed without making a user full administrator (much easier in Linux IMHO). For his profile I had to button down some things to keep him from accidentally changing his launcher and panels which would confuse him. It was too hard do do. But I agree that a command to get something done is much much more efficient than a description of how to do it graphically. Yes I have has long and labored calls, what are you seeing, do you see... A cut and paste line is almost foo proof. When we are supporting or being supported in newsgroups, I think the ideal solutions would be expressed in both command and graphical ways, which graphical would of course be more wordy and complex. Also is so variable! Even in just Windows 10 settings UI keeps changing from patch to patch. Your IKEA-style picture tutorial may be good today and not tomorrow. Just a note, for a close friend that is remote you can setup easily a SSH strategy. 1) install ssh and setup router for forwarding 2) easy small shell script enable and disable ssh server 3) handy on off shortcuts of GUI menu 4) easy shell script to show external IP or shortcut to whatismyip.com 5) setup to public key and disable password login for ssh (recommend) Then all you have to do is when the call have them enable ssh, tell you their IP and you can shell in and fix what need to be fixed. Use of public key and disabling ssh server is added security... -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#168
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 5/4/20 10:29 AM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: What your your preferred distro be for non-techies and seniors? Personally I liked the much maligned Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Contrary to all the bad press after the initial bugs were refined out it was a very intuitive and clever modern interface that novices had no trouble navigating, unlike MS's attempt with metro. I guess it was because it is very similar to a phone interface. I was really hoping for the Ubuntu phone to fly and escape Google and Android. However, Canonical has dump it and is using the GNOME3 shell. Not bad, but has some really annoying things. Like they broke the desktop as being a desktop. You cannot drag or paste files or shortcuts temporarily to the desktop breaking nearly 40 years of convention.(Someone on the GNOME team must be one of those anal retentive that has nary a piece of paper or stapler on their desk.) Anyway that may confound exWindows users and normal folks workflow. I mean no one is advocating Windows 95 desktops with the Where's-Waldo icon packed desktops of hell! You know what I am talking about... But there are many other desktops environments you can use which is the beauty of Linux over Windows or Mac. I'm going to see if the community project that picked up Unity have their act together for 20.04, but many folks like Ubuntu Mate or Mint which have a Windows-like DE out of the box. The Xubuntu and Lubuntu are more sparse Windows 95 style DE that are a bit too clumsy and reminds me too much of my 90-00 Linux desktops. Too retro for my taste. There's Zorin, Elementary, System76's Pop!_OS, and Manjaro which is not Debian but Arch based. I prefer Debian. I used to used Redhat and Mandrake, but after trying Ubuntu when it came out became a Debian fan and much preferred their system configuration files layouts. And Canonical (Ubuntu) has an extensive documention and helpful community forums. Have you ever tried to get a "relevant" answer on a Windows forum? Since almost all distros now come with LiveSession setups it is so easy to download a iso, setup on a thumbdrive, plug into a computer and boot. You can test it out without any harm. You can see if all your hardware works out-of-the-box (and you will be surprised how it almost always does), And you can test if you, or the senior in question, likes it and finds it usable. If not try another distro... How large of a thumb drive do you generally need? This presumes the hardware you want to test it on allows booting from a thumb drive. What does it take to setup a thumb drive. That's not something I've ever needed to do. Has anyone ever looked at the systems designed for seniors that are based on Linux? -- Ken MacOS 10.14.6 Firefox 70.0.1 Thunderbird 60.9 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#169
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Simple backup option non-techy person
Ken Springer wrote:
Mike Easter wrote: If the fonts are too small, adjust the font size in whichever different places you want them bigger. You can't do this to the text in ribbons.Â* :-( Is a ribbon what some call tooltips? Or is that some kind of MS Word thing? Oh, no, it isn't a tooltip; I found it in the wp. IIRC, you can't do this to the menus, either. Menu yes. I do like the Night Light setting, though.Â* The same feature is called Night Shift on the Mac.Â* Don't know if it's in any of the Linux distros. I see a night color control in the notification area in a KDE over there but I don't know what it is. I've also seen night 'brightness' control somewhere. There's a curiously named default application in Mint and some other distros that is very useful.Â* Qt (now 5) is a toolkit that is used for KDE or LXQt, but not the GTK (now 3) based desktops such as gnome, cinnamon, mate, xfce, etc.