<p>A caveat, I am well over 50.
H and I bought a new car today. We actually had to go through a tutorial to teach us how to use all of the features. These are features that I probably wont use because I wont remember how to use them. (I know, so why did we buy this car? The extra features came with the ones we wanted.) They are cool features, but I wont be able to remember to push this twice and then this or scroll down and hold this button a few seconds.
We bought a new refrigerator last month. It has a light to tell us when to change the water filter and when the temperature is low/high in the freezer, refrigerator or even certain bins in the refrigerator for goodness sake. There is a row of lights that I have no idea what means what.
I still have an old cell phone because Im not sure I can figure out a smart phone.
Never mind we have to remember numerous pins, a billion cell phone numbers or how to access a number on the phone book that is now on our phone.</p>
<p>Am I alone??? How do you deal with it without keeping a long list or file of pins and directions? Keeping control of what you need to know is becoming more work than the savings and conveniences we’re getting.</p>
<p>Oh, me too. Still clinging to my “dumb phone” and actual books. I’ve had my car for almost two years, and it wasn’t until someone with the same model showed me that I learned I could open the trunk from the outside. My new toaster oven (just a toaster oven!) came with a thick book of instructions that I am loathe to read. I try to keep up a bit by reading technology columns, but most of the time I zone out halfway through. Case in point: this Slate article about a portable hotspot:</p>
<p>It sounded cool, and then I started reading and was quickly lost. </p>
<p>There’s also the expense of all this stuff–cell phone with data plan, Netflix, satellite radio, cable TV, GPS. Compared to the days of antenna TV, a land line phone and a free gas station map that was impossible to fold up, I feel like a awfully big huge portion of our income goes to electronics.</p>
<p>Face it, we are electronic curmudgeons, and there’s nothing to be done about it but to keep hanging out with our own kind.</p>
<p>As a college student trying to break into software development, technology getting the better of me is the biggest challenge I face every day. You might say the single most important ability for a software developer is the ability to adapt to unfamiliar technology.
I know that feeling so well. I’ve tried several times to learn vim after being used to non-console-based code editors like Notepad++ and Geany which utilize the mouse instead of keyboard commands for selection and other tasks. I’ll get through the tutorial feeling pretty comfortable with what I’ve learned so far, but then when I try to edit actual code I find I’m much less efficient than in Geany because I have to learn the commands to do everything I took for granted before I used vim. And vim is supposed to be one of the most productive editors in existence! I just go back to Geany and forget even the few commands I learned for minimal text editing.</p>
<p>No matter how technically savvy I am, there’s always some technology out there that gets the best of me when I try to learn it. It keeps me humble knowing that there’s an ocean out there and I’m just a fish who has only seen a small part of it.</p>
<p>When we remodeled our kitchen I spent lots more on the microwave that is also a speed oven/ convection/ browning whatever. I have never used any of the functions beyond microwave.
I have an iPhone 5 with no music on it because I’m afraid to sync it and accidentally get (once again) all my email address book on my phone. Or maybe lose photos that are in one place but not another.
It’s not getting the better of me yet, but I’m not gaining on it.
Hope you come to terms.
My DH uses something called “Password Wallet” to keep track of his logins and PINs and passwords. I have a much better system, a bowl of little bits of paper with indecypherable scrawls on them…</p>
<p>I use [url=<a href=“http://oplop.mobi%5DOplop%5B/url”>http://oplop.mobi]Oplop[/url</a>] for password management. I must say, it is way less inconvenient than I had expected it to be. It’s worth it, but I probably would have given up if not for the fact that I changed most of my passwords at once and it would be an enormous pain to change them all back.</p>
<p>I use 1Password to generate and store passwords across my devices. It synchs changes and generates passwords for me, ones I could never remember if I tried and which are very strong. </p>
<p>I find most features have marginal utility for me. So for example, I have one display option in my car that I’ve found I prefer so I leave it on that. This means I don’t have to think about which display I want. This is the “chocolate ice cream” approach, a label I apply to a story told by Richard Feynman in which he realized he was spending time thinking about what kind of ice cream he wanted when he’d end up deciding on chocolate and regretting the choice if he picked another flavor … so he stopped thinking about it. It’s all about your personal utility not about what you might do if. Another person might want to download trip data, etc. I am perfectly happy with a guesstimate in my head.</p>
<p>I also learned DVORAK. For 3 reasons: it really is faster and the smaller reaches keep my fingers from hurting, but the “killer app” for me is the way it twists my mind around to look at a keyboard and not think about what the letters say but what they do … and then to twist it back if I’m using a QWERTY keyboard. </p>
<p>I have a gazillion apps but use only a relative few. Like I love Shazam because it can identify the most obscure dance music and Brazilian easy listening samba in a coffee bar. </p>
<p>I do have a sort of war with technology but it’s about information privacy. I am constantly asked to let Facebook log me into things and I refuse because I don’t want all that information about me connected to others and all that. People don’t realize that they get neat recommendations - at least in reviews - from Google because they use your personal information and the personal information of people you know. We give that stuff away in a poorly understood bargain. </p>
<p>Not being political at all, but reading commentary about how the IRS connecting to Obamacare is an expansion of government is absolutely ignorant about how much more industry already does. (It’s also ignorant about what government does now; as many parents here know, if you file a Fafsa, they let you bring in your tax information but I’m trying not to talk about politics.) Want a national gun registry? Fear one? I’ll bet Facebook and Google could compile a pretty accurate one right now. Researchers have demonstrated they can take easily available information right now and identify you and pretty much everything about you. And I’m not talking about the underworld - try reading Krebs, for example - and the vast amount of material you can purchase on the “underweb” for not much money. </p>
