Jon Wilson
Paul FordHappy Family Sysadmin day to all who celebrate.
Hammancheez@ftrain on the 12th day of reboots my user gave to me / a problem already documented in a KB 🎵
Ginevra@ftrain aka how a career in being kind to people who don’t understand the internet begins
Kirk Kittell@ftrain "celebrate"
djohngo@ftrain The next person that talks about how intuitive Apple products are is going to get a stern look.
Will Lowe@djohngo @ftrain Made me chuckle. That said, 'intuitive' just means 'thing I no longer remember having learned how to work'.
afaict Linux/Unix and iOS's upfront learning costs are high, but negligible with each extra app ('intuitive'), and Windows' are low but with a sizeable dollop for each extra app and their weird interactions ('unintuitive'), and the family sysadmin's yearly workload follows from that choice.
Except when MS or Apple try to do cloud things. Nobody understands that shit.
croqueto
Pat Dennis@ftrain
This is the year I give up on wifi printing for this home and just find a usb-b cable in the garage
This is the year I give up on wifi printing for this home and just find a usb-b cable in the garage
Andrew Williams@ftrain no new tech in the house this year, I get a year off!
Ben Lamb@ftrain doing my level best to not involve myself with setting up the Fitbit my out of town brother mailed to my dad
David Gerhart@ftrain Yesh. Thankyou. I just had to bounce the router again. I think the ISP is choking this morning...
cthululemon@ftrain Thank you so much I feel seen
Mike Rose
joy larkin 🌺✨@ftrain The desktop I ordered for family was delayed — I’m sorry Dell’s third party delivery provider repeatedly fouled up — so the celebration is postponed until it arrives.
Bill Seitz@ftrain if you encourage your mother's luddism, you avoid it all
Peter Moore@ftrain Make sure your family members raise a ticket before you look at their issues and set their expectations for a fix given that your RFC won't be approved until CAB reconvene after the holidays.
0xC0DEC0DE07EA@PeterMoore @ftrain the literary ones may appreciate how Kafka-es que the process becomes when they want your help to get Trello on their phone so they can use Trello to get your help with their phone!
Chris L@PeterMoore @ftrain I unironically said something like, while talking about fun holiday activities, “I don’t mind changing the plan, I would just like an explicit notification that he plan is being edited.” Sigh.
Christopher 
@ftrain I learned today that printer manufacturers are not yet including USB-C cables. Had to go “connect to printer’s AP and config there” route.
I’m glad I took care of this today while on-site.
Aaron Lord 
@ftrain So far one iPhone, one iPad, and one Windows convertible. And a camera.
Chris WilliamsI've moved all my relatives over to Chromebooks.
Blessed relief at no longer having to degooberfi Windows and Mac laptops.
Daniil BaturinThey're going to use Gmail anyway, so we might as well take advantage of that.
@gaffa @ftrain Again, I understand the individual motivation to save themselves effort, but I'm absolutely not convinced that just letting the monopolies win is a right thing to do in the long term.
The reasons why people are "going to use Gmail anyway" has nothing to do with its service quality — it's Google's habit of dropping messages from any other sources and getting away with that anti-competitive behavior.
The reasons why people are "going to use Gmail anyway" has nothing to do with its service quality — it's Google's habit of dropping messages from any other sources and getting away with that anti-competitive behavior.
I've never seen anybody say that was happening, and as far as I know it's never happened to me with any of my dozen or so Gmail accounts (that I used to fuzz their tracking.)
In this world, you kind of have to pick which devil you want to deal with, and Google has done reasonably well by me.
Dan
J👀My Google Pixel phone is on Google Fi, my home internet connection is supplied by Google Fiber, I listen to YouTube Music and my TV programming is supplied by YouTube TV.
The trade-off for all of these things is that it allows them to deliver better, more targeted advertisements to me - which I block anyway.
I'd be a hypocrite to complain about advertising, given that Google pays me every month for my videos on YouTube.
