Tag: Technology

Tired

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I am sleepy. But, as life should never be as simple as I would like, I can’t sleep. Well, I do eventually go to sleep, but I may only sleep for a few hours a night. Which is not good when you work 10 hour days.

I think the blame, like with most people, is technology. I have a phone, that sits near my bed. That’s without the TV, games consoles, Kindle or iPad. All within reach from bed. It means I can easily get distracted till the early hours of the morning by nonsense.

It is too easy to whittle away hours on nothing, since the internet came into force. Watching videos of classic WWF fights, or cats falling over, it is very easy to lose hours of time before you realise it. There is nothing wrong with finding something that engrossing, but there can be when it stops your sleep.

I am going to try something going forward. Which involves being in bed by 11pm, without any Internet connected devices. And just sleeping. See how that works. Sounds silly trying to set a routine, like you would a child, but routine really is good for people. Especially if it is to help things such as sleep. Well. I guess I’ll start tomorrow.

The Computer With The Speed Of A Snail

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

So, after all my problems a few days ago with my computer getting stuck on an update, it eventually righted itself. Kind of. I searched various websites for a solution, to get my computer out of being stuck in a Windows Update, and the advice was just to let it run. As I couldn’t reset the computer at all, like it wouldn’t even go into the boot menu. So I left it, and went and watched a movie. Now, I don’t like leaving computers running unattended, but I sat it on the table, and let it run it’s course. A couple hours later, I found that the screen had changed, but instead of ‘installing updates’ on the screen, it said ‘update failed, removing changes’, or something like that. But it restarted a few times, and booted up as normal.

And, this is the first day since all that, that I have been able to switch it back on properly to use, and well… it is slow. Really slow. I can only think it is the broken update that has made it so bad. But, it could be a range of things. Sometimes, with the joys of mobile phones and my general laziness, I probably don’t give the computer as much of an opportunity to update itself, as much as I should. Which I am aware is breaking the first rule in the ‘how operate a safe computer’ manual. It sometimes just takes so long, and I don’t really have the time. It sometimes feels like a hassle.

Microsoft does put out a lot of regular updates, for various reasons. It could be something that can simply make the operating system on your computer work more efficiently, as there are a lot of software engineers who spend every day trying to make things work better. I am still waiting for that update which will stop Windows hogging up my CPU, but that’s another issue. And one of the biggest reasons that software gets updated regularly, from mobile games to shopping apps to operating software is for security. Especially when every device we use daily, connects to the internet. And that is part of the problem.

It is very easy to think of the internet as an static, non-moving thing. The very concrete, reliable, sturdy ‘information super-highway’. It is almost reassuring, that we can get everything we need from some massive electronic motorway. Except, that’s not quite true. The internet is more like a flowing river, than a motorway. Yes, it has a path, and it can give so much information to everyone. But that river won’t stay the same. Every bend the water takes, it erodes the riverbank. The current takes earth downstream. The current changes, and batters all kinds of obstacles. You can always rely on the river of the internet to be there, but it is never the same every time you visit. It is always changing.

There are people all over the world who are hired to poke holes in the internet. Trying to find ways to manipulate something or other. Because if someone finds a way to exploit our internet connection, it could be a way to collect our information. And the information held on the internet, that we can access through multiple devices, can all be exploited. For example, if someone finds your Facebook details, they could find a way into your Amazon account, and access your bank details. If you use an unsecured connection, and open your banking app, someone could track your activity and get your bank details. But these exploits are constantly changing. Almost as if someone plugs one hole, water starts leaking from another.  So what is a big risk today, in terms of internet security, may not be in even a few months time. So, updates to devices that connect to the internet, can help you protect all your information. As every update, of every app, has been created to try and fix any issues which could effect your security.

Which makes me wonder, I am sitting here, writing this post, on a PC that is slow as anything. And it is probably my own fault. Having multiple devices, I should probably know better. I am going to work over the next few days to fix the speed on this computer, and hopefully, I shall then get in the habit of using the computer regularly enough that the updates can actually run properly.

 

 

Multi Media Viewing

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I am sitting at home right now, Eastenders is playing in the background as I write this post. And, this happens all the time. I spend a lot of time with the TV on, whilst browsing twitter or checking news articles. There isn’t a lot of programmes that can keep my attention.

This isn’t anything new. A lot of people have the same problem, it is so hard to focus just one thing. I mean, even my mum sits with the TV on, whilst playing Candy Crush on her phone. It works in other ways, how many people read a newspaper or book with the TV on in the background. It does effect how we can view things such as movies. I have about a 30 minute limit to get ‘into’ a film, if I am not interested then I simply get bored.

