Hardware Ram

Thanks to all who gave attention to my VIC-20 setup!

As a treat, here is my baby, currently awaiting a power supply repair. Sorry for the missing key, this was a landfill rescue ^^;

I wish I could write about the way my mother uses computers under my real name. It's quite remarkable. She does the wrong thing, reliably, but she is also scared of clicking anywhere at all. She never copies and pastes anything, she distrusts computers, she always writes things down on paper, to the effect that online banking has become a slower and more arduous process with more wasted paper compared to just filling out bank transfer forms or mailing cheques.

But I can't. People who know me would wonder why I am disparaging my mother in public. People could deduce my mother's identity from my own, and potential employers would wonder why I am writing about this personal stuff.

But the way my mother uses computers is super interesting! She is the worst-case user of every UI. She never copies and pastes. She never clicks "OK". She always closes every window before she opens a new one, and she never ever multi-tasks. If you send her an e-mail with information to enter into a web form, she will print it out and type it in again. When filling out a form, she never presses tab to go to the next field. She always looks down, gropes for the mouse, looks up, realises she has pushed the mouse away while grabbing it, looks for the mouse pointer, slowly moves the pointer back to the place where she wanted it, and then clicks in the field she wants to edit. Then she carefully places her hands back on the home row of the keyboard (still looking down), and starts typing. The whole ordeal takes about ten seconds each time.

She never presses backspace right away when she inputs text, a habit from her old typewriter days. Instead, she always finishes typing, and then she puts the cursor in front of the mistyped character she wants to erase - with the mouse, which means she looks down, gropes for the mouse, looks up, realises she has pushed the mouse away while grabbing it, looks for the mouse pointer, slowly moves the pointer back to the place where she wanted it, and then clicks - and then she presses delete on the keyboard. Needless to say, this method makes it easy for her to forget a mistake she had typed in and wanted to correct. Watching her type in an e-mail is an exercise in frustration, and a simple bank transfer to pay a bill, something that should be three minutes total, easily takes her fifteen minutes per transaction.

Sometimes she takes a coffee mug to her computer desk, and she usually places it on the mouse cord, or she moves the keyboard back to put her mug down in front of the keyboard. Together with a stack of random of papers she keeps on her desk, as well as the paper and pencil she uses to wrote things down, that coffee mug on the mouse cord turns the switch between the mouse and keyboard into the classic wolf-goat-cabbage puzzle, adding twelve seconds to it every time.

When my mother saves a document, she saves it in the "My Documents" folder. Usually she opens an old document, edits it, and saves it under the same file name, and thus a file like "Rental Contract dacha 2006.doc" may actually be about different tenants who rented the dacha in summer 2014.

In addition to never cutting and pasting, my mother refuses to select things, to drag and drop, to use a context menu. She sometimes right-clicks on icons, but that never does what she wants.

When I try to walk her through a process over the phone, she will sometimes ask "left click or right click?", and when I say "left click", she responds "I already double-clicked, is that also okay?"

When told to double-click or right-click, she will click the wrong way, maybe double-right-click.

When there is a yes/no/cancel modal dialog, she always clicks "cancel". She usually doesn't read what's inside the dialogue, she just clicks "cancel".

When I ask her to describe what's on the screen, she always describes everything on the screen, so sometimes she reads out things like "My Computer" and "Steam" (installed by my dad) when the window is not maximised. When I ask her to take a screenshot, she uses her phone. She doesn't want to use share her screen on a video call to let me troubleshoot things, because that would mean opening another window on her computer. She never takes screenshots directly, because that would violate three of her rules: One, it means pressing a non-letter key on the keyboard/a keyboard combination that isn't entering text; two, it means using the clipboard; and three, it means pasting content into another application to share it with me.

Imagine describing in detail over the phone how to copy and paste text between two documents. There are at least ten steps you have to follow, ten instructions in order you have to get right with no mistake in between. Selecting and copying text take five steps: Hold left mouse down at beginning of selection, move to end of selection with left mouse held, release, right-click on the selected text, left-click "copy" in the context menu. There are already so many things that could go wrong with the copying part: My mother sometimes drags things around in e-mail and word documents by accident; she could right-click on something else and open the wrong context menu, she could click outside the window, she could click the wrong mouse button at any time. "This is all so complicated, son. I'm an old woman who didn't study this stuff at uni. Why do I have to do this? Can't I just use a pen and paper?"

Don't even think of telling her to press CTRL+C and CTRL+V. This is much harder.

My mother has been using computers at work since 1992. She has been doing online banking in some capacity for at least 20 years, but now there are certain paperwork things she has to do from home, that previously could have been done in person.

My mother had talked to my sister and to me over Skype, back when my sister was in the US and I was an undergrad. This was forever ago. My mother still has that same shitty webcam, but getting people into Zoom meetings is considerably trickier than Skype. My mother often took the car to fetch grandma from her house so she could talk to my sister over the Internet. Today, failure is not an option, you can't get most people in the same room and have one or two be present non-physically, and for some reason everybody in these bloody meetings has to turn sound and video on at all times. It really has gotten harder.

But also, for thirty years if you count private use, my mother had refused to learn what the computers she uses every day actually do and how to use her software.

