Technology-Love it or hate it

[RayW]

Now as an old guy, like many of my sector of the community we have a love hate relationship with technology. For me, a lot of it is towards the hate side of things. In many areas as far as the general public is concerned its a pain the arse. Medicine, defence, engineering, these are all fields that benefit from it.

Here then is an example of my hatred for it. My wife bought a new Casio scientific calculator for me the other day. I opened up, no manual. This is a $119 job, and the one it replaced was much the same, bought in 2009. It had a small book with it, luckily I kept that. So I called up the newsagent where she purchased it asked them. The answer "oh that stuff is all on line now!" My reaction- wtf?

[boronia]

So true.

Once, when you bought an appliance you'd get an instruction manual about the thickness of a telephone book. Now, all you're likely to get is a small booklet with umpteen pages of "Warnings" and "Safety Instructions", along with an A4 size paper explaining how to plug it into the wall socket.

[scott]

Friends of ours have a new Kia Seltos, the manual is bloody thick, takes forever to look up anything, you can download the manuals from the Kia Australia website. For the audio unit, the manual is a few quick reference pages, and a QR code that links to a website with the full information.

Also in some cars, particularly Mercedes, there is no service logbook as such, and the service history is all online.

[RayW]

Yes its still hit and miss isn't it? After I posted this topic I looked through our old junk box where we've kept all our manuals for various appliances we've bought over the years. The book for our 1978 Hoover twin tub is all of 4 pages. While the manual for our relatively new Simpson 8kg washer is near the size of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

[ScaniaGrenda]

on the other hand, anyone that is a gamer will have grown up always getting a small manual booklet alongside the game explaining what the game is, features, control scheme etc and I have found with many titles as of previous generation (Xbox one / PS4 Era) the inclusion of physical manuals has dropped dramatically. If you want support they now days just tell you to go visit their support section on the developers website. All you get is a small synopsis on the back of the case.

I have relatives that also recently invested in a Brother sowing machine, to my surprise that actually came with a physical tutorial CD that I believe showed the Do's and don'ts of using the machine and how to set it up. IMO physical media is sorta dying out so I always thought it would've made more sense just to link people to their support page or Youtube?

Don't get me wrong on the other hand, physical does have a place for myself. How many platforms out there still don't show a particular show, movie, documentary etc and are only sitting around on physical media somewhere? Plenty and not possible to name all of them. Mostly it comes down to rights & legal concerns I suppose. "Lost Media" is actually a thing too believe it or not but that is for another topic another day.

[scott]

I remember when my father bought one of those Triton workcentres you mount a circular saw on, it came with a four hour video hosted by the guy who invented it, showing how to set it up and how to cut bits of wood.

[RayW]

Our son was big on gaming back in the early 2000s, I recall one game he was into was based on D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) The little book that came with it was immense.

My current bug-bear. Telstra said we had to ditch our copper line for the home phone. Now connected to NBN, honestly, in a week its been nothing but trouble. Drop outs, weird echoes on the line. Truly it is utter garbage!

[ScaniaGrenda]

My current bug-bear. Telstra said we had to ditch our copper line for the home phone. Now connected to NBN, honestly, in a week its been nothing but trouble. Drop outs, weird echoes on the line. Truly it is utter garbage!

That's because you're 99% more than likely still partially using copper. I'll explain in Simple terms because this can become easily complicated.

NBN has this fixed line technology being used called "Fibre to the Node" basically the connection that comes from the exchange side is Fibre optic, that connection runs as Fibre until it reaches a giant green box called a Node Cabinet and from there the transition is made to the copper cables and makes its way into your property / business using an existing lead-in. The reason Fibre to the Node was even made part of the NBN was simply for political issues, it is and will always be a Liberal Idea. This all started back near 2013 or so when Labor lost the election and the Abbot government was elected.

Having really been involved in the NBN in it's early years (as a technology enthuistist) I really learnt a lot about our communications networks and backbones and it really opened up my eyes. What has happened to the NBN should never have happened, I know we get a lot of "but labour" but I'll say if Labor had remained in government, chances are you would be sitting on a Fibre to the home (No copper) connection right now and would not be experiencing drop outs (unless your internal cabling was crap or your hardware was failing or your ISP was a flop). When NBN wanted to build it's FTTN network they didn't purchase new cabling, they simply purchased the existing copper network from Telstra who was more than happy to sell it off and they got it in as is condition (majority of it rotten and well past it's use by date).

You should have a communications pit somewhere on the street, no you can't legally open it as it isn't your property but If it was open, chances are there is water in the pits and copper carries electricity and we know the two don't bode well.

Ray what you have is a serious fault, lodge it with your retail service provider ASAP, tell them you have been experiencing constant drop with your service and that there is echoing on the phone line. You have to go through your provider as you are a customer of them and not NBN, NBN will not help you. Chances are once you've made contact with your provider, they'll run you through the troubleshooting process and then when it's determined on their end it's an issue, they'll either send someone out or log the issue with NBN which NBN will come out and inspect the copper on their side of the network (street or what is in the local telephone pit).

Hope this helps.

P.S sorry for the wall of text but thought I'd explain some additional things about the NBN.

[RayW]

Apparently we're not alone. My wife's cousin who lives in Merrylands has experienced the same thing, as has our eldest daughter and several of our friends. Telstra doesn't give up anything when you ask them, they just tell you they'll check it out.

To be honest with you, we never had a problem with the old service and that we've had since we were married in 78. The TV reception today is quite similar with several channels losing transmission on regular basis. And that has nothing to do with NBN, our TV or the aerial. All of which has been checked out.