Â* However, in those gtk/s there is an app named Qt5 settings, which is actually 'made for' gtk desktop tweaking, not Qt (place an interrobang here).Â* If you are tweaking a mint such as cinnamon or xfce or mate, take a look at it. Is it easily accessible and understandable for the normal computer user? It is installed by default and in the typical repository in such as Mint. I don't know about its ease of usage because I've never used it personally; I just hear what others say. As kudos. I might be able to tell you more of my own eyeball stories than you have or even would want to hear :-) Cataract surgery in both eyes.Â* Wet macular degeneration in the right eye.Â* Stopped it with the first treatment in 2013.Â* Dry macular degeneration in both eyes, but stable for a long time.Â* Really makes typing a pain.Â* Astigmatism too.Â* Fortunately, better off than one reader of this newsgroup. Errk. You 'win' on the badness of your condition, but I've had more extensive surgery for less 'severe' (potentially bad) macular abnormality. I had a so-called 'retinal wrinkle' or pucker, so they remove the vitreous so they can 'work on it', peel off the epiretinal membrane and then replace the missing vitreous w/ clear saline. But, it didn't really improve the vision in that eye, which doesn't correct w/ lens. But I would rather not have any macular degeneration. This problem is in the macula all right, but it doesn't really get any worse. Since I can't really read much w/ my R eye (which is the one which had cataract surgery first) I don't want to take the small risk of cataract surgery on my L eye because if something went south on that low risk procedure I would be very unhappy w/ my vision if I had to depend on my R eye. That would definitely interfere w/ a lot of reading, computer use, and such as crossword puzzles. "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash Â*Â*Â*Â* and it's gone!" Somehow that reminded me of a 'poem' by Billy Collins, "Picnic, Lightning". Collins was poet laureate sometime. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ns/poems/11315 -- Mike Easter |
#170
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 2020-05-04 3:17 p.m., Ken Springer wrote:
On 5/4/20 10:29 AM, Jonathan N. Little wrote: Ken Springer wrote: What your your preferred distro be for non-techies and seniors? Personally I liked the much maligned Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Contrary to all the bad press after the initial bugs were refined out it was a very intuitive and clever modern interface that novices had no trouble navigating, unlike MS's attempt with metro. I guess it was because it is very similar to a phone interface. I was really hoping for the Ubuntu phone to fly and escape Google and Android. However, Canonical has dump it and is using the GNOME3 shell. Not bad, but has some really annoying things. Like they broke the desktop as being a desktop. You cannot drag or paste files or shortcuts temporarily to the desktop breaking nearly 40 years of convention.(Someone on the GNOME team must be one of those anal retentive that has nary a piece of paper or stapler on their desk.) Anyway that may confound exWindows users and normal folks workflow. I mean no one is advocating Windows 95 desktops with the Where's-Waldo icon packed desktops of hell! You know what I am talking about... But there are many other desktops environments you can use which is the beauty of Linux over Windows or Mac. I'm going to see if the community project that picked up Unity have their act together for 20.04, but many folks like Ubuntu Mate or Mint which have a Windows-like DE out of the box. The Xubuntu and Lubuntu are more sparse Windows 95 style DE that are a bit too clumsy and reminds me too much of my 90-00 Linux desktops. Too retro for my taste. There's Zorin, Elementary, System76's Pop!_OS, and Manjaro which is not Debian but Arch based. I prefer Debian. I used to used Redhat and Mandrake, but after trying Ubuntu when it came out became a Debian fan and much preferred their system configuration files layouts. And Canonical (Ubuntu) has an extensive documention and helpful community forums. Have you ever tried to get a "relevant" answer on a Windows forum? Since almost all distros now come with LiveSession setups it is so easy to download a iso, setup on a thumbdrive, plug into a computer and boot. You can test it out without any harm. You can see if all your hardware works out-of-the-box (and you will be surprised how it almost always does), And you can test if you, or the senior in question, likes it and finds it usable. If not try another distro... How large of a thumb drive do you generally need?Â* This presumes the hardware you want to test it on allows booting from a thumb drive. What does it take to setup a thumb drive.Â* That's not something I've ever needed to do. Has anyone ever looked at the systems designed for seniors that are based on Linux? I use 8 GB drives as they are cheap and pletifull, I have about 10 that I use for testing Linux distros. First of all find and download the distro you want to try, Distrowatch has then all.This will give you an ISO file. Next, Find and download "RUFUS" this is the little program that will install the ISO on your USB stick and make it bootable. Then bring up your boot menu with the proper Fkey and boot the USB stick. That should get you going in a Live Linux OS. That is a simplified scenario and others will pitch in for more advice. Rene |