My mother does not understand the difference between a local file, a file on a share on a different computer, and the cloud. She does not understand the difference between a local application and a web app. She does not know when something is a software bug, a bad wifi connection, file corruption, user error, or a virus/hacking. If a web app she uses for work changes the UI, she does not know whether this is a phishing attempt, a bug, or just something she needs to deal with because the company fired their Rails devs and hired React devs.

My mother is resistant to explanations of basic computer literacy topics. She only remembers concrete steps in concrete work flows, concepts like "files" or "clipboard" or "browser" do not exist in her world. She thinks she does not need to learn this stuff, because she gets along, kind of. She's functionally computer illiterate. She's somewhere between functionally illiterate and a high-functioning illiterate person who has built up a repertoire of tricks and excuses to navigate the world without needing to read.

She's by far not the worst case I know. Among non-technical people who work with computers, I would have to rate her below average, but not an outlier.

I which I could write about her case when I talk about UI design. If I talk about this kind of thing in the abstract, some people think I am exaggerating. If I say "think about something your mother could use" or "think how your mother would use this software", people may call me sexist because I said "mother" instead of "parent". If I say that this is literally my mother, other people say I am unkind to my mother.

Well, this is my own anonymous void to shout into. My mother can't use computers, and yet she does.

I’d be really interested in your thoughts on UI design regarding this. Many devs at least try to take reasonable measures to deal with the less computer literate people in the world, but at some point those measures always end. Just like when you have an actual illiterate person and you even provide them with somebody that reads out everything written and writes in their spoken answers, you still will never be able to deal with a person that sticks their fingers in their ears, refuses to listen and will also not answer questions when asked.

What, for example, would be a way to cut down on the time it takes her to fill in those bank transfers? Maybe filling out the slip in paper and making a photo to OCR in the banking app? Would she be willing to use the banking app in the first place? Or would she refuse to on the grounds that only the photo app should take photos, not the banking app or something similar?

I also must be honest, even though you say you know people much more computer illiterate, I personally don’t think I’ve ever met a person this computer illiterate. I might rant about my own mum, but she can mostly follow instructions if they’re explained to her the first time and she gets the chance to write them down. My still living grandparents don’t use computers at all, but can use their phones mostly fine, including picking up on things like reordering apps and the like (after a while). They are open to the technology and want to use it because they see the benefits for themselves, even if those benefits are just being able to play candy crush.

We can deal with a lot of stuff. We can’t and shouldn’t be expected to deal with active refusal to at least listen to a suggestion. I’m sure there are ways to get around that, but the farther along that path we tread, the more icky it actually feels. If someone really wants to not do a thing, we should let them, and let them live with the consequences. If those consequences are that bank transfers take 15 minutes now, well, you’ve shown them every way, they’re an adult and decided for themselves to take that route instead of a different way.

A thing that interests me greatly: what exactly is going on in people's minds that generates resistance to explanations / refusal to learn?

Not in the critical sense! Not from the "they're wrong and should stop being so" angle, that'd really be unkind/uncharitable. But surely there are some explanations, something that makes resistance the sensible response?

toyhouse and sheezy (and eventually artfight?) having customisable HTML for your profile pages: yay yippee i love customisation ^_^! i know a lot about HTML and CSS ill keep an eye on the help sections every now and then to answer questions

everyone apparently: how do i add autoplaying music and strobing lights to my profile to give everyone migraines and seizures and blast them into cyberhell

me: 🫠

maybe its just me but i think it's possible to achieve the retrocore aesthetic without giving me a migraine and also being a hospitalisation risk for everyone with epilepsy

"at least you can turn custom css off on these sites" -> the gifspam is the most dangerous thing here and that's unaffected by disabling CSS, especially considering "disabling CSS" only gets rid of the custom stylesheet, and does not strip it of its inline styling, so more often than not all it does is break the page without getting rid of any of the risk factors.

Ideally, these sites should have "disable CSS", "display profiles as plain text", and "pause gifs where possible" using JS to pause all html gif images.

"at least these sites have profile warnings" -> in toyhouse's case, people are regularly putting these dangerous gifs into the profile warning page, and in both toyhouse and sheezy's cases........

idk how to express that it sucks to be excluded from half the website because they care more about their profile's aesthetic at the expense of people's safety and lives.

I'm thankful to only experience migraines, but "only" still means debilitating pain that can last days, makes it difficult to eat, and isolates me.

an epileptic toyhouse user who got lambasted for making it put together a blocklist of people with dangerous profiles because they had gotten hospitalised twice from just browsing the site.

so again. maybe it's just me but i think it's possible to achieve the retrocore aesthetic without giving me a migraine and also being a hospitalisation risk for everyone with epilepsy.

percussive maintenance

a wikipedia poem on software entropy

(via Commodore PET 8032-SK - Old Crap Vintage Computing)

NEC (1982)

Oh hey I have this beautiful boy sitting right next to me!

Early American Commodore VIC-20 with a modern sticker to replicate the style of VICs in early advertising photos. No VICs were ever sold looking like this, so I figured I would have fun with it.

Hyperspace Commodore