2022/07/11

We can't go on like this!

I'm sitting here in the sun - yes, it's sunny in south London - and for the past 30 minutes I've been trying to buy another of Martha Wells excellent Murderbot diaries on Kobo books. It's failed. Several times. Once it insisted on an update first, grrr. Once it just timed out. Once I gave up. And now... the ebook has decided to reboot itself. It nearly worked once but Monzo approval was needed and the Monzo app decided it was "Refreshing..."... and I guess it's hot so perhaps it needed a long cold shower because, well, that didn't work either, or rather when it did the Kobo had given up!

In the midst of this Microsoft logged me out of OneDrive for some random reason (I don't care why right now and I don't need to be interrupted to be told), and the god awful Apple AirPlay stuttered, stop-start, repeatedly. You can't listen to music like this.

All I wanted to do was sit in the sun, read some trashy sci-fi (Murderbot is excellent trash sci-fi - and I mean that in the best possible way), and listen to some Metallica in the background (blame Stranger Things).

To add insult to injury my mother called and her computer's no longer running Skype and a reboot won't bring it back. And you can forget about talking her through going to Launchpad and clicking on Skype. She's 78, once threatened to leave my father if he ever bought a new computer again (this was the '80s), and despises them (computers, not men). I have her using gmail and Skype and I've not got the energy to add any more complexity to her life or be the IT support bod any more than is strictly necessary. I shall fix Skype the next time I visit (which btw, what's the f**king point of video chat if you need to visit in person to get it working!).

We can't go on like this. This stuff needs to be much more reliable, much more tolerant of noise, much less invasive, so much easier to use and just plain better.

On the up side, it's 18:30, time for a whisky and a game of cards.

Voyaging dwarves riding phantom eagles

It's been said before... the only two difficult things in computing are naming things and cache invalidation... or naming things and som...