Technology is hard....

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Marti Woolford
@FordMwool
Today I received in the mail a letter from my mom. It was a photocopy of her phone-she wanted to share a picture that is on her phone with me. A picture that is on her phone. She photocopied her phone and mailed this to me.
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3:23 PM · Sep 24, 2021

[underpants]

1. That's funny.

[dweller]

2. That's sweet

Mom gets the message through

✌🏻

[whistler162]

3. Well at least she didn't

scan it and then email you the letter.

[FoxNewsSucks]

4. Actually that's pretty cool

I just tried copying my phone, and it didn't come out nearly as clear as that.

[Nevilledog]

6. LOL at you trying it.

[FoxNewsSucks]

7. I wanted to see if it worked. . .

Looks terrible. I actually expected glare from the screen would keep anything from showing up.

So the "old person" in the original post deserves great credit for getting her copy to look good.

[blugbox]

26. Since you were willing to go the extra mile...

I would try rotating the phone to different orientations to see if one works better than the others.

I'm thinking maybe the traveling scan beam might interfere with the phone screen refresh rate or something along those lines..

To the OP: Very cute story! I'm glad your mom is trying! All that really matters is the end result I guess. Not the most efficient, but that's how it worked for most of her life so is completely logical.

[Biophilic]

5. I can sort of understand that. There have been times when such solutions seemed great.

[csziggy]

8. My sister who slightly technologically challenged could do something like that

Recently she needed to send me a draft of a letter she was writing on her Apple computer. But for whatever reason the Word document format was not readable on my Windows 7 computer. So she printed out a copy, took a picture of it with her phone and sent me that version.

(And yes, I know, I need to update my computer, but I have the philosophy that the only time I update the OS is when I build a new computer. At this point I am two years past my planned time to do that and with the chip shortage and other complications, it might be another year before I can do that. )

[snort]

10. Yeah!

I enjoy gaming but the date of my last build is 2013. Still humming along though. Good components I guess. Managed to find a new Nvidia GPU that is still compatible with W7 so on it plays. We need chips!

[csziggy]

11. My computer was built in 2013 also

But it really needs updating for some of my projects. I need newer versions of the programs I use to make it easier to do the projects (making web pages of family photos) and those will not run on Win 7.

Plus my user profile has gotten corrupted and the only fix for that is to do a clean install of Windows (from what I have read). It will be easier for me to build a new computer than deal with that on the old one.

Previously my builds have cost around $2k. Right now, without getting a top of the line video GPU, my estimated cost is around $4-5k. The GPU I want is about $2k so the total price is getting scary. Of course part of that is the massive amount of hard drive space I need for all the family photos (I'm already using 4 TB for them and need to scan and edit more) and a big enough scratch disk for PhotoShop.

I was going to wait but with the projections of continued chip shortages for years more, I am not sure I want to. I've already limited my projects to what I can do easily now - and I am getting older fast. So I'd really, really like to get these projects going before I get even less capable.

[snort]

12. 8 years. 8 loooong years.

I'm not looking forward to the re-learning phase of the op. Still, I'll hit Newegg and look for the upper middle tier best sellers as far as MBs, RAM and the like to try for that sweet spot. Chewing up photos and video takes a lot of GPU but $2K? Wow. I'm playing the latest Doom on ultra at 1080p using an I5-3570K at 3.4G, 16G DDR3 ram and a GTX 1660 Super GPU, but there are some bottleneck issues that are noticeable at start-up. Sigh.

[csziggy]

13. Try PCPartPicker.com to select parts

It "shops" from various sources for the best prices and checks for compatibility.

For instance, the motherboard I was considering has to have its BIOS updated to take the newer AMD Ryzen CPUs - so you either have to flash the BIOS blind without a CPU or also buy an older one to do it. So I am thinking of changing motherboards for my theoretical build.

It's a pretty neat tool. I found it in the Build a PC subreddit and am pretty impressed by it.

Also, I need to check out this - someone there mentioned that they were buying all their parts from NewEgg and getting a discount if they also paid $100 for NewEgg to assemble it. That is very tempting. The guy that assembled my computers after I decided I was now too ham handed to do it anymore charged that - but he's retired. The son of a friend that mostly repairs computers would do it for $150 but I am not sure how good he is at it.

Right now I think I am at analysis paralysis - too many factors for me to finalize my decision.

[snort]

14. That's why I generally go with the buyer consensus on Newegg.

Let the young gamers figure it out first, cuz theres way too many choices and combos available. I'm reluctant to update to W10 because of their decision to make a desktop look like a cellphone. Irksome. But no choice in the matter. I've run Linux in the past but don't have the energy to commit to figuring it out when windows is basically plug and play.

Thanks for the tip on the dot com, I will check it out.

[blugbox]

27. Just wanted to let you know about W10

They only had that "Metro" style with the touchscreen looking buttons for a short while, and the world hated it.

