Technological Revenge Part ?

Where to begin? There have been several incidents of this I have had to deal with recently but none worthy of their own posts. It is hard to even order them chronologically as some began before others but finished after them. I’ll start with my printer/scanner.

Bought in mid November, IIRC, last year, it did not come with instructions. No owners manual. It did come with a QR code sticker on the printer to use to sign up for the companies services, register the printer and download the app. It has now been too long to recall all the details and reading through them would just cause almost as much frustration for you as living through it did me, or just cause the reader to give up. As best as I recall, I had complete all the above and more before I could use the printer. Extremely frustrating as I had something I needed to print right away. Finally complete, I printed out whatever it was. However, I could not scan. I needed to sign up for the app.

I was certain I had done so as I couldn’t print unless I did. I tried to log in to the app. It wouldn’t accept the password that was saved to my keychain. Not the first time this issue has befuddled me with other websites or apps. As this is a common issue, I wrote down the password but that would not take. After hours of trying numerous ways to solve the mystery of why I could continue to print but not scan, one function accepting my saved password and the other not, I gave up and went to bed LATE.

Several other attempts over the months since to connect to the scanner, each taking multiple hours, also failed. Suddenly, last week I caught a notice balloon stating that either the app or firmware was updated. I tried again and magically, all functions suddenly work without me doing anything other than opening the app. Why is this acceptable? Thankfully, the printer worked since the beginning as I needed it to do my taxes. Several of my employers no longer issue monthly pay slips nor the yearly earnings statements needed for income taxes. Employees must log into the employer’s website and download and print these documents themselves, using our printers, paper, ink and time. Do you think we got even a tiny raise when these tasks were suddenly thrust upon us?

An issue that has long plagued me is unique, I believe, to Japan. Though I suspect may also be true with websites/apps in other languages that use kanji. This is the half width and full width character requirements for different fields of online application forms. When I first encountered these, it was a time wasting issue for me only as though time consuming, it was easy for me to toggle between these two sizes. There was even a key dedicated to this function on Japanese models. Then things started to go weird. Despite the key existing, some webpages would not recognize its inputs. Searching around, I finally found the correct pull down menu to use. Took more time than before, especially as with some I could still use the key and others I could not. Then the key and the pull down menu have at different times disappeared. When using the touch screen key board, this key is sometime present, but often disappears leaving me with no way that I can find to change character size. This was issue with my printer, which drove me nuts because it wasn’t a problem to sign up on the webpage or the app to print but the full/half size key vamoosed when I needed it to log in to the app to scan. ArrrrrrG! Now, get this. I copied the correct sized password from the print side of the app and pasted it in the correct field for the scanner. The app “corrected” the character size to the wrong size. It did the same when I typed it out in the proper size on different apps, Notes, Pages and even when my boss sent it to in the proper size via email. This is a long standing issue for me. In the rare cases I finally do get in, updates have a knack to screw things up again and I lose access to entire apps, devices or certain functions of them from time to time.

None of this nonsense happened when printers were connected by cable to computers. We also didn’t have documents, photos or whatever we wanted to print or scan being sent through the air and someone else’s servers. For the moment, I am scanning all I can before POOF, I can’t again.

I have a lot of points from my credit card. With my excessively high failure rate signing up for things online, I only used my points once, years ago when I exchanged them for gift certificates at the now closed customer service counter where real, live human beings were there to assist. Ah, the memories....remember these? After the move I knew I needed to change my address for my credit card but ran in to same old full/half sized character issue. After some time, I successfully changed my address....or so I thought. They sent an email telling me that they accepted the change. I thought that would mean that it was changed, no? Well, the point use catalog on the same website didn’t get the electronic memo. It still showed my old address. I closed the website, reopened it and tried again. Still not reflecting the change that they told me they accepted. I clicked the icon to change my address that was given on the catalog webpage. This gave me a message telling me that I had to change it on a different page, the page I changed in on and that displays my new address. After 45 minutes of trying to get the ordering page to reflect the change, I accidentally ordered a Dyson air purifying heating and cooling blade less fan to be shipped to the ex-wive’s house. This is what I wanted to order, but would have preferred to have it delivered to my residence and not to my former one to carry over a kilometer in the rain, wasting the entire morning.