#171
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Simple backup option non-techy person
Ken Springer wrote:
On 5/4/20 10:29 AM, Jonathan N. Little wrote: Ken Springer wrote: What your your preferred distro be for non-techies and seniors? Personally I liked the much maligned Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Contrary to all the bad press after the initial bugs were refined out it was a very intuitive and clever modern interface that novices had no trouble navigating, unlike MS's attempt with metro. I guess it was because it is very similar to a phone interface. I was really hoping for the Ubuntu phone to fly and escape Google and Android. However, Canonical has dump it and is using the GNOME3 shell. Not bad, but has some really annoying things. Like they broke the desktop as being a desktop. You cannot drag or paste files or shortcuts temporarily to the desktop breaking nearly 40 years of convention.(Someone on the GNOME team must be one of those anal retentive that has nary a piece of paper or stapler on their desk.) Anyway that may confound exWindows users and normal folks workflow. I mean no one is advocating Windows 95 desktops with the Where's-Waldo icon packed desktops of hell! You know what I am talking about... But there are many other desktops environments you can use which is the beauty of Linux over Windows or Mac. I'm going to see if the community project that picked up Unity have their act together for 20.04, but many folks like Ubuntu Mate or Mint which have a Windows-like DE out of the box. The Xubuntu and Lubuntu are more sparse Windows 95 style DE that are a bit too clumsy and reminds me too much of my 90-00 Linux desktops. Too retro for my taste. There's Zorin, Elementary, System76's Pop!_OS, and Manjaro which is not Debian but Arch based. I prefer Debian. I used to used Redhat and Mandrake, but after trying Ubuntu when it came out became a Debian fan and much preferred their system configuration files layouts. And Canonical (Ubuntu) has an extensive documention and helpful community forums. Have you ever tried to get a "relevant" answer on a Windows forum? Since almost all distros now come with LiveSession setups it is so easy to download a iso, setup on a thumbdrive, plug into a computer and boot. You can test it out without any harm. You can see if all your hardware works out-of-the-box (and you will be surprised how it almost always does), And you can test if you, or the senior in question, likes it and finds it usable. If not try another distro... How large of a thumb drive do you generally need?Â* This presumes the hardware you want to test it on allows booting from a thumb drive. What does it take to setup a thumb drive.Â* That's not something I've ever needed to do. The latest Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 is 2,715,254,784 bytes so a 4GB thumbdrive is more than enough. I think 16GB drives are in every WalMart. They get formatted to FAT32 so 32GB recommended. -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#172
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Simple backup option non-techy person
Ken Springer wrote:
What does it take to setup a thumb drive.Â* That's not something I've ever needed to do. Oh and the answer to this one, in Windows the easiest is: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#173
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Simple backup option non-techy person
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
That is a simplified scenario and others will pitch in for more advice. For example if you have an available 4GB or greater thumbdrive. 1) Download this utility https://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Universal-USB-Installer/Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.9.0.exe 2) Download a Linux ISO, here is the new Ubuntu https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/ubuntu-iso/20.04/ubuntu-20.04-desktop-amd64.iso 3) Put the thumbdrive in (Note this will delete any on drive) 4) start the Universal-USB-Installer 5) Select Ubuntu and point to ISO you downloaded. 6) Done, just use drive when booting on text system... -- Take care, Jonathan ------------------- LITTLE WORKS STUDIO http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com |
#174
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 5/4/20 3:11 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-05-04 3:17 p.m., Ken Springer wrote: On 5/4/20 10:29 AM, Jonathan N. Little wrote: Ken Springer wrote: What your your preferred distro be for non-techies and seniors? Personally I liked the much maligned Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Contrary to all the bad press after the initial bugs were refined out it was a very intuitive and clever modern interface that novices had no trouble navigating, unlike MS's attempt with metro. I guess it was because it is very similar to a phone interface. I was really hoping for the Ubuntu phone to fly and escape Google and Android. However, Canonical has dump it and is using the GNOME3 shell. Not bad, but has some really annoying things. Like they broke the desktop as being a desktop. You cannot drag or paste files or shortcuts temporarily to the desktop breaking nearly 40 years of convention.