Latest toy. This will be it for a while for tech purchases. This isn’t a smart watch; I’m going to use it at the gym. It’s a Casio GD-010-1 GSHOCK. It’s rugged, waterproof to 20 ATM, and has a long lasting battery. It’s a pretty good deal for $135.00. I bought it online at a Canadian store(Ben Moss) so I didn’t need to face the Trumpy bullshit.
So I just spend my whole Sunday afternoon setting up a budget HP laserjet.
Windows 11 can’t find it. There IS NO network adapter on it. HP MFP139w
The HP Smart setup for that specific model (the 1st download option IDs it as the wrong model) claims to connect and asks for the network & password.
It can only do 2.4GHz
Asks you to press COPY button. Has weird symbol instead of COPY on the burron.
Nothing happens.
Look at laptop - there’s the No Connection globe icon. Click and discover a supposed 'temporary HP wirelss port". But you’re dead in your tracks.
Q - why didn’t they just use wifi direct like REAL companies, their claimed ‘connection’ obviously isn’t connected.
Confirm that by looking at the router - no new connection w an IP sddress.
3X restarting process, same results.
So ran home got them a USB cable. Went to ADD PRINTER and it found the right one.
Wouldn’t print after it installed. Look at printer properties, Windows set it up on a MS print to PDF port. Fixwd that, rebooted laptop and printer.
Did print test page, it did work but slow as hell. Guy kept insisting it didb’t work - because the pages came out printed side down!
He kept xaying he was gonna take it back to Staples what other HP to buy.
He’s never gonna move the laptop or printer from the desk (with the wireless router right there beside them) so after telling him repeatedly - to the point I was ready to 2x4 him upside the head - I finally convinced him it bloody worked juswt fine the way it was, he didn’t HAVE TO do anything more to use it.
So get this - he then pulls out a stack of recipes and asks how he makes them ‘go on his computer & printer’…
Of course, the guy is a business owner. He got the HP laptop and printer because people at church told him HP was the best brand. The priest set the laptop up for him. With a MSoft login, Macafee, a VPN, WPS office and every damn thing you avoid at all costs.
Uninstalled all that shit, put in LibreOffice set to load/save as MSoft and had to show him how to start the writer program.
As I was leaving I had to stop him from unplugging all the cables and to just shut the lid and f off.
OMG it’s 2025 and people like that still exist. Can’t, won’t, refuse to learn and don’t understand why they’re just scraping by.
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BTW - that old Macbook:
Installed latest Linux Mint. sudo apt install bcmwl-kernel-source and the wireless went in perfect. It’s an i5 5350 w 8 Gigs and a 256 SSD according to neofetch.
Needs a new keyboard and battery $80 on Amazon, a future project. I have USB keyboards if I want to play with it more.
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I set up a portal for Fort St James in the late 1990s and used it as the landing page for our dialup customers. Few people use it, but some do. Evidenced by:
RING… what’s wrong with YOUR SERVER NOW? Yet another person usning Internet for 30 years.
Followed by another my Internet’s out can you fiis my computer
Followed by another YOUR SERVER IS OFFLINE AGAIN
All the while. I’m adding things to the Men’s Shed site on that serve with FB in another tab. I noticed eomething…
BTW not one of these ppl knew how to look at their taskbar and see if they’re online. All hovered over the icon and got TelusXXXX No Internet
1st lady called back It’s STILL not working
"#1 - could it have anything to do with the Telus line truck across the street?
"#1 - could it have anything to do with the Telus line truck in front of your house?
"#1 - could it have anything to do with the Telus line truck down your street?
FB was full of posts about that whole part of town going on an off all day.
No point telling them how to use their phone’s Hotspot if they can’t even tell if they’re online after 30+ years.
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OMG it’s everywhere. At a mechanic’s new shop and a lady came in said her tire was leaking, change it. He took a quick look and told her he couldn’t see anything wrong with it and she had no warning lights on her dash.
I think the tire’s underneath the truck
You should get a tire specialist to look at it Kal Tire is right around the corner.
Just fix it.
Do you have the jack and tools?
I don’t know fix it.
As I left, the fat cow was still sitting in her truck, hands on the wheel and motor running. He had to ask her to unlock it to look for the tire jack behind the seat.
Pleases and thank yous are alien words to so many people.
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Yep. Unfortunately many people are completely self centered, they don’t care how their behaviour impacts the world. I had a former acquaintance who would look me up once a year to install and or update his horrible antivirus suite(this is the only time I’d hear from him). I did this for several years for free. After several years I said that I didn’t want to do the work. He was pissed and blocked me on FB. People are weird.
Just sent a quote to a group with a note that they didn’t have to buy Malwarebytes for each computer, but leave it in their budget so they could use the $$ for emergency or something useful.
No way though they’d take the advice to save $320 per station and use LibreOffice. They HAVE TO use MSOffice, you’re not professional if you don’t pay for Office.
Just like you HAVE TO use Office Outlook, not Thunderbird.
