Published on 12, July, 2020
I have huge problems with tech, I almost gave up joining here as I kept running into problems about codes and passwords. I can use basic email and just about cope with some shopping, like the big forresty place, but some I find overwhelming. I don't know how to use a smart phone I can just about cope with a stupid one, but not well. Everyone seems to think that everyone else is comfortable with tech and that 'it's intuitive', who's intuition are they using? I can't seem to find any help and everyone seems to think more tech is the answer. I'm starting to get very excluded from the world as everything moves towards smart phones, mobile banking, do they really want me to crash the worlds entire banking system? That's the other thing with tech, I go near it, it goes wrong, the list of things I've crashed gets ever longer, sometimes I only have to stand next to something for it to stop working. I'm so fed up with stupid answers when I try and explain my problems, from people talking loudly and slowly to me, (my response was I'm autistic not deaf or stupid), or laughing, getting angry, trying to start me off at a place well above my understanding, like 'you have to decide if you want Apple or Android?' Most often they just sort of drift away, before I sprout a second head or something. One of my learning difficulties is that some bits of information go straight to long term memory storage without ever passing through short term memory storage, I'm told that without spending time in short term storage, I have no synaptic links created, so I can't retrieve information. For example I know I've done C&P dozens of times, but I can't remember how to do it, everytime is like the first, of course it dosen't help when I lose stuff, like an essay or something. Tech causes me more meltdowns than almost anything else
Technology is very complex and I regularly get overwhelmed by it. I have a phone and a laptop but I need other people to set them up for me, I have absolutely no idea when it comes to tech. I need everything to be basic otherwise it's overwhelming and like you meltdowns are a regular occurrence for me. I wish things were simpler, but to be everything is getting much more complicated as tech advances.
Touch screens, thats a good way to get nothing or 10 of everything!
I do like the telly, so what? I get really annoyed by people who think themselves superior because they dont' watch it. At the moment I don't have the ability to have a computer instead of the telly, I share a living room with other's mainly my 89 year old Mum, who's far worse with tech than me.
I've heard of this immersing myself in technology stuff before, it only works if you have some idea of what you're doing or it goes horribly wrong, like the whole thing freezing and not being able to get out of it even turning the machine on and off dosen't work. To be honest I wouldn't know how to immerse myself in it. I much prefer typing to using a mouse, I write quite a bit so my typiing speed is quite good. Hypermobile and arthritic finger joints don't make using a mouse that easy, and I've tried various kinds and end up going back to the most simple and basic. Dragging things about with a mouse is the fastest way for me to lose things entirely, I'm a total technoklutz and can crash anything, even a digital egg timer!
I find that no matter how I word a search it rarely gives me the information I need or want, once I've worked my way through all the sponsered ads and things people seem to think I ought to have instead of the thing I actually want, I find the useless information endlessly repeated the more pages I go through. I get so frustrated at searching for something simple, getting three of them and pages and pages of stuff I didn't ask for.
There are many times when I think of going offline completely, only then I wouldn't be able to find the books I read huge amounts of.
Whenever I ask how to do something a YouTube video or 10 come up, I don't find them useful at all, I dont' know if it's just my learning style is different or what? The other thing is so many are American and they often have different equipment or terms for things or things that you just can't get here.
Does anyone have any insight into why me and tech don't get along, as I said before often all I have to do is touch it or even walk past it and it goes haywire. The case of the egg timer was one, 'you're just afraid of technology, press a few buttons, nothing bad will happen'said an ex, so I pressed the buttons and it crashed, had ot have the batteries taken out and put back in again, he never tried to help me tech stuff ever again.
Some people who, like you, hate the mouse set up their computer so that they don't have to use it. By using the command line and tiling window managers. Those are usually considered quite advanced though.
As for search engines, I have heard good things about kagi.com. It's paid so no ads. I don't use it myself so I can't vouch for it's quality but I've heard it's very good.
I took a look and the sponsored links on the search engine I use (https://duckduckgo.com/) are somewhat less in your face than the ones on Google. And I can't see any on https://search.brave.com/.
Other engines include https://stract.com/ and https://mojeek.com/. But they don't have that good results in my experience. People like them because they have completely independent indexes and because Stract is free and open source software.
BRAVE is the one for those of us on the ADD end of the spectrum.
NO ADs.