(Someone on the GNOME team must be one of those anal retentive that has nary a piece of paper or stapler on their desk.) Anyway that may confound exWindows users and normal folks workflow. I mean no one is advocating Windows 95 desktops with the Where's-Waldo icon packed desktops of hell! You know what I am talking about... But there are many other desktops environments you can use which is the beauty of Linux over Windows or Mac. I'm going to see if the community project that picked up Unity have their act together for 20.04, but many folks like Ubuntu Mate or Mint which have a Windows-like DE out of the box. The Xubuntu and Lubuntu are more sparse Windows 95 style DE that are a bit too clumsy and reminds me too much of my 90-00 Linux desktops. Too retro for my taste. There's Zorin, Elementary, System76's Pop!_OS, and Manjaro which is not Debian but Arch based. I prefer Debian. I used to used Redhat and Mandrake, but after trying Ubuntu when it came out became a Debian fan and much preferred their system configuration files layouts. And Canonical (Ubuntu) has an extensive documention and helpful community forums. Have you ever tried to get a "relevant" answer on a Windows forum? Since almost all distros now come with LiveSession setups it is so easy to download a iso, setup on a thumbdrive, plug into a computer and boot. You can test it out without any harm. You can see if all your hardware works out-of-the-box (and you will be surprised how it almost always does), And you can test if you, or the senior in question, likes it and finds it usable. If not try another distro... How large of a thumb drive do you generally need?Â* This presumes the hardware you want to test it on allows booting from a thumb drive. What does it take to setup a thumb drive.Â* That's not something I've ever needed to do. Has anyone ever looked at the systems designed for seniors that are based on Linux? I use 8 GB drives as they are cheap and pletifull, I have about 10 that I use for testing Linux distros. First of all find and download the distro you want to try, Distrowatch has then all.This will give you an ISO file. Next, Find and download "RUFUS" this is the little program that will install the ISO on your USB stick and make it bootable. Thanks, Rene. This looks really easy. A lot simpler than what I looked at a couple years ago, which was above my pay grade. Then bring up your boot menu with the proper Fkey and boot the USB stick. I'll try one on my "bestest" Windows machine, and if it works, I'll try it on the machine I want to use as a test bed. That should get you going in a Live Linux OS. That is a simplified scenario and others will pitch in for more advice. Rene -- Ken MacOS 10.14.6 Firefox 70.0.1 Thunderbird 60.9 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#175
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 5/4/20 5:00 PM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote: That is a simplified scenario and others will pitch in for more advice. For example if you have an available 4GB or greater thumbdrive. 1) Download this utility https://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Universal-USB-Installer/Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.9.0.exe Thanks, Johnathan. Looks like I have 2 prorgams to try. :-) 2) Download a Linux ISO, here is the new Ubuntu https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/ubuntu-iso/20.04/ubuntu-20.04-desktop-amd64.iso I'll probably go to the Ubuntu site, and any other distro site, and download the iso there that appears to me to be the simplest desktop environment I think a newbie would have the least problem learning. 3) Put the thumbdrive in (Note this will delete any on drive) 4) start the Universal-USB-Installer 5) Select Ubuntu and point to ISO you downloaded. 6) Done, just use drive when booting on text system... -- Ken MacOS 10.14.6 Firefox 70.0.1 Thunderbird 60.9 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#176
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 5/4/20 3:16 PM, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: On 5/4/20 10:29 AM, Jonathan N. Little wrote: Ken Springer wrote: What your your preferred distro be for non-techies and seniors? Personally I liked the much maligned Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Contrary to all the bad press after the initial bugs were refined out it was a very intuitive and clever modern interface that novices had no trouble navigating, unlike MS's attempt with metro. I guess it was because it is very similar to a phone interface. I was really hoping for the Ubuntu phone to fly and escape Google and Android. However, Canonical has dump it and is using the GNOME3 shell. Not bad, but has some really annoying things. Like they broke the desktop as being a desktop. You cannot drag or paste files or shortcuts temporarily to the desktop breaking nearly 40 years of convention.