<p>I’m not afraid of self-driving cars and the like and, IMHO, the biggest risk to us is not government use of data but industry’s power. They haven’t used that - much - so far but imagine an industrial world in which privacy essentially doesn’t exist because they can compile from various sources every trace of your movements and doings and then not just advertising to you - like the horror film of ads popping up in store windows as you walk past - but blackmailing you and compelling you. People are doing this now but it’s small scale and the data isn’t robust enough to give them sufficient control. Then imagine a world in which you have to manage all you do to avoid becoming a target … and the targets are selected by algorithms running in the cloud so they select you for some identified vulnerability and use that against you.</p>
<p>I, too, just bought a new car. I drove several and most had lots of electronic gadgets, especially the Japanese cars. I ended up with a Volvo that has a very simple dash and no touchscreen. I do love the keyless entry.</p>
<p>I am not a fan of touch screens in cars for controls commonly operated while driving (climate control, radio presets, or switching the audio system to a different input). The problem with touch screens is that you cannot operate them by feel like you can with physical knobs and buttons (touch-buttons that don’t press in when you touch to activate them have the same problem).</p>
<p>Halogen, I agree that one of most important skills is to get used to a new, unfamiliar environment. I am one generation older than you.</p>
<p>Since you mentioned vim ( the ancestor of “vim” is actually “vi”), I grew up with the editor tool like ed and vi (and the famous emacs) as well as other old generation programmers’ tool like make/lint/yylex/yyparse/awk/m4. When GUI and the “project” based development environment came along, it took me a while to not totally dislike it by “unlearning” the old stuff and “relearning” the new stuff - even though in principle the thing under the hood should be quite the same.</p>
<p>BTW, my background (when I was young) was more on the EE than on the CS. But in the old days, some EE got exposed to some software stuff too when needed. In the old days, we learned Pascal, C, data structure, assembly language (actually a separate class), system programming (how assembler/linker/macro works, and a light intro OS), and operating system. (For the last one, we were asked to study a version of Unix source code from then Bell lab directly.) Back then, as compared to today, there appears to be much less you need to learn at school. Especially the field knowledge has been exploded since then. I have stopped trying to catch it up.</p>
<p>This is the difference between you, a young whippersnapper, and me, an old geezer. Maybe you can’t learn it – but I don’t have the faintest idea what it even is. :)</p>
<p>It seems that just about every appliance, vehicle, device or ‘thingy’ now has what I term the ‘TV Remote’ feature overkill. Each of our remotes (of which there are now many) has an overkill of button options. The things look like the control panel of a small airplane. And yet, all we really really want to do is turn the thing on, change a channel, control the volume and select an input source. Whenever we accidentally hit a random button the only solution is power off and power on. This is more difficult with things like microwaves or…vehicles going 70 mph at the time of random button touching.</p>
<p>The one remote which is very nice is the one for Apple TV. A simple click wheel like on the original iPods. On, off, and scroll up,down,right or left. I wish Apple designed car dash boards.</p>
<p>Just spend 3 hours on the phone with COMCAST technical support to solve one small problem: How to add a channel to my “favorate” list of channels on my remote control.</p>
<p>They passed my phone around the nation, 4 different tech support persons, without any success. Finally I demand a higher level support and he told me I cannot get it added easily, I need to scroll 900 channels to select the one’s I wanted or to remove one’s I do not want. And I am a technically savvy user.</p>
<p>I have a fairly new low end Camry and was pleasantly surprised with all of the electronics that seem to come standard with most cars today. The Bluetooth hands-free phone is great. Dialing is easy on the touch screen - it displays about six frequently dialed numbers on the screen and you just tap one to call. If it’s not in the frequently dialed numbers, you have to come to a full stop before it will allow you to dial a number or go through your contacts. If I have a passenger, I give the passenger my phone and they can dial the number from my phone.</p>
<p>The radio controls are on the steering wheel (along with the phone controls) so I can change stations from the steering wheel. I can also switch to music off my phone when all of my stations decide to play commercials at the same time.</p>
<p>So I like new technology and use the things that I find useful and learn things over time. I don’t read the manuals for most devices.</p>
<p>On editors - I like emacs. That’s what most folks use in the office. vi is second though emacs is more useful overall for debugging.</p>
<p>dietz -OMG, the remote control. It defeats me every time. I’ve had to turn the TV off completely and wait for one of the kids to get home from work so I could call and get instructions.</p>
<p>Does anyone have Apple TV? It’s a gizmo that lets you transmit photos from your computer to your TV. That’s a total nightmare. Even my son can’t figure that one out without an hour prep time.</p>
<p>It took me forever to figure out how to turn the radio off in my car and even more time to figure out how to change the time. Why can’t it be obvious? Why do I have to look up in the manual these simple things. I try to buy appliances with less features. I am dreading upgrading my phone and the thing is, I like lots of the new technology.</p>
<p>My new oven came last night, and while I read the manual, I am afraid to use it. First you need to heat oven for an hour to get rid of the smell. I am afraid of another fire, which happened to my former oven.</p>
<p>In my opinion, these days most gadgets/devices include too many non-essential functions that only a small fraction of the users may use.</p>
<p>When GUI (graphical user interface) and the command line interface to an electronic instrument started to become popular, one old fashion engineer (who was then mear his retirement age) told me that as long as an instrument has a keyboard, he refused to use it. He only used the instrument with physical knobs and push buttons. He could not survive in today’s world.</p>
<p>There are a lot of people out there who would rather not spend their precious time on the new things that are forced on them, especially these new things are of limited use for them. Not all people are like those geeks who are willing to search/surfing the internet for hours or days if not weeks in order to solve the problem. They have better things to spend their time.</p>
It keeps me humble knowing that there’s an ocean out there and I’m just a fish who has only seen a small part of it.</p>