Adventures in Tech, by Neil McGowan

  

There’s been a distinct lack of writing time over the last couple of months. Partly technical issues, and partly that wonderful thing called life getting in the way.

We’ve just spent the last few days moving my eldest into accommodation at university. She’s going to be an Occupational Therapist, but the last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of packing up boxes and, in terms of writing, the nearest I’ve managed to get is a couple of recipes and some instructions for the microwave and cooker…

I’ve also dredged my memory to advise on the joys of academic writing (because ‘You write stuff, so you know how to do essays’, apparently). I even found a copy of an old guide to how to correctly reference sources and after a quick review and update, gave them that. Fingers crossed it helps, as otherwise I can see me spending the next few months going over Harvard Referencing – not really my idea of fun.

The technical side has been more frustrating. As I’m moving away from a reliance on the big US tech firms, I’m discovering just how difficult they make it to operate without them. I’m using Linux to write on my laptop, and have an online platform from Murena that ties in well with Linux and my phone (phone actually runs Murena’s own OS, a de-Googled version of Android – I like it; it’s clean, fast, and pretty stable). But trying to do things with it is...interesting, sometimes.

Although I can get the various apps and software I need, getting them to work can be an exercise in frustration. And the so-called technical support of most companies is, well, not that supportive. Scot Rail, for example, suggested I ‘Use Google Chrome and an Android phone’ to resolve a missing option in their ticketing app. Telling them my preferred browser was Firefox (well, actually, I told them it was Waterfox, but they’d never even heard of it, so I fell back on Firefox which I also have installed) was met with a blanket ‘Just use Chrome’. Sigh…

It’s been similar with quite a few services. I missed last month’s post due to Google themselves refusing to allow me to log in for using an ‘unsupported browser’ (no prizes for guessing what they recommended…).

Still, with a bit of perseverance, I’ve managed to get everything working now. And the Murena online office tools are much nicer than the Google workspace my kids had on their Chromebooks, not that I’m a big user of online tools for writing – I prefer to keep my files local where I can manage my backups, rather than on someone else’s computer (which is all the cloud really is). But for jotting ideas when out and about, it’s brilliant, and syncs nicely with my laptop. Perfect for those times at work when I don’t have a network connection due to the building acting as a giant Faraday cage) – just write on my phone, using a small Bluetooth keyboard, and it all syncs seamlessly in the background as soon as I can pick up my home server where it’s hosted.

The whole experience has left me extremely cynical about big tech though – now sketching ideas for a story about it looking forward to getting some words down...