Simple backup option non-techy person

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.

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

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!"

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

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

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

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

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

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!"

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!"

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!"

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!"

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.

"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.

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.