Denny Cherry@ftrain this is why I started telling family that I don't know how to work on computers that cost under $100k. I started doing this 20 years ago. It worked like a charm.
bigjsl
KlavsKlavsen
Matt Rose 
Jeff Moore
gturpin
ashar
DrYak@mrdenny it's even funnier because that's also literally my case (bioinformatics analysis on very large HPC)... and my mom's (worked on IBM mainframes back in her days).
Cue in both of us looking clueless in front of some modern tiny shiny gadget.
George Mitchell@ftrain And condolences to the victims.
E.E. Reed@ftrain Three Lenovo Thinkpads (Yoga 11e, 5th generation) for our three scalawags configured and connected to the net via my phone hotspot here in rural Indiana.
Piers Beckley@ftrain Feelin' this buddy.
Patrick Boutet
Becky@ftrain Oh noooooooo...... my poor partner! I did this to @silverwizard when we exchanged gifts 😭😭😭 😅
Dallman Ross@ftrain Some just call it Boxing Day. 😉
https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/boxing-day via @Wordorigins
Boxing Day — Wordorigins.org
22 December 2015 Boxing Day is 26 December, the day after Christmas. It is celebrated in Britain and many of the Commonwealth countries, including Canada, but not in the United States. Two competing theories about the origin of the term are common. One is that the name comes from the&
Manawyrm | Sarah@ftrain Don't worry, this started by installing Netflix on Mom's iPad and it ended in me hanging upside down swapping ignition cables on a 1996 Volkswagen... Happy Holidays 😹
David Willmore@ftrain It's not so much 'celebrate' as 'observe'.
Børge@ftrain It's the most important season of the (non-election) year! :D https://tutoteket.no/@forteller/109585581852383556
Børge A. Roum (@[email protected])
Please remember to update all your families digital devices while you're home for Christmas! And while you're at it, why not have The Talk with your parents about phishing, critical thinking about what they read on Facebook, and how the algorithms work to spread disinformation if they interact with it in any way. I know I needed to have that talk.
Phil Gastwirth 
@ftrain
My grandfather got my him and and my grandmother new ipads. His was easy cause it was newer and has ios14+ so it synced everything over. My grandmother not so much. Plus it the new one doesn't have a home button so she is confused by the gestures.
My grandfather got my him and and my grandmother new ipads. His was easy cause it was newer and has ios14+ so it synced everything over. My grandmother not so much. Plus it the new one doesn't have a home button so she is confused by the gestures.
DanB@ftrain it’s a running joke in my family that I know exactly one trick.
Reboot.
The most frustrating thing for them is that it almost always works.
The most frustrating thing for me is that I still have to tell them.
That's become a huge thing as more people move to laptops. They forget that there's a power button, and they just keep closing the screen. So updates never get a chance to finish.
This is true for both Mac and Windows.
I can't tell you the number of times I've remoted into a client's computer, the only thing I had to do was literally turn it off and turn it back on again.
Infosec V'ger@ftrain After years of family tech support I learned the hard way that, “if you’re good at something, you never do it for free.”
JauntyWunderKind@ftrain chrcking in; i did a bunch of setup for the laptop i bought my sister. much not really necessary, but had envisioned something like it for a bit! tooted my doings: https://cybre.space/web/statuses/109579096219981073
JauntyWunderKind (@[email protected])
woohoo, setup the windows laptop im gifting my sister by ansible+chocolatey. gave in & installed tailscale too, & gee, it's 100% as slick & easy as i'd expected. easy mode indeed! openssh for windows is setup. so too is a debian wsl instance, which is running systemd, and it's own openssh. wrote a openssh.dnssd & turned on systemd-resolved so i can find the debian ssh easily-ish. tightvnc is also running. steam is installed for some remote play together. there's a host of other good things installed. zoom. this is all pretty overkill & semi pointless for my audience/the user/the sister. i dont think she computes or watches shit much! still, it'll be nice to give sister access to my media archives, but all that required is tailscale mostly. i just want to be able to add more wow & more bonus stuff over time, have a viable & fertile system i'm handing over that i can grow and add to remotely.
Nick 'The Viking'