Wombat

One option a lot of people overlook (or don’t know about) is connecting a landline phone to your cell phone via Bluetooth. For all practical purposes this makes the normal phone work as if it was connected to a regular landline, and does not require VoIP and also does not have the issue of no or questionable 911 service (in most areas, however be aware that your actual location will be only as good as what your cellphone company provides to the 911 call center, Still, it may be better than what you get with some VoIP companies, who may route your call to the wrong 911 call center).

In order to do this you need a device that handles the connection, and there are two I am aware of from different companies. One is called the Cell2Jack and the other is one of the models from XLink. One is less expensive than the other, and at least one offers different versions that do different things, such as allow you to connect two cell phones simultaneously. The downside of these is if you carry your phone around with as if it were some kind of implant then it probably won’t work because you will be out of Bluetooth range most of the time. In my case I only use my cell phone as a phone, so when I come in from outside I lay my phone next to the device and it just works until I leave the house and take the cell phone with me. This has the added advantage of not interrupting my sleep with text messages, not that I get many of those. It depends on your usage scenario but if you just want something that will just let you use a landline phone without paying for additional service, this might be the answer. Be aware that if you have an older house with phone wiring in the walls, you can hook one of those devices to a phone jack and it will let you connect your phone to any of the other phone jacks BUT you must make certain your inside wiring is disconnected from the network interface box outside, and of course you must make sure your cell phone is in Bluetooth range of the device.

I am not giving URLs because any decent search engine should help you find those devices and because I don’t know if doing so might might cause this post to get flagged for some reason. I have no interest (financial or otherwise) in either of the devices I mentioned, though I am a happy owner of one of them.

I have a suggestion for those that don’t have a burning hatred of all things AI or Google - try NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google/) which is FREE for limited usage. It may take you a few tries to learn how to use it effectively *there are videos showing how) but what you can do is give it a list of URL’s on any topic. These can be man pages, wiki links, PDF documents, links to specific posts or discussion forums, YouTube videos, or almost anything that can be accessed via a link. You can include up to 50 links for free (up to 10 at a time, I think it is a bug that if you try to add more than 10 at once it just silently fails and then you have to go to a different “notebook” and come back to try again).

Then when you have added all your links, you can ask for a summary of the material, or ask specific questions based just on the links you have added (no more outdated responses). You can even do things like generate graphics or audio “podcasts” or even videos with really bad visuals (IMHO) based on your links collection if you want to. But what I find is when dealing with complex material it often makes connections that I would never have seen. And did I mention it’s free for limited usage? You just need a Google account to use it (and yes I realize that’s a non-starter for some people, and no I would never ever include anything personal in my links or requests).

I hate it when AI hallucinates an answer but I REALLY hate it when I try to ask a question and some smug know-it-all tells me I just want to be spoon fed the answers and didn’t do any research on my own. Usually if I am to the point of writing a post asking for help I have tried the usual ways of finding answers (at least the ones that work for me - man pages decidedly do not) and I’m at the point where yes, I WOULD like to be just spoon-fed the answer if you know it (or at least a relevant link), thank you very much. More than once I have got REALLY pissed off at a guy like that and then usually I’m the one that gets censored or booted out of the forum, while the know-it-all goes on to find another victim to bully. Oh, and then there are the moderators who censor “low quality” posts (except from their friends and users they like).

So when AI came along, I found it much easier to ask it and try to work through the hallucinations than to deal with that, and I suspect a whole lot of other people felt the same, and that is one reason why sites like Stack Exchange saw participation fall off a cliff. And AI keeps getting better and (so far at least) has never once criticized me for not trying hard enough to find something on my own. I get some people want challenges in their lives, but not everyone does and even those who like to be challenged now and then don’t always want it to be in the same areas of their lives. There are people who enjoy running in marathons but who would hate any friction at all when trying to use their computer.

This is sort of a compilation of things I have heard:

Too many distros to choose from and I tried a couple of the ones that were supposed to be good for new users, but had issues that I found too annoying to ignore