So far, so good. No screen glitching. Everything seems to work. 
Looks good! Gonna begin a project to turn a Samsung tablet into a Mint machine after I take a break to the Mainland.
OMG if I want fried chicken for dinner I’ll have to choose from Lee’s, Churches. Nandos, Jollibee, Mary Browns… and they’ll have food at suppertime!
I can get hot&sour soup, szechuan pepper chicken, steamed buns… not just deep fried balls of dough & sugar. Even Grrek food where they have lamb and squid and don’t use 75% lettuce in their salad. Maybe even a pizza with anchovies on it!
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BTW you ever deal with ppl who look at you like you’re a lying idiot?
Lady came back after 6 mos of me telling her she had power issues at her rural home. She’d bring her desktop which fired up and worked fine but wouldn’t at home. I changed the power supply and same damn thing, wouldn’t work at her house but powered up instantly at mine. Even shut it down and rebooted it in front of her many times.
So 3 days later she was back with the same problem, still worked fine on my desk and out in my kitchen. Gave me ‘the look’ when I tried to use basic logic, it works here, it doesn’t there so the problem isn’t with “it”.
I ended up taking her hard drive out and putting in a newer, faster desktop w more RAM I had awaiting a buyer.
So now it’s 5 mos later and guess why she brought it back?
Fired up instantly with a screen showing update 15% installed, let it run thru and it’s perfectly fine… when she brings it home tomorrow - I’ll be on my way to Abbotsford for a week hah hah hah!
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I forgot to set-up my printer on my Ubuntu 24.04 Thinkpad. Ubuntu has the Debian awesomeness. I just turned on the laptop and it saw my printer and set it up. How cool is that?
True - it’s been years since I ever had to ‘set up a printer’ after a Linux install. Maybe on Puppy or DSL since it wasn’t just there and ready after installation.
Damn ever since I got this Epson inktank I hardly ever have anything to print in colour…
Upgraded to the latest iOS (18). Messaging now has animated texting. This is important. Haha.
Wow! Ubuntu is 20 years old. 
The days where you emailed and they’d send you a dozen Ubuntu CDs to hand out.
We’d put them on the counter marked FREE TRY ONE and end up tossing 8 of them when the next version came out. One always got sent to the workroom to run upgrade the servers.
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So now there’s a thing called Ubuntu Pro. You can sign up for Pro on an existing LTS machine. Do I need this if only for the cool name? Heh.
I think it may be free for a certain number of machines.
If you set it up properly, you can manage a fleet of machines all at once.
But I don’t think there’s any real advantage to it.
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Yes. According to this we can run Pro on 5 machines for free. You’ll need to sign up for an Ubuntu account (free).
So went to a lady’s house to set up her Starlink yesterday. Her son moved away and took his dish. $$ to donuts the little shit made her pay for the dish and she wasn’t happy to pay $160 a month for internet,
She’s a widow that gets GAIN supplements FFS and she doesn’t even have a computer or tablet. Has a cell and only uses FB and Messenger!
So I turned on USE DATA on the old pawnshop Samsung she had and she was stunned. She insisted it didn’t work without Internet until I showed her how my iPhone surfed and then turned her data on.
Told her to call Telus, mention she was a senior on GAIN and ask what options they had, She’s a little bit rural, so ADSL is out. There’s also XplorNet and CityWest WISP service for a hell of a lot less.
She could also use a decent phone, the thing only showed 1 or 2 bars and cuts off walking a couple feet left or right. The iPhone showed the 5G - first time I noticed that.
What kind of son pulls crap like that on their poor Mom? Convinces her she needs 300Mb Internet for $160 s month AND pay for cellular too. Scumbag!
She could probably get a brand new modern phone and data for $50 a month on that Seniors program.
Set the lady up with her Telus Smart Hub today. They mucked up and sent her two, and the PITA was the SIM card wasn’t authorized on the 1st one I tried.
Also discovered it really didn’t work at my house!
She’s got 5G service out by the airport and I don’t right here in town.
So she pays less than half the cost. Could’ve been cheaper if she owned a 5G phone.
Didn’t charge her for spending 8 hrs over 8 days, our kids were friends and I know how poor she is. Told her to bring me some eggs some day from her chickens.
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So an hour on the phone with someone who’s used Firefox and Tbird since they came out. Knew him since the old DOS days of the local computer group.
Didn’t know CTRL-ALT-DEL
Didn’t know what tabs were or that there was more than one open
Didn’t know about the X in the corner to shut off a program.
Spent half the time finding the hamburger menu to reset the FFox start page
Had him unplug his router, couldn’t find his wireless icon in the tray.
Go one of those fake web pages WAH WAH YOU INFECTED didn’t know how all he does is Facebook…
Yesterday ran into an Epson printer with Wifi Direct. Choose OS on setup - iOS or Android… nothing else.
93 yr old lady, her 70 something daughter who ‘knows all about computers’ set up her new laptop, 90 yrs old and ‘needs’ a 15" laptop that’s never gonna move from the same place.