(Someone on the GNOME team must be one of those anal retentive that has nary a piece of paper or stapler on their desk.) Anyway that may confound exWindows users and normal folks workflow. I mean no one is advocating Windows 95 desktops with the Where's-Waldo icon packed desktops of hell! You know what I am talking about... But there are many other desktops environments you can use which is the beauty of Linux over Windows or Mac. I'm going to see if the community project that picked up Unity have their act together for 20.04, but many folks like Ubuntu Mate or Mint which have a Windows-like DE out of the box. The Xubuntu and Lubuntu are more sparse Windows 95 style DE that are a bit too clumsy and reminds me too much of my 90-00 Linux desktops. Too retro for my taste. There's Zorin, Elementary, System76's Pop!_OS, and Manjaro which is not Debian but Arch based. I prefer Debian. I used to used Redhat and Mandrake, but after trying Ubuntu when it came out became a Debian fan and much preferred their system configuration files layouts. And Canonical (Ubuntu) has an extensive documention and helpful community forums. Have you ever tried to get a "relevant" answer on a Windows forum? Since almost all distros now come with LiveSession setups it is so easy to download a iso, setup on a thumbdrive, plug into a computer and boot. You can test it out without any harm. You can see if all your hardware works out-of-the-box (and you will be surprised how it almost always does), And you can test if you, or the senior in question, likes it and finds it usable. If not try another distro... How large of a thumb drive do you generally need?Â* This presumes the hardware you want to test it on allows booting from a thumb drive. What does it take to setup a thumb drive.Â* That's not something I've ever needed to do. The latest Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 is 2,715,254,784 bytes so a 4GB thumbdrive is more than enough. I think 16GB drives are in every WalMart. They get formatted to FAT32 so 32GB recommended. I'm not a big thumb drive user, but I've got some empty thumb drives here, ranging from 4 to 16 GB, so I should be OK. -- Ken MacOS 10.14.6 Firefox 70.0.1 Thunderbird 60.9 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#177
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Simple backup option non-techy person
On 5/4/20 3:00 PM, Mike Easter wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: Mike Easter wrote: If the fonts are too small, adjust the font size in whichever different places you want them bigger. You can't do this to the text in ribbons.Â* :-( Is a ribbon what some call tooltips? Or is that some kind of MS Word thing? Oh, no, it isn't a tooltip; I found it in the wp. wp? IIRC, you can't do this to the menus, either. Menu yes. This appears to be program dependent. Menus change in my word processor, but not in WordPad. Ctrl +/- doesn't work in WordPad either. And for those that struggle with a modern word processor, I like to get them to start with WordPad. Then the user can "move up" to something more sophisticated. There does seem to be a dearth of word processors between WordPad and "top of the heap" for Windows. Much easier to find mid-range programs on the Mac. I do like the Night Light setting, though.Â* The same feature is called Night Shift on the Mac.Â* Don't know if it's in any of the Linux distros. I see a night color control in the notification area in a KDE over there but I don't know what it is. I've also seen night 'brightness' control somewhere. In general, how many things like this span across the different desktop environments? There's a curiously named default application in Mint and some other distros that is very useful.Â* Qt (now 5) is a toolkit that is used for KDE or LXQt, but not the GTK (now 3) based desktops such as gnome, cinnamon, mate, xfce, etc.Â* However, in those gtk/s there is an app named Qt5 settings, which is actually 'made for' gtk desktop tweaking, not Qt (place an interrobang here).Â* If you are tweaking a mint such as cinnamon or xfce or mate, take a look at it. Is it easily accessible and understandable for the normal computer user? It is installed by default and in the typical repository in such as Mint. I don't know about its ease of usage because I've never used it personally; I just hear what others say. As kudos. I'll have to try to remember to check this out. I might be able to tell you more of my own eyeball stories than you have or even would want to hear :-) Cataract surgery in both eyes.Â* Wet macular degeneration in the right eye.Â* Stopped it with the first treatment in 2013.Â* Dry macular degeneration in both eyes, but stable for a long time.Â* Really makes typing a pain.Â* Astigmatism too.Â* Fortunately, better off than one reader of this newsgroup. Errk. You 'win' on the badness of your condition, but I've had more extensive surgery for less 'severe' (potentially bad) macular abnormality. I had a so-called 'retinal wrinkle' or pucker, so they remove the vitreous so they can 'work on it', peel off the epiretinal membrane and then replace the missing vitreous w/ clear saline. It's not a "win" I enjoy. The macular degeneration causes the most problems. Vertical straight lines will have a "bump" somewhere, depending on where I'm focusing. And when reading text, letters are often missing. For example, let's say the next word in a sentence is "saved". As I read the sentence and get to the word, I see "sav" but no "ed". What I find interesting is, after I've read past "saved", if I go back and read again, my brain fills in the missing letters. But this problem now means I make