The fan also did not come with instructions. Had to sign up for a Dyson account, register the fan online, down load the instructions and print them out. This too is a long standing problem. My son loves Lego and in the past he would get a large set for either his birthday or Christmas. Lego now has Technica, I think they call them, sets that include gears and linkages, and other mechanical devices. Really cool stuff. These too do not come with complete instructions. Several of the sets he has can be used to build two or more different vehicles but the instructions for only one come with the set. To get the instructions for the other vehicle requires scanning the QR code, signup for an account with the company, register the set online and down load the 58 page instruction book. Then what? Allow my son to use my iPad for several days as he works on building it in the few, short breaks his mom allowed between assignments and activities or print out 58 pages in color? I have every single iPad I have ever owned, 7 I think now. Two are in use, these are my newest iPad Pro, the large one, which I use for almost everything, and a regular iPad that I do what I can on it while on the train and as an emergency back up for the iPad Pro. The other five I keep for legacy as each has data, mainly music, that I cannot access on newer models. More on that later. So I thought I would blank my oldest iPad, save the Lego instructions to it and give it to my son.

In retrospect, it seems like I misordered the tasks to accomplish this. My first concern was could I actually remove everything from the iPad and completely sever it from the any and all online services, so that was what I did first. “Yeah, now all I need to do is save the instruction book from Files on the iPad I was then using to a SD card and save it to the old iPad.” So thought I. Over two years, perhaps 3, of hours and hours and hours spent trying to get the instruction book over to the old iPad, I over heard my son disappointedly telling his mom that daddy never gave him the instructions so that he could transform his Lego hovercraft to an airplane. I printed out the 58 paged color instruction book in secret, not easy to do with everyone home cuz Covid and put it in a photo album as a gift from Santa.

I cannot recreate all the ways I tried to get the instructions to the old iPad and it would bore you to tears to read through all of it. Here are just a few. First, the SD reader I have for the then current iPad is incompatible with the old, pre type C, pre lightning equipped iPad. The media reader for that iPad predates SD cards, it reads CF cards. The reader for my current use iPad does not read CF cards. Actually, these are not entirely true but are close enough to give you the idea. On the software side the issue was similar. The older model iPad cannot use the newer versions of the apps required to open the file containing the Lego instructions.

Already in his nothing but study life style enforced my his mom, he has never been able to build the Lego airplane. If I had known that despite hours of attempting a large number of paths that I would not be able to put the instructions on that iPad I would have just printed them out and sucked up the cost. Printer ink was then very expensive. Now, just expensive.

I may have written on the following in the past, at least in part. There is the widely held belief that each new generation of electronic toy and upgrade to the infrastructure needed for them to operate allows for greater access to information. This is false. These are in fact funneling us all to less information as each upgrade results in information loss. I have long loved music. My collection of recorded music extends to before CDs existed. I have a lot of cassette tapes and some LPs, many of which have never been sold in a digital format. These include folk music, sea shanties, civil war era military band and fife and drum music from my reenacting days and those of various groups of my musically inclined friends. I invested a crazy amount of time dubbing these to MP3 files stored in various media; first MDs and later in iTunes amoung others. At one point years ago, Apple deactivated all the music I saved to it that was not in its online catalog. No one makes MD players any more. When asking about them at the big electronics stores in Tokyo, I am actually laughed at by the sales staff. What was for me the ultimate in flexibility in music media use, my Sony minicompo from 25 years ago with double cassette deck, CD player and MD recorder/player and its like are extinct. So too it seems to be the case with home music systems that play any of my 3 iPods. Further many of the songs I paid for over iTunes or Apple Music while in Japan are now no longer accessible in Japan. Does Apple Music refund the purchase price for these? Of course not. How about needing to pay a subscription fee to listen to music I bought before the MP3 format existed?

Compare this with older audio recording tech. In the newspaper article that first alerted me to this 30 years ago the author told of research he did that involved listening to interviews of US WW2 veterans recoded right after the war onto audio recorded and played on devices that no longer existed. The tapes were still extant as were the plans for the player at least and as it 100% mechanical in construction, they rebuilt one and were able to listen to the recordings. Is it possible for anyone to build a MD player from scratch?