And Chrome - you must have Chrome. Can’t use Edge…
And don’t forget, if Jesus had a computer it would be a Dell
OMG I made a website for our group and it ‘doesn’t work’.
No one has ever heard of or seen the little address bar on top of the browser. When they Google it, there’s too many to choose from how would they know which? (hint - the very first one in the list)
If they manage they csn’t find the form. You need to click Contact in the Navigation menu (??? whassat???) AND scroll down(???)
Tack on 4 of them didn’t know what Highway the town is on, all grew up here… one even typed (the word inside the brackets] in a password field instead of the word in the brackets…
OMG OMG
The one guy who keeps posting full page letters on FB is the least of my problems.
Helpless, helpless, helpless…
one lady wants to be in our Junk in your Trunk sale but doesn’t have a car or a table to sell her goods from. How the hell is she even gonna get there?
Gotta go answer a local ad for a car. Just had a break job and the roter replaced…
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So I brought my rebuilt computers and stuff to the Men’s Shed Junk in your Trunk sale we held alongside the annual Classic Car show. 100% of the proceeds for the Shed.
An amazing turnout of twelve vendors, 5 of which were pickups and trailers and zero people selling from their trunks. A balmy 14 degrees for the event dozens of people came and the rain held off for over an hour.
One of them came to our tent and looked at the computers, I’d cut the prices in half already and pitched a sale like make an offer - like ANY offer when his wife came and told us they didn’t bring any money, none at all. If he had $20 they could’ve taken home an i5 with an SSD and a 1TB data drive… or wireless keyboard/mouise combos for a loonie…
Before I left I made a fellow organizer put $5 in the por from a bet, he was carrying on we’d need more space and I bet him we wouldn’t get enough SUVs to fill the space we’d already marked out. First time I was sad to win a bet, like I said NO cars came.
I think we raised almost enough to cover the cost of the canopy we bought for the event. I hope the guys that hauled the ice cream truck all the way to the Fort for the event sold enough coffee to cover their gas,
Lived in Thwart St. James long enough not to feel disappointed.
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Debian 13 was released today! Did a bare metal install on one of my units. I opted for KDE-plasma. Everything just works out of the box. Beautiful. All hardware identified automagically. I started using Debian at 4.0.
I’ve been running Plasma on both the RasperryOS and Debian 12 drives on the Pi as my favourites for a while.
When I do older systems for people, usually it’s Mint 22 Cinammon. A woman just texted how she loved a POP! OS I did for her, who wanted to know where she could buy a new laptop with POP! instead of Windows.
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Doing a lady’s HP she got from Costco. quite a nice machine.
Holy shit, updating and updating and rebooting and updating again.On top of setting up local account, removing Macafee, setting privacy and notifications… been at it since 11 this morning and still more.
OMG what a PITA.
I also added LibreOffice and Firefox to escape the MSoft traps. Half the installed apps are HP crap, should’ve just opened the box, plugged in my Rufus stick and did a fresh install.
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Wow! Your customer is lucky, herbie! Reading your post makes me feel very grateful I’m only running Linux. I’m also the administrator for dev/wifes’s Macbook Air. Life is so much simpler without M$.
I wonder if Win 11 and the upcoming EOL for Win 10 will drive people to other ways of computing?
you can’t! Linux is just too hard. Nothing works on Linux! It doesn’t even do Facebook, when you turn it on there’s just this THING with little pictures on it.
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BTW we went over the books yesterday and in spite of the rain ruining our Shed yard sale, we made over a grand in donations! Now planning the next one.
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ZOMG! Hahahahaha. Thanks for a good laugh, herbie! 
I remember selling a couple of dirt cheap Linux machines back aroung 2000-2001.
One lady came back screaming that she’d downloaded MSN messenger dozens of times and it didn’t work. There was a pile of intall icons on the desktop, I don’t think she even knew you had to click on them to install them on Win98.
Also there was this Pidgin Messenger that did all of those ones back then, but it was too confusing to enter the MSN username etc.
2nd only to the lady who bought a Mac somewhere buz they told her Macs were better than Windows. The DOS game she bought at a bargain store wouldn’t even install !
Having a bugger of a time getting Debian 13 on my Pi 4. I’m just downloading iso again to burn to an SD card as my first tries wouldn’t boot from either a USB usb stick or an SD card,
I have 12 wirh Plasma 5 on an SSD, but I want to keep that too.
I’ll let you knoe how it goes,
I gave up on 13. It has some bugs. It wouldn’t recognize inserted DVD media (known issue). I’ve gone back to Slackware and Void Linux.
Call it a day neither the lite or full version will boot the Pi 4 from SD, USB or an SSD. Only vid I saw was a Pi 5 with NVME storage.
I even tried to upgrade my Debian 12, changed the sources.list from bookworm to trixie.I did not run sudo nala update or upgrade. Rebooted and that no longer boot either, like WTH why would it even reference etc/apt/sources.list on boot?
I guess I’ll wait until there’s an official Raspberry release.