Just for Fred

Safety first, ease-of-use second, everything else a distance third

Interestingly(?)—or at least coincidentally—I fired up one of my older laptops shortly after we talked this AM and I hit two issues that completely baffled and frustrated me for a while. I eventually solved both but only because I have developed a degree of computer instinct over the course of 56 years. I mention this because you will discover during your computer journey that the machine makes you feel powerful like a god when all goes well; but like a total helpless idiot when problems occur. So if that can happen to me after 56 years we need to keep the Fred choo-choo on the tracks during the early going because if we don’t set you up with safety and ease-of-use in mind a bad initial experience could be the end of the experiment.

Human/machine Interface

It won’t be too much longer before Martian in disguise Musk manages to pull off a feat even harder to conceive of than the Second Coming, with his Neuralink company. This will enable him to harvest the sum total of all human knowledge (to complement every shred of data possessed by the US gov’t, which he’s already got copies of) as well as control every person on the planet as if they were his personal robots. I may be [slightly] exaggerating but otherwise am dead serious.

What am I getting at? All existing—and contemplated—paradigms for the human/machine interface totally suck. They slow computers down to a tiny fraction of their capability and make humans feel slow and stupid. But when Musk and Neuralink solve the technical issues of wiring directly to the human brain while cleverly skirting the associated moral issues (by pretending his goal is to help people with brain damage) the human/machine interface will become totally trivialized and irrelevant. Actually humans will become trivialized and irrelevant as Martian Musk returns to his home planet with the sum total of all human and earthly knowledge.

Hopefully you’re motivated now to focus on how Fred and his computer are going to interact; i.e. communicate with each other. This is the single most important issue in selecting your equipment.

Interface Options: pointing device

You tell the computer what to do with (typically) a keyboard to type on, a “mouse” or similar “pointing device” that makes it easier for you to direct the computer’s attention to a specific place on your display aka monitor, and a couple of buttons that enable you to tell the computer what you want it to do when you have pointed something out to it with your pointing device. That means your fingers and/or hands are going to have to move back and forth between two input devices. That is no big deal, but only if we can find the devices that will work best for you.

The most popular choices here are:

·         Mouse: the most common, a thing separate from the computer you move your hand to when you want to point to something. A mouse typically has 2 or 3 buttons.

·         Touchpad: these are typically built into the keyboard so you only have to move a finger of two to go back and forth between keyboard and pointing device. They typically have the same 2 or 3 buttons, although they may be ‘virtual’ buttons in the sense they are built into the touch pad.

·         Voice: a decent choice if you want to use your phone as your computer but otherwise it can be a bit clunky, slow, and error-prone.

There are plenty of other choices—in fact I don’t use any of the above items other than voice, and that only when I’m stuck without access to a keyboard such as when driving. I hate mice as well as touchpads. I can show you what I use but it’s not likely you would prefer it to the more traditional approaches.

As you can guess pointing devices come is a dizzying variety of shapes and sizes, wired and wireless, etc.

Interface Options: monitor/display

Having talked about how you will communicate to your computer let’s turn to how it will communicate back to you via a monitor aka display. That is easy to grasp yet not as simple as it sounds because monitors come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and be built into a laptop and/or freestanding. They come in the same endless choices of sizes just like with TVs as well as different resolutions (determines how sharp is the picture when looking at movies, sports, etc.). You even have a choice of a matte or glossy finish on the screen (I hate glossy, other folks love it). They also can be wired or wireless.

Next Step

So we’ve got step one identified. You need to kick the tires of these various options for interacting with your machine. There is actually no better place to do that than where I’m sitting at the moment. I have 5 laptops, 3 desktops, and 7 monitors in my fleet and a decent variety of the mechanisms you can use for interfacing with a computer. I’m happy to have you visit at your convenience; also happy to accompany you to a store (Best Buy or Staples are probably the best local choices) if you prefer that approach. Just please don’t go to the story by yourself. I know you way better than any salesperson so am your best bet for a good outcome. J