How about what I wrote on the first generation of floppy disks, when they were actually floppy? How about any data storage media? I have USB thumb drives that for whatever reason/s I can no longer access the data stored on them. Others cannot save anything. Same with external hard drives. Same with hardware. I once had a device called a “Wormhole” that allowed me to transfer data between my Windows machine and my Mac. I got busy and was unable to use it for a while. When I tried again after a period of time, it was no longer compatible with my Mac. I have not been able to find anything that performs the same function. This problem “works” in reverse too. Newer memory sticks, SD cards and external hard drives with high memory capacity are often incompatible with older devices. Makes transferring data considerably time consuming. Automatic cloud back ups are no solution.

The two devices I currently use are an iPad with 256 memory and an iPad Pro with 2TB. Automatic back up services try to down the 1TB plus memory of photos and audio files on my iPad Pro to the much smaller iPad. Worse, whenever I wish to delete photos, videos or audio files from any device, it deletes them from Al devices and the cloud. Thus, I have all these auto save functions turned off. I fear that I have lost photos of family events before I realized that deleting anything anywhere deletes it everywhere. This set up is the most ignorant I can think of. Absolutely Faucing asinine. What is the point of having two devices if they do not allow you to have different data on them?

Then we have the cloud storage services themselves. I lost a tremendous amount of edited photos when a major name company decided to end this service. Lots of pro photographers were furious more than I as this sudden move destroyed their businesses. Other photo editing apps have suddenly changed their pricing making it too expensive to continue using them, and of course you lose access to the files even if you down loaded them, once your subscription ends. Not always the case, but too often is. Of course, refunds are rarely offered. Another issue with apps is when they suddenly drop a feature, one of the few for which I subscribed to it and in many cases thee reason I did so. No refunds.

I once had about 8 GB worth of newspaper articles I used as resources for discussion classes. These were gathered over a period of ten years, minimum. When saving, I would save each under the headline and in folders named by subject matter and in alphabetical order. Then they suddenly disappeared. All the folders were empty. I could see that they still took up the same amount of space on my hard drive, but I found no way to access them. Customer service was as helpful as a screen door on a submarine, or a mask against Covid. 18 months later, they magically reappeared but not in a way that was usable. First, they were not returned to their folders. Worse, none had the names they were saved under. Instead, they bore names like, “Japan Times Article 1” up to like 1500. Had only around 500 named “New York Times Article 1” and up. Absolutely useless. Another is from a different time when articles saved under a then common format suddenly were no longer recognizable. I could and did convert same of these but as there was not a way to mass convert them, most were not. More wasted effort and lost information. Sometimes, typing in the headline in a search engine will bring up the article, but as time goes on, this works for fewer and fewer. The local library in my small town in the middle of corn fields had a copy of every single newspaper ever printed in the town, going back to the town’s founding in 1841. Yet, online archives go back only to the last major upgrade of a newspaper’s data holding system. Information lost and as too few know that next to zero, far far far less than 1%, of information mankind posses is in digital format, me thinks this is no small thing.

How about updates to operating systems? The most recent one for my iPads has very cleverly added a tool bar that offers the options to change the window size, on some apps, minimize or close, however I see little difference between these last two as the icon for the app remains in the dock whether it has been minimized or closed. It is a nice feature, however it has to be among the most idiotic ideas to have the close icon a hair’s breadth above the back arrow. On some apps, the close icon obscures the back arrow, making it well nigh impossible to use the back arrow. Truthfully, I have found it to be impossible to use it, accidentally closing the app each time I try. I should add, I use a stylus, so it is not a fat finger issue. Functionality lost.

Speaking of updates, Apple Music now has this annoying feature of the next song beginning before the one before it ends. I HATE this. Following the instructions, I accessed my account via my computer, for I cannot with the iPad, and tuned it off. In a replay of other issues where I chose one of the options provided, the one I chose changes nothing. In this case, turning it off in my account did not turn it off in the app. In other cases I selected “No” to exporting my iTunes library to Apple Music and it did it anyway, and since then I have not had access to some of my music. To prevent the loss of it, I had turned off sync on my iPad Mini. Auto updates had long been disabled on all my devices. After quite some time, I happened to see the syncing indicator spinning on the iPad Mini. I did not turn sync back on but back on it was and it synced and I lost the music I wrote about above. Apple hates it when you elect to not have everything done automatically and they have ways to reset your preferences to theirs. Every time they have done so with me, I have lost data and functionality.