It looks and functions just like the Windows you are used to. Normal desktop, normal start menu, normal file explorer...
Plus Windows 7 is no longer supported or updated for online virus protection. I would highly recommend upgrading.

Also, your 2013 level PC sounds like it will hold up for a bit longer. Maybe need to start turning down some options, but I would HIGHLY recommend a SSD for your OS. Those really make everyday tasks and startup so so much better.

[snort]

28. Now thats some news I like!

Happy to hear they dropped the Metro look. I'm already running a Samsung SSD installed in 2017. It definitely makes for faster startups. Thanks for letting me know about W10!

[hunter]

15. Yikes! I've never spent more than $300 for a computer...

... and that was for a shop-worn 386 in the 'nineties.

The last version of Windows I used on my personal computers was Windows 98SE.

Since then I'm a Debian guy.

Usually I'll grab a machine that someone considers e-waste and add some memory and a larger hard drive to it. Then I install Debian and I'm good to go.

I'm not a gamer and I'm not doing any fancy video editing so it works for me.

I don't use Windows or Apple products unless someone is paying me.

I have over 30,000 family photos but most of those weren't taken with any sort of fancy camera so a 300 dpi scan works fine. I've also got a lot of converted videos. Those were originally NTSC which doesn't take up a lot of room compressed.

I suppose that makes me some kind of Luddite.

Yeah, I have a flip phone.

[csziggy]

19. Up til now $2k was about my budget

1982 First computer - Apple ][ with extras $2k
1987 First PC (Packard Bell) - $2250
1993 First Windows computer - $2k
2000 Window XP computer - $2k

After that I built them and didn't keep as close track on costs, but it was usually around $2k. I did try Linux around that same time but there are too many programs I am used to using for business and other stuff, and got tired of pushing the Linux ball uphill.

As for the family pictures, between my husband and me, we have ALL the family pics going back over 150 years. When I scan them, I scan to archival level high resolution TIFs which take up a lot of space. Then I covert to JPEG, edit and save those and downsize to a good web size. The TIFs are treated as though they are the original negatives or photos, and never messed with.

That's why it takes terabytes of storage - thousands of archivally scanned pictures are huge.

You know, apparently flip phones are back! They now call them foldable.

[hunter]

24. My flip phone is half that size and has actual buttons to press.

No touch screens. Mostly it's just a phone. The screen is 4 X 6 centimeters.

I have a few old family photos scanned as TIFs, but not many. Maybe I've got too much faith in having the originals around to re-scan in greater detail.

Younger family members, some of them not yet born, will probably be looking at these family photos on their phones. If they need to enlarge an image to poster size they'll probably use AI upscaling. Some of the artifacts introduced in this upscaling process will likely be quite amusing. For example, I can imagine my grandfather, who lost a few fingers in a pre-OSHA stamping mill accident, getting all his fingers back in an AI upscaled photo. Or an inexpensive watch upscaled to a Rolex. Maybe everyone will look prettier too.

[lagomorph777]

25. Built a fancy one last summer; its predecessor was 20 years old and "running" XP.

More like "walking" XP.

Got it built just before the big chip crunch.

[ananda]

17. I always change the doc to pdf when I want to share it.

Sometimes MS Word for Mac isn't compatible with pc.
.

[csziggy]

18. She told her new version of Word for Apple can't save to PDF

Since we're nearly three hundred miles apart and the last Apple product I touched was an Apple ][ I can't help her.

I know about Mac/PC incompatibility - I scanned all her slides for her but the thumb drive I saved them to wouldn't read in her Mac. Her husband had to put them on his laptop to see them.

[ananda]

20. My new version saves to pdf fine.

I bought it though and did not get the subscription.

I got it just a few months ago.

[csziggy]

21. She probably is looking in the wron place

In my 2007 version of Word, it's hidden under Publishing, I think, and not very obvious. But it's there in that ancient version so I'm sure it is somewhere in my sister's one.

And there must have been some change since my old version that made whatever she saved not able to open in mine. Oh, well, I hate Word - I'm a Wordperfect person from way, way back and much prefer it.

[ananda]

22. Here's how I do it.

Hit command-shift-S at the same time.

A window pops up. In the bottom right,
click on Word Format.

Then at the bottom of that box, click
Export PDF.

That creates the PDF doc of your page.

[csziggy]

23. Thanks - I'll tell her to try that

Saving your directions so I will have them next time I talk to her.

[ret5hd]

9. You need a grandchild like this:

[Iggo]

16. Every now and then at the office...

…someone prints a pdf from an email, scans the printout back to pdf, and emails it from the scanner to their desktop so they can email the pdf to someone else.

It’s fun to watch.

[Johnny2X2X]

29. DOT COM

When my parents moved into their retirement condo, they had to visit some website to register with the condo association, my dad asked my help and wrote down a web address for me to go to:

CondoasscDOTCOM

He now has a flip phone though that he makes phone calls on occasionally.