Technology. Wonderful innit?

T’internet, camera, satnav, apps, all there on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop.   All integrated, with data and images flying around in the ether over wifi. Yeah right…

Everybody thinks I have all of the latest technology. I don’t and I never have had. Okay, I did upgrade to a smartphone ( iphone3S ) when my Motorola was still perfectly good (I was s till using that 3S when the iphone6 was launched. It’s in a drawer in my kitchen and I noted the other day it had exploded. I ran it into the ground. Funding for a replacement arrived in the nick of time. Equity release anyone?).

I did buy a desktop when I was using this laptop but that was another story. The TV was about to die and I had no money for a new one so just for a laugh, I applied for an imac on Apple credit so that I could watch TV on it when the TV died. Of course I never expected the credit to be granted so I fell off the chair when it went through. I was so shocked I left the imac in the box for a year before I even plugged it in. Guilt? I think we are in about 2012 here. So I switched to the imac and lent this laptop out to a young friend a couple of years ago.

I’ve never had a ‘proper’ camera either, just a cheap digital thing. I did buy a decent video camera, but I then realised that I didn’t really want to make movies ( other than the porn ones, natch ). I like taking still photographs and making collages, slideshows with music, that sort of thing. Anyway, the video camera got left behind in a taxi at Murcia airport in 2009 so that was that. I did get some money back on the insurance though! Good friends who are aware of my occasional carelessness will understand this. I am shit hot at ‘Mi xxxxxx es perdido’ in Spanish.

I do have an ipad, which I scraped the money together to buy. It’s an excellent product, but it’s only an ipad1 which is now almost useless. It really pisses me off this. All it needs is more memory which of course you can NOT add. It’ll do email and twitter OK but try loading a link in the Facebook app and the whole thing crashes. Planned obsolescence anyone?

So, having sorted myself out with an iphone6s plus in the Spring I also invest in a Panasonic LUMIX bridge camera for this holiday. Just one problem, I don’t have a laptop anymore ( out on loan ) and I need a laptop for downloading all the photos, writing the blog posts etc. No problem, I get the laptop back from the lad that had it ( he’s deleted iphoto….), update the software, give it a polish and ‘Klaar is Kees’. Off we go to Spain!

And then the trouble starts. This laptop is from pre 2008 and now deemed obsolete by Apple. it’s on a very old version of ios which you cannot update. Is the iphone6 compatible with it? Is the Pope Catholic? Can you reinstall iphoto or Apple’s current offering ( which I hate ) called photos? Er no. Can you connect it to icloud for syncing of photos, contacts etc? No. Can you run the WordPress app on it ? Cat, hell’s chance.

I manage to move the photos from the LUMIX to the iphone, and the photos do go up to icloud, but of course they don’t come back to the laptop. Can you make photo albums in the online icloud? Can you do it in the phone? I want to put albums on Facebook and here in the blog. The same album. Google is a bit more helpful, it let’s me put Picasa on the laptop so I can park my photos there too but then it wants me to upload them to Google’s ‘cloud’ which is a duplicate of them in icloud. Ah ! I can create albums and publish using my Flickr account. Well I can but all the photos are in the album newest first, when I want them to be oldest first. My albums tell stories and that doesn’t work very well backwards.

So we have another go with icloud, and yes we do work out how to create albums in the phone or online and then publish them but the interface into Facebook is much uglier than Flick, which at least puts up the first image for people to see as opposed to icloud which puts a drawing of a man wearing spectacles up…

Desperation sets in and we draw a flow chart to try to solve all the problems.

The upshot is, that only the iphone has the WordPress app and all the photos to enable me to easily create the blogposts I want. But I find typing on the phone horrendous. It’s why I brought the laptop with me #fatfingers

So, I am writing this on the laptop and my next post will be done on the phone. Let’s see how it goes shall we ? This blogpost may be 1 of 1.

Friends from work will remember that I one of the most determined users out there and I am going to make this work COME WHAT MAY. Rules will be bent I am sure. There will be tricks! I’m in a lovely place to fiddle about with all this, I do enjoy the intellectual challenge and I have all the time in the world but it really shouldn’t be like this. I guess the blame finger has to be pointed firmly at Apple. This laptop should be allowed to run a more current version of ios.

PS The TV did die, but in the end I was able to replace it with a new one and that’s another story for another day!