It is something I want to combat. Like put my phone away more, and simple relax, enjoy one thing at a time. So
I can pay attention to programmes and films better. The only things I watch with all my attention are subtitled anime episodes. I think that is because you have to read as well as watch, you don’t pay attention and you miss what happens. At the moment, I am watching Naruto Shippuden. I watched the dubbed version of some of the series years ago, but the voices annoyed me. A big issue I have with a lot of English dubbed anime
series. But I am getting more into the ones with subtitles, as the original voices are less annoying, and as said reading what happens takes all my attention. It’s easier to stay focused.

Technological Clearout

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I have been feeling a bit bogged down when I have been trying to use my computer and iPad. They are both filled up with gimmicky games and apps that I don’t really use anymore. Some of them have only been used once or twice. And they just, make it a pain to use the device they are installed on.

Now, when it comes to apps and games, whether on my iPhone or through my Steam account, I always end up going to the free games and apps. The stuff that advertises other games every time you lose a life. Or that runs so slowly, it completely ruins the user experience. What is the point of a note-taking app, that asks you to sign up for the premium version, every time you make a note. It frustrates me A LOT. So, I end up downloading other apps, to replace the app which is getting on my nerves. And this pattern could go on, and on. And it means that, much like my bookshelves, my devices start to run out of space thanks to all these unnecessary things installed.

So, today, I deleted a ton of old applications of both my laptop and my iPad. Something that I have been needing to do, particularly on my ipad, which had apps going on for 10 pages. Yes. I actually downloaded that much crap, and I would be lucky to use even half of them. So, the games that annoyed me with adverts, or crashing, I deleted. I put the games I like into folders, and made my front page full of the apps that I actually use the most. Which, is mostly social media apps. I do like my social media.

The result is, that I feel like I have new devices. They run smoother, and everything is so much easier to find. Part of me knows, that within a few weeks, things will start to pile up again, but maybe I can keep on top of it. App hoarding isn’t healthy, for you or your device. As a person, it is always good to let go of the stuff that you no longer use, out of your life. Help yourself be more organised.

Socially Over-networked

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

The problem with trying to create a lot of content online, is that sometimes it can get too much. Motivation, as well as inspiration, can disappear. Which is great. Particularly when you try to give yourself a target, such as I have, where I am trying to write every day. This means that things can become too forced, to the stage that writing is something that I really don’t enjoy anymore. I know this, because it has happened to me before. And, because I also like drawing, my ‘creative slump’ can also effect that, and that is my manner in dealing with stress out of the window. Annoying.

That is why I have been quiet on here for a few days. I thought I’d take some time out, which isn’t a bad thing. That is a new thing I am learning, knowing when to take a step back. Because I haven’t before, and it’s caused me to completely stress out. Which is the total opposite to what I want writing to be for me. Because, it is something that helps me chill out and organise the nonsense in my head. To the point that I don’t know what I’d do without it. I think I feel suffocated, which is bizarre because it’s just rambling online, really.

But, the internet has become something that has taken over our entire lives. There is not a day that goes by, where we don’t use the internet for something. Even if I locked my phone and laptop away, just doing my job at work involves network connections that use the internet. Nothing would work, in fact, my job wouldn’t even exist. And that is quite scary. But, however scary it appears to be, it still doesn’t mean anything compared to actual experience of dealing with real people. And as real people, ourselves, we should never forget about the way we feel. Sometimes, it is too easy to be dragged into some battle on facebook or Twitter over something that doesn’t even matter. Whilst, I know I try to shrug things like that off, it is not always that easy. The best thing is, realise when things start to bother you, and try to take yourself out of such situations when they arise. That is a good thing about the internet, there is always a block button.

Sometimes, I wish real life had a block button.

 

 

Counting Steps

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

In a bid to get healthier, I am recording what I eat as well as monitoring my physical activity. The aim of this is to record when I am doing well, to try and spurn me on to do more. Whilst this all sounds great, it doesn’t necessarily work out like that. I have a habit of being inspired for a few days, and then falling down a bit, which happens. The problem is, that you can see this on your fitness tracker, and it can sometimes have the opposite effect. It can make any lack of activity look a lot bigger and more important, than what it actually is.

I have a Fitbit Charge, which is like a watch. It shows time, steps taken, distance walked, and flights of stairs climbed. If I am active, like at work or walking round the coast, it is very useful. It is something I would recommend to people looking to become more active, but don’t take the data too seriously. It can be very easy to be discouraged if you don’t hit target. It is something that happens, whilst it is nice to aim for 10,000 steps a day, you should beat yourself up if you don’t reach your target.

