Drop-In Time toots were popular this week. A lot of people (relatively speaking) asked about how the setup worked. This blog post which I'd written in 2018 is actually pretty accurate to what I do today. A few changes:

- I do it at the public library now (and once a month at a senior living place)
- I will occasionally do a house call (library pays for this) or email support
- we no longer have a local adult ed program or a coffee shop where you can run a tab

https://www.librarian.net/stax/4841/ask-a-librarian-how-does-drop-in-time-actually-work/

Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I'm currently engaged in one of Vermont's mostly widely enjoyed competitive sports: not turning your boiler/furnace on until you absolutely have to. My bedroom has a heat pump and it is fine. The kitchen has a pellet stove and it is fine. I am typing in another room and I've only got so much time on these fingers. Have a comfortable weekend.

image credit: Preus Museum, on Flickr Commons
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56434318@N05/32856644152/

Thanks to @jessamyn 's excellent posts, I have seen several people express interest in starting a library tech drop in at their local library, which is a fantastic idea. Libraries are all about people helping people! I wanted to share a thread with a few tips for people looking to start a meetup/help group at their library.

First, check to make sure a thing like that doesn't already exist - and if it does, don't think "they have it covered" - go help! Programs like this always need more people. If they do have one already, think about how you might help get the word out, it's so hard to get the message out about these things to people who need them. (1/4)

It was a long day but with more Ws than Ls, made tougher by the fact that the library is always underheated and I was so busy my tea got cold. I ran into a lot of friends at the library and stayed to chat because even though the library was cold, it was warmer than my house. I went home with a book of Billy Collins poetry and cranked my pellet stove up. EOM

I talked him through how I did not *think* they would make you do that (but I've seen weirder VT tech things) so maybe show me? The vibe I got was that he may have been second-guessing if he was on a real VT website, or just had a use case in his head which was maybe not totally explicable. I said we could reset his password but he said maybe another day,

Last up was my friend Kevin who lost his job last week (he was also in last week because he'd gotten information on his severance package in a PDF that he couldn't open) who wanted to know if we could "get his Google password out of his phone." I said maybe, but if he was already logged in to his email why did he need it? He said something about needing to log in to the Vermont Department of Labor with his Gmail password.

Gary just wanted the notifications from the various PDF applications to stop. I mean, he didn't know that is what they were, only that he was trying to use his phone and he kept getting annoyingly interrupted by something that was talking about PDFs. Gary doesn't know what a PDF is. I deleted every scammy looking PDF app from his phone which seemed like a better option than disabling notifications.

Ray wanted to know how to scan a QR code so he could get some introductory offer from a credit card company which only had a QR code as the way to get it. I showed him how his camera could be used as a QR code scanner and how to see what it was doing. He was able to do it on his own and was able to fill out the rest of the form on his phone.

The phone was active, hooray! Now we needed to set up voice mail. I don't know if you've ever tried to set up voice mail with someone who is unused to following the standard audio prompts but it's tricky. Steve's first few "recorded names" were "What?" and "Hold on a sec, wait..." and "Hahaha" but we got it done. Steve has no email address and we were both tired so I told him we could set that up next week.

It was one of those cases--we just need to do something, not teach skills--where I did the typing. The minutes had a scratch off thing for the pin and the FUCKING NUMBERS SCRATCHED OFF.

Steve didn't seem like he had $30 more to buy more minutes so we worked the problem. There were maybe three numbers I wasn't sure of. I figured we might be better off calling tech support. After a lot of me saying "Agent. Agent." to their AI, I talked to a human who guided us through it, but it was a 20 min slog

She wanted to go over her texts from Apple with me to see which ones were scams (all of them?) and I showed her how to mark texts as junk. This was empowering for her!

Steve had been waiting patiently this whole time but just kind of staring at me, patiently, but staring. He had a brand new smartphone and pre-paid minutes that he'd bought from the Dollar Store and needed help setting it up. He'd had a smartphone before but not in a while. He had a laptop but he barely used it.

They then had to enter all their prescriptions but since they were decently tech savvy, they did it themselves and Kathy reading prescriptions to Bob who would type them in was background chatter for all of the rest of this.

Linda got a text from "Apple" saying that she was logged in from five different places and if this was not the case to call this number ASAP. Linda called. Once they asked for her Apple ID she was like "Wait you told ME about the problem..." and hung up.

A friend of theirs who is a doctor recommended some website where they could comparison shop. They were stymied by it. Apparently one of the early steps is where you choose your local pharmacies. We have one local pharmacy, singular, so the website required them to scroll past a lot of white space to get to the continue button. Never considered a use case with ONLY ONE PHARMACY huh?

Drop-In Time is a time where I hang out in a room at the library with a big table and a lot of chairs and help people with their technology problems for two and a half hours. These are their stories. It was cold today so I was warming up some water for tea and by the time I got upstairs at three past the hour there were four people waiting for me. Whoops!

Bob and Kathy had a Medicare prescription drug plan that wasn't going to be around next year so they needed help finding a new one.

Librarian.net: Why half the internet was broken yesterday, the two issues

Unsolicited tech advice about the two issues (PHP, compromised certificates) that, separately, each pose some security risks and are worth attending to.

https://www.librarian.net/stax/6002/why-half-the-internet-was-broken-yesterday-the-two-issues/

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@Walkaholic/117472527922723039

If you're not in one of the countries where eBay is legally required to notify you of your right to opt out of your data being used for AI training (European Economic Area, U.K., Switzerland, perhaps others), then eBay probably sent you a different email which doesn't mention that you can opt out.
However, you still can, at this page:
https://accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-preferences
#eBay #AI #privacy

Book 76: The Collected Angers. A collection of Monteiro essays that from a couple of different places, mostly advice to designers especially younger, new-career ones. If you know the sort of writing he does, this is the short form version of it. There's some overlap because he's talking to different audiences (you'll read a couple of anecdotes twice) but it's strong, forceful and says things that need to be said about how to do the business part of design, from talking to clients to getting paid

Book 75: The Last Detective. This was recommended to me as a good detective series if I was looking for one. I liked the detective character--Peter Diamond, an old-school technology eschewing guy--but found the plot of this story a little basic at the beginning and convoluted at the end. It's from the nineties, so we don't have cell phones or really personal computers, just a lot of "working the problem." A good book for nighttime when it's helpful if stories are a bit dull.

It was more like graupel but I definitely saw snow outside this morning. #FirstSnow

Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I've sorted out my car situation and now just have to do the endless twiddling of my car's settings so it's not doing things I don't want it to. I'm sure you can relate. One thing I don't want it to do is read email. Hope you have a good weekend adjusting things just the way you like them.

Image credit: State Library of New South Wales, on Flickr Commons
https://www.flickr.com/photos/29454428@N08/6456366655/