so many more typos than I used to. :-( But, it didn't really improve the vision in that eye, which doesn't correct w/ lens. But I would rather not have any macular degeneration. This problem is in the macula all right, but it doesn't really get any worse. Since I can't really read much w/ my R eye (which is the one which had cataract surgery first) I don't want to take the small risk of cataract surgery on my L eye because if something went south on that low risk procedure I would be very unhappy w/ my vision if I had to depend on my R eye. That would definitely interfere w/ a lot of reading, computer use, and such as crossword puzzles. I avoided the cataract surgery until the doc commented it was getting awful hard to see the back of my eye. The macular degeneration was already there, so on that day I said "Let's do it." "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash Â*Â*Â*Â* and it's gone!" Somehow that reminded me of a 'poem' by Billy Collins, "Picnic, Lightning". Collins was poet laureate sometime. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...ns/poems/11315 Poetry... Something that has always eluded me. -- Ken MacOS 10.14.6 Firefox 70.0.1 Thunderbird 60.9 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#178
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Simple backup option non-techy person Change Subjec Slightly
On 04/05/2020 17:49, knuttle wrote:
On 5/4/2020 11:46 AM, Mike Easter wrote: The tracfone plan costs me about $50/y as I need virtually no usage, just service days.Â* The blu doesn't cost anything beyond its purchase and it is quite useful, as is the chromebook.Â* My numerous landline phones at home cost nothing because they are voip googlevoice. I understand you are a collector ;-) I Have a gusto Samsung phone for with I pay about $100,Â* When have tried to go to a smart phone it cost about $50 per month, My smartphone costs me £5 per month. You need to shop around. |
#179
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Simple backup option non-techy person Change Subjec Slightly
"Chris" wrote
| I Have a gusto Samsung phone for with I pay about $100, When have tried | to go to a smart phone it cost about $50 per month, | | My smartphone costs me £5 per month. You need to shop around. | There's nothing like that in the US. Several years ago I went around to each of the 4 major dealers to see about costs. The cheapest deal was the same for all: "$39.99". What was the real cost with trumped up fees, taxes, etc? They all claimed they didn't know. Well, what should I expect to see as the number on my bill? They all claimed they didn't know. A woman paying her bill at that moment in the AT&T store was nice enough to show me her bill. It was almost exactly twice, at $79. Most people seem to spend about $100 per month, though I haven't talked to anyone about it recently. It's possible there are better deals now, but the trend seems to be toward requiring everyone to buy maximum service, so I'd be surprised. I've had a Tracphone for several years. The last one was $20. I pay $20 every 3 months for minutes that roll over. Currently I have over 3,000 minutes. Like Mike, all I really need is a portable phone booth. And even that I don't need very often. It's nice because I can just turn it off when I don't need it. And it actually does turn off. So the charge lasts for months and it doesn't serve as a tracking collar. That also means no one can interrupt me any time of day. They can leave a message on my landline. I'm not NORAD. No one needs to reach me *now*. It also means that I get no texts and no one expects to reach me on that phone. Occasionally someone tries to establish a "phone relationship" with my cellphone, thinking they're not in my inside circle until they do, I suppose. I have to explain to them that I'll never get their message unless they tell me it's coming, and that I don't actually know the phone's # offhand. They back away slowly. "Is he messing with my head? Does he hate me? ****! It might actually be true! WHAT A WEIRDO!" The funny thing is that evangelical apocalyptians, for years, used to worry about "the mark of the beast". Is it a credit card number? Social security number? They worried about gov't IDs. Now they're too busy diddling their unique-IDed tracking collar to think about the Beast. Perhaps my most critical need of a cellphone is to deal with cellphone addicts. As a contractor I typically go to peoples' houses to do estimates. Once or twice per year I get a cellphone addict who's adamant that their doorbell doesn't work and insists that I call them when I arrive. They want me to call from their front door! Maybe that's the only way they know to be sure I'm real and not a hallucination. Sort of a Chauncey Gardener disorder. |
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Simple backup option non-techy person Change Subjec Slightly
In article , Mayayana
wrote: | I Have a gusto Samsung phone for with I pay about $100, When have tried | to go to a smart phone it cost about $50 per month, | | My smartphone costs me £5 per month. You need to shop around. | There's nothing like that in the US. yes there is. Several years ago I went around to each of the 4 major dealers that was a mistake. check out the mvnos instead. |
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