Had to get her one of those stupid Logitech mouse with a f*cking ball because that’s what the daughter’s used since Win95.
Removed all the crap from the “tools disk” we gave out in the dialup days, Auslogic, AVG etc. Works fine now - at my house or thru my iPhone hotspot. Thru her Telus ADSL -110 Kbps
She needed her system fixed so her son could plug in his phone and load a picture to print out and then fax to the guy he was on the phone with…
Getting tired of every customer service person in every buisiness in Canada just popping off a quick excuse, true or not, to get you out of their hair is the norm.
The lady’s son called today to say Telus informed him his mother was “on copper” and that’s the best they could deliver on copper.
110 Kpbs down, unmeasurable up, 2 ms ping to router but 1200+ ms ping with 75% loss to 8.8.8.8
for only $86 a month.
(She lives within 100m of the Central Office)
Went well with the excuse about how the gas station in Vanderhoof could restock smokes in 2 days, but billion dollar GougeOn has been out of my vape pods for 6 weeks now,
I know damn well the person who does order them has forgotten to for 6 weeks in a row and the manager hasn’t made sure anyone’s doing their job for at least that long.
I think that excuse was ‘on backorder’.
Like how the wife used to bring home and treat me to oyster burgers when the fresh ones came in, but after Christmas she’ll be gone three years and oysters are still 'on backorder.
Not that there’s more than 3 of us in this hick town that’s tasted one that wasn’t smoked and in a can.
Did you know thst Highway 16 ends at the Ocean? And there’s fish in there that doesn’t come frozen from cesspools in China?
So out of curiosity (I was the phone installer 30 yes ago) I went back to look at the ‘drop’ (phone line from the pole to house) on that lady’s house, Turns our, it came off a pole in the back of an ancient apartment complex and then all the way back to her house at the street, not from the can on the pole directly across from it.
It was also "figure 8’ this ancient thick 2 wire untwisted shit that they told us while training in Burnaby back in 1988 to rip down and toss as it was obsolete. Like obsolete over 36 years ago. Same reason you don’t use a phone line more than 10 ft long to your ADSL modem, Won’t carry high frequency properly due to induction.
I’d also used Canada safety rules to refuse to climb the yard pole as it was ‘Coke bottled’ warn away from years of climbing with spurs. Whenever a tenant moved, they look up their paper records, find an empty pair on the feed cable and send you to disconnect the old one and connect to a pair that wasn’t being used. There were also so many splices on that cable you had to black tape the aluminum access lid shut.
So I would cheat. I’d keep the disconnect forms for that place in a drawer. When the order came in for the new tenant, I’d look up the apartment number and hook up the new number to the old pair inside the office. Then go on my terminal and reassign the records in the database. Use the saved time to collect payphones, clean up old wiring in the office and businesses.
Eventually I got a ‘monkeys can do your job’ arsehole supervisor who said that wasn’t fair to the guys who only worked outside and didn’t have access to records or terminal access, Just do the work your told to do or else.
Or else 36 years later you wouldn’t be finding those little things the company still hadn’t done, obviously.
Add this on: the lady once had cable TV. The cable drop comes straight from the street to her house, she even still has the cable box sitting on a desk unused. I have cable Internet, just the Net no TV. When I ditched my ADSL they didn’t even know they owned the cable company too. and didn’t suggest it.
I guess they still don’t.
My daughter has been bugging me to start a YouTube ‘computing for seniors’ channel. I think maybe I should, but testing out a recording my voice sounds ‘too funny’ for me. Other people say no, describe it as anytning from politician to college prof to late night FM radio jockey.
Two more calls from not yet seniors today - they don’t know the difference between the Internet and their computer. Like THE most common thing I encounter other than forgetting passwords.
Hell it’s got so bad now, they don’t just think Facebook IS the Internet, they think it’s their computer!
Just had a woman’s daughter call long distance (she’d lost everything on her computer) cuz they were stumped once they typed System Restore in the computer and the window that popped up said “system properties” at the top. Just SO confused they couldn’t see the big f*cking button two whole lines beneath that. Had no restore points… so I walked her through looking for a windows.old folder tp maybe get her pics and docs back.
Oh I’ve got all my pictures and downloads and documents, it’s my Facebook contacts that are completely gone. Is it worth fixing this computer or just buy a new one?
Yeah lady, drive up here from the Island and I’ll sell you this rebuilt one for only $10,000.00
2 more older couples who were told by their kids that their cell phones don’t work unless you have an Internet connection at home.
What is it? You simply don’t want to learn about new things, so you take a child’s advice?
Neither couple had a computer or a tablet.
And a lady gave me her tablet to upgrade. Said she hated the Windows 8 on it, could I upgraded it. Didn’t want an iPad or Android it would be too hard to learn, she’s always used Windows.
Surprise! It was an old Asus Transformer with Android. She thought it was an ordinary laptop, but if you took the tablet off the keyboard the touchscreen didn’t work so she’d always used it as a laptop.
A simple reset and the touchscreen works, but it won’t update and only has 16GB total storage. Useless as they get.
Another project to try- change the OS and move the home partition to an SD card…