I walk an average of 15-18000 steps a day when I am working. And if I have my fitbit on, it uses a LOT of the battery, purely because I am doing a lot of activity. Now, the Charge is supposed to last up to 3 days on a single charge, which doesn’t happen. In fact, I the Charge will last till the end of the day. This means, that if you want to use it for monitoring your sleep (another function of the product), you wouldn’t be able to have a heavily active day before or after the night you use it. But, as I write this I have realised something, a lot of people maybe don’t use it as a watch that they wear all day. Fortunately I charge my Fitbit overnight, and wear it all day at work. Unless I forget to charge it, or lose the charger (both happen frequently), and then I will go without.

Overall, I would recommend the Fitbit or any fitness tracker for anyone who is looking become more active. The biggest thing I would say that is a challenge about using a fitness tracker to improve your health is finding routine. Like every change really. If you are unorganised, like me, it may take you a while to remember to wear your device every day. But, I has made me more active, I love walking, and the fitbit helps give me aims about it. If you are unsure whether a fitness tracker is right for you, there are many apps available for mobile phones, which also work quite well. That’s what I did first, to see if I found that kind of thing useful, and i obviously did.

Does anyone else use apps and devices to track their activity and is it working?

Computer Says No

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I have spent the last 10 minutes getting my iPhone to charge using a cable with a loose connection. Again, I curse at technology as my phone dies, and I have to search around for another cable, of which I have came into ownership of a ton. And only about half of them actually work.

This hasn’t been my only issue with technology recently. I have had to use a lot of computers at work, which are shared. Like sometimes more than one account can be logged into the PC at a time. Which is handy when there is limited computers available, but not very good when you rely on the PC being fast. To do the job I do, I need multiple programmes open at once, and I must be able to jump between them all seemlessly. This does happen, when someone on another profile jams the print queue, and just logs out. And it happens a lot, and the only way to fix is to restart everything. Which takes way too long. 

So, to humour myself the other day whilst my PC was resetting, I thought of a few things that could be done whilst waiting for a work PC to load.

1) Have a cup of tea, even watching the kettle boil would be quicker than the PC. 

2) Do the Metro crossword. And that includes colouring in boxes so that my words fit. 

3) Annoy several colleagues by singing Christmas songs. 

4) Attend a First Aid incident. It’s okay, I am trained.

5) Go for a walk and see how other colleagues are doing. 

6) Sweep the floor and tidy up. At a push. 

7) Cry at the pile of work getting bigger, that you can do nothing about. 

8) Try to give ‘new starts’ directions, and confusing them when I say ‘right’ and point left.

9) Go to stores and refill all the paper and pen supplies.

10) Realise that I would be quicker doing everything manually.

Lost In It All

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

Just looking at the Internet today, not searching for anything in particular, just looking. Something that I don’t do very often. I am good at commenting on everything, and putting in my two cents on whatever is going on. 

Sometimes, I think we get too much information thrown at us, mostly by the Internet. It gets a bit hard to process it all. It is also hard to distinguish what is important, particularly on social media. Twitter and Facebook have a habit of promoting the useless twaddle that fills up the gossip sites. If you like that kind of thing, it’s okay, nothing wrong with it. But how can you tell what’s important when the going-ones in I’m A Celebrity is given more promotion than the story about Parliment voting to bomb Syria? 

It just gets a bit overwhelming at times. Like information overload. The press has always had the finger pointed at it for over-hyping one story, to mask over another one. A way of attempting to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. And that made a lot of people bored with the press, and turn to sides like Twitter and Reddit for more direct news. But when companies can pay for an allocated number of retweets, how honest is what we actually see? 

That’s what I sometimes think about, and to be honest it freaks me out sometimes. There are so many different ways to get information these days, and a lot of the time, every take is slightly different. So what has been added for effect. Is that ‘first hand source’ really telling a true story. You never know. 

As good as the Internet is for finding out information about the world we live in, sometimes I think it would be easier if all the web was used for was Netflix.

Disconnection Notice

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

It has recently been made abundantly clear that my, once passionate, love affair with the internet is going through a rough patch. I am becoming frequently frustrated to the point of putting my phone’s internet off, so that people can call me if they need me, but I don’t get interrupted by the constant Facebook and Twitter updates.

