at war
Yesterday, I read this very helpful piece about how to get started with Lynx, a command-line browser.
The piece starts off with a quote that's now stuck in my head:
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever."
(FWIW, avoid the logical misstep of assuming the inverse is true. Even if you do perceive using the Internet to be a constant fight, you may have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever.)
I have recently re-committed to the expectation - or demand - that my tech Just Work. "Just Work" has two equally important parts:
WORK: my tech must do what I an using it to do.
JUST: my tech must not do anything except what I am using it do.
Expecting tech to Just Work is also to be in a state of constant war with most tech.
Lynx Just Works. I use it to read text online. It delivers text online. It doesn't report on my reading or keep logs of it.
I debloated my Windows machine yesterday. It didn't Just Work before and it doesn't now. Even after the debloat, it's still borderline offensive to use - and messing around with old DOS software in DOSBox is making me realize just how out of our hands Windows has gotten.
Windows 3.1 was a graphical shell for DOS, basically. It did some of its own stuff, but it felt and acted like a convenience to the user, one that the user could abandon at any time. Everything was adjustable to your liking, right there in Windows itself. I know, because I spent dozens of hours adjusting it, to my mom's annoyance.
(She liked that I gave it a purple color scheme. She did not like that I turned the error noise into Data saying "your sanity is not in question." Sorry not sorry, Mom. Maybe you should have let me have video games.)
Now, even with third-party tools - which I had to go find on GitHub, which is itself a skill - I cannot adjust many things about Windows to suit me. I'm at the mercy of the OS. It does not Just Work.
Or printers.
In hindsight, I don't know why I have put up with my HP printer as long as I have. I do know it has been getting worse over the last couple years. It only prints from the mobile app (yes, even when I Ethernet cabled it to the computer). It pesters me for a dozen "alignment" and "diagnostic" printouts every time I turn it on. The cartridges wear out or dry out or something if I don't use them at least weekly; sometimes I'm lucky to get 20 pages out of them before the printer rejects them. It won't run at all without a working color cartridge, even though I never print in color. It jams almost every single time I print, requiring me to do more printing. Printouts often come out with the "running out of ink" white streaks, even when the cartridges are new, and cleaning it did nothing to help. It occasionally lies to me that it's out of paper, too. Recently - this is a new one - it started lying that it can't print a black and white paper form without photo paper in the photo tray!
I typed "printer without proprietary bullshit" into search this morning, and 500 Reddit comments told me to get a Brother laser printer. Which makes sense to me, honestly. We have one in the library office, and it just prints.
Our office Brother printer doesn't jam. It doesn't lie to me. It doesn't insist on running tedious diagnostics. It doesn't refuse to listen to this or that device. It doesn't clog or "run out of toner" before it's expected to (we once went three years without changing the toner).
It. Just. Prints.
Which I guess shouldn't surprise me. My Brother serger Just Serges, too.
I instantly understood the quote on the Lynx tutorial about being at war with the Internet, because I'd already experienced that as I decoupled my digital life from Big Tech earlier this year. I'm frustrated that I have to be at war with my devices. But here we are.
Good thing I'm stubborn.