Pickles by Brian Crane for December 26, 2021

Do you really want Nelson to give you an answer Earl.

Does he have a backup copy of that stuff? I don’t trust my phone enough to make that the only copy.

I’ve discovered a cute trick on my laptop: If you use the file viewer, it shows “locations” in the left column. If you hover just to the right of the “Locations” label, it pops up a “Hide” option that remains invisible until you do that hover. Selecting “Hide” hides all the “Locations” from view. And then, the only way to see them is to hover just to the right of the “Locations” label, you can see a “Show” option which will put them back. But if you don’t KNOW that you clicked “Hide”, then there’s about a 2mm by 7mm invisible spot on the screen where you can hover and then put them back. Not really obvious, but I feel far from moronic: That UI is what’s less than wonderful, imo.

Teaching old dogs new tricks sure is serious business.

I feel the secret is to be open minded to different ways but especially to not be unafraid of breaking or screwing up a device beyond repair.

He probably just accidentally turned it off.

It was an ID10T problem.

If Earl feels that way, that’s pretty much on him. I don’t think Nelson was thinking that at all.

Earl the kids today are entuned to the modern devices !

Kvetch.

One is never too old to learn a new trick Earl ! But Nelson should of showed you what he did ;-)

Earl, watch your language!

I do that stuff at work and sometimes get that response when I do it.

He may be a miracle worker, Earl, but that’s TOO big of a miracle to ask

Ok! I’ll teach Roscoe to do it.

Really don’t like the new ones. Wouldn’t have ‘em if I could do otherwise. But, age being what it is, I’ll have to adapt to at least some small degree of proficiency or just feel that much more behind the curve. That being said, the one digital communication device I will not have in our house is Alexa and its cousins. Just not necessary to an average life.

Earl, I feel your pain.

I see your smart phone and raise you stick-shift transmission.

Maybe “Smart Phone” ISN’T the best term…….

Nowadays, kids learn this stuff in the womb.

My wife’s phone was driving her nuts so I did a ‘needed’ upgrade and now it’s driving her nuts, squared.

Ha! Truer words were never spoken!

Morons come and go. You’ll always be PopPop

My grandson is like Nelson…a digital quick fixer upper!

My phone was losing function and was older. I skipped 5 iterations to get a newer one, and I won’t let that happen again. Playing catch-up takes time. I did just find, a month later, that there actually are some directions with it. I did the data transfer and set up myself, as I didn’t want to go into a very crowded store on Black Friday. Even so, I could use the help of an 8-year-old for a few items.

Earl. Take the gift and thank him.

Most computer and phone problems are PEBCAK (Google it).

In fairness the owners/instruction manuals for phones can be several hundreds of pages long. Some come as a .pdf file (which are handy and super easy to use, but people are unaware and/or too lazy to look at them). Car owners manuals can easily be over 400 pages. People will not read them, look up important items, or even open them ever, but will readily blame manufacturers when they cannot operate the cars the way that they want to.

This stuff isn’t that hard too learn (hey, if a kid can do it…) and there are mini-courses at little or no cost offered at highschools, community centers, and all levels of colleges, but you have to make the effort to go and learn (“GASP! But it’s soooooo much easier to whine”).

And yet so many of the “boomers” especially claim that young folks are so lazy these days…

Yep, I couldn’t get my laptop to work one day. Our then 5yo grandson was in the room when I got really frustrated and asked me if he could look at it. Took him less than 1 min to fix the problem. So when I got a new laptop I gave him(now almost 7yo)my old one to play with. He has it working much better than when I was using it(it is a 10yo Toshiba laptop). He uses it only when he is at our house and is writing new programs. Like iggy says, kids today have no knowledge of the pre personal computers/smartphones age.

But I don’t have any of my ego involved either. If I have a computer problem I just hand the device to our 6yo grandson and let him fix whatever I screwed up.

Or, at least take a little more time.

indentured… more like

Just go with it pops. The phone is fixed and the kid feels like a hero.

Ever have a dream where you desperately need to call someone but you can’t dial the number right. Or its in contacts in your phone, but you can’t find it. Wonder what that means in the world of dream analysis?

..don’t feel bad, Nelson’s grandson’ll tug on Nelson’s left earlobe to restore Nelson’s internet brain inplant..

OK kid, now show me an Excel spread sheet to compute my gasoline mileage, verify itself, draw a graph with the left ‘Y’ axis as MPG, the right ‘Y’ axis as Month Of Purchase, ‘X’ axis as Odometer, and Sets of Curves including Overall and By Year with additional tabs showing all possible permutations of the data. When finished, create an ellipse of earth’s solar orbit and dividing the ellipse by daily actual orbital speed for each day for all 365.25 days and including month.

I’m just grateful to know Somebody can help me … what amazes and humbles me is that my daughter successfully built her water-cooled computer ground up. She would call and describe the steps. I understood the simpler conjunctions and a few nouns and verbs (and, the … water, motherboard… and filing, fitting into)

This isn’t the first or the last time that Earl is going to look like a moron. Even Roscoe knows!

I have an Apple 6S “smartphone”. I really like it – except for the iOS updates. The IT people keep adding new, wonderful things that I have no use for nor want along with security updates that I need. Now overnight the phone prepares photo albums that I don’t want along with actions that aren’t apparent to me causing the battery to go from fully charged to 1%. Apple techs tell me tough luck!

Step one is to know that you can’t delete everything that easily.

Nope! You are what you are.

NO