Yes, I am at that stage where I am avoiding the other party of the ‘relationship’. Normally in that situation, you would change how you walk to work, or try and hang out with different people. Try and create some space between yourself and the other person. However, when your relationship is with such a thing as the internet, it isn’t that easy. Actually, it becomes so overly dramatic that a relationship with a real person would have probably been easier to deal with.

I mean, everyone has been in ‘that’ relationship, where despite loving that person, everything they do winds you up the wrong way. Where you just want smack them on the head, and you can’t really tell them why. So, you try and put some space between you both. However, saying you ‘have a sore head’ doesn’t stop the internet. It is everywhere. Everything from restaurants to tampon companies have their own twitter handles. If you liked one craft page 2 years ago on Facebook, the site recommends events near you every 2-3 days. Sometimes I feel smothered.

But that’s not even the worst bit. When I was at my lowest point, the internet came to the rescue. It showed me that I was not alone in feeling so rejected all the time, that I could voice how I feel, and all seemed awesome. But, obviously, fairy tales don’t actually exist, and reality happened. When I say reality, I mean people who like to spread hatred from behind vague avatars. This was a nasty streak in the internet that I never foresaw. It wouldn’t happen to me, we are so happy together. But it did.

Now, a person’s nasty streak is easy to deal with. You can utter sarky retorts to their insults, or you just walk away. Yes, what they say hurt may leave a mark, but you can leave that one person. The internet isn’t a singularity, so dealing with any negativity from it, is a bit harder. If someone has taken to ‘troll’ something you have created, it normally isn’t just one person. And you also may find these trolls are a bit braver than what they would be in the real world, which means more cutting comments. I did what any sane person would do, I decided I needed time apart from the internet. I stopped going onto forums and writing blogs as often, as these places are where the negativity came from. Good? Kind of. When I did log on, I saw a lot of hate and the spread of intolerance. This is not the internet I had loved and used so heavily.

Who are you these days, dear internet? You are no longer the place that I go when things get to stressful. After allowing me to feel free, after so long hating who I am, you are now lampooning me for being that same person. A normal person would at least be able to explain their actions. And, as an adult, I wouldn’t need to rely on a person for EVERYTHING. My job exists because of the internet. I get my music and TV over the internet. I contact friends around the world on the internet.

Maybe I just need to change my relationship with the internet? Or maybe get in a relationship with a real life actual person?

Or not.

 

Technology’s Least Favourite Person

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

The biggest problem about using a lot of technology, is that sometimes it can stop working. Something happens, and it feels that, no matter what you do, things just don’t go the way you plan it. That is the problem that I had today. First my phone refused to charge. It kept popping up with a message saying ‘device is not compatible’, despite me using an official Apple charger. It’s not something that surprises me, because despite the cost and how good the actual devices are, iPod/ iPhone charger cables are absolute terrible. They always seem to break, a small lose connection renders the thing useless. I got the cable working again, mostly by unplugging it from the mains for a bit. I don’t know how but it seemed to work.

And that was okay. After visiting the Doctors, I decided that I would use the afternoon to make a video, get my YouTube channel working again. So I thought I’d record a video explaining why my previous videos had disappeared, and the name change, which has all happened for the same reasons as this blog has changed. There was no point in having the ‘graphics’ title in anything if I wasn’t uploading anything to do with art. Makes sense. I made all my existing vlogs private, as if to get a clear slate to work off. So far, so good. I then decided to record a quick vlog, explaining the changes. I tried using my Canon camera, it didn’t work because something corrupted in the memory card and I had to format it. So attempt one was a bust. I then tried to use my webcam, but my movie editor wouldn’t pick up the sound, at all. So I resorted to my iphone. Shot a video in 2 parts, went to import it into my computer, and it didn’t transfer just deleted the videos off my phone.

At this point, I was close to just leaving it. But, after some delving, I realised the current iOS YouTube app allows you to upload direct from the app. Which is good, because for a while there, you had to upload using a different app. Which was a pain. This time, fortunately, the video recorded and uploaded no problems. It did mean that the video wasn’t edited, but at the stage I was at, it didn’t really seem important.  But I got it up, which is a good thing, considering that YouTube is where my creativity tends to go to die. It is easier to watch people’s stuff, than make your own. But because vlogging helps me just as much as blogging does, I thought I’d make the effort.  See the results below.

https://youtu.be/VcMK1Cxdz7M

The video is so simple, but I don’t think that people realise how much effort goes into making a simple video appear online. I mean, it has taken me hours just to get that video available for others to watch. Of course, technology was a major problem today, but usually I would edit a video, and that takes time. And I think people need to remember how long things take, before they post hate on someone’s videos.