h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's time to come clean - I haven't got a clue! Not a clue. On the outside it looks like I know what's going on, and if you have a conversation with me it looks like I know what's going on but I really haven't got a clue.

This is mostly about technology. There are so many things I would like to do and it seems like everyone else finds it easy to do but I am paralysed by the fact that I don't know where to begin. Just where do you begin? Example: I'd like to add some videos to YouTube. Where to begin? Do I need an expensive camera? Can it be done with a phone? How do I choose a camera or phone? What sort of files are made? Does it take weeks to learn how to do it or is it intuitive? Do I need to buy expensive editing software? How the hell do other people find out about this stuff? Just where do I begin?

Example 2: I can't get YouTube to play videos now. What do I do? Get a new computer? Ring YouTube head office? Take my computer to PC World to get fixed? Put an ad in the paper asking for help? Hope the problem will go away if I leave it? Go to the bookshop and look for a book "100 YouTube problems and how to fix them"? Join a forum? Which forum? A general computery forum? A specialist YouTube forum? A general computery problems forum? What do I do when they use terminology I can't understand?

You see, I haven't got a clue and I don't know where to begin. Not only am I a centipede paraylsed by the thought of not knowing which leg to move next, I'm doing it in thick mud. Any advice?

Frustrating, isn't it?

I'd type your questions in plain English into Google. There will be thousands out there experiencing the same.

In the meantime, wait for all the YouTube-savvy researchers to arrive and start asking you dumb questions.

Oh, and you may save time by switching it off and switching it on again before they arrive

"I can't get YouTube to play videos now. What do I do?" [The Groob]

My first computer had speakers built in. My second did not, so I thought there was something wrong with it because I couldn't hear anything. Somebody at data Doctors explained the situation, and I got some speakers that worked. Now that I'm on my third computer, I have an audio cord connected to the computer and my Bose stereo, so I hear *good* sound.

Of the options you list, I suggest the shop that fixes computer problems. There are all sort of insane things going on with flash players and adobe this and that. They send nasty pop-up messages about upgrading to the newest edition. Technology seems to have as its goal, the aim of totally demoralizing you and me. If they are reading this thread, they know they are succeeding.

Good luck. At the heart of this dilemma is one simple fact: humans change very slowly, and then only over thousands of generations. Technology advances rapidly in some eras [this one, for instance] and slowly, if at all, in others. The Renaissance, it is said, was made possible by an improved version of the plow, which raised farmers slight above the subsistence phase. The tiny amount of extra time and energy they had left over after meeting survival needs gradually allowed them to think about intellectual and artistic [and, yes, scientific] matters. The rest is history].

We stand on he shoulders of our predecessors. We also stand on zillions of ancient organisms whose bodies went to make up the fossil fuels that we run the modern world on.

If you go to a youtube page; do you get teh flash warning thinggy, coming up, sayign its blocked your flash player, because it is outdated, and vunnerable?:

if so, then that is probably because your've not updated your browser, firefox, internet explorer, chrone, etc, to the 'lastest and greatest' version; this may well b because, like some of us, you've still got an 'old' PC running along quite happily on an old opperating sytem (currently on an XP machien down here, for example; but I've managed to make it still recognize youtube, err, don't know how, by turning off some of the youtube/flash thinggies, that kept blocking the flash player on pages). I basically oughta be running this old XP machine as an offline, no internet machine; i use it for audio recording, and as it works perfectly fine for it, there is no advantage to replacing with an updated machine, for say £3000, and then having to update software, for at least another £2000, to achieve, exactly the same results I can now. - its a nice acletic mix, anyhow, of old software, overly expensive hardware at the time, hence why it still stands the pressure of jobs at hand, mixed in with some really dirt cheap second hand external gear I bought online and a few choice external new shiney bits for audio input etc, whcih would move over easily enough, to a new machine... I tend to use teh win 7 laptop mainly for the internet, as its still possibly to update stuff on it, unlike on XP not that I know anything about anything mind; I just keep hitting it with my aubergine, until it caves in and does what I'm screaming at it.

2legs made some good points there excellent advice from the other posts to.

A pocket digital camera will cope with your needs and give excellent results with a good SD card (16 mega bite) there is an entry that might help with the dilemma (A87849102) good luck

Icy said
"Oh, and you may save time by switching it off and switching it on again"

In the old days, that was standard practise (as Icy will know)

In stubborn cases, leave it off for an hour - or preferably overnight - to allow those stray charges to disperse
Maybe that delay is less useful nowadays (with resistors, capacitors, coils being so much smaller) but still, it's worked at least once in the last five or six years...


Good Luck

My internet stopped working briefly yesterday while my 6 year old nephew was watching skylander videos on you tube. I sat down and checked a different website, just in case it was you tube at fault, while he went off to the toilet. When he came back he asked "Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?".

And I had just restarted my home hub, which is essentially the same thing. And it worked.

If off/on again doesn't work, asking here would be my second option. It does seem that someone always knows the answer

But I think to really understand modern technology you have to be 15.

Deb

Shutting the system down and restarting it to clear a crash (system slows down drastically or seizes up and refuses to function at all) has the effect of dumping the cache, which tends to accumulate junk files to the point of unusability.

An alternative is simply to clear the cache on the web browser, if the web browser has internal controls that allow that.

Clean Master, a free utility, also provides tools that can be used to the effect without having to shut down and restart (reboot) the entire system.

http://sensortower.com/android/us/cheetah-mobile/app/clean-master-speed-booster/com.cleanmaster.mguard

Especially, their CM One Tap Boost and CM Game Master features are easy and convenient to use and fast.

The link given is fo Android, will work also for other Linux and Unix OS.

Cleanmaster also produces similar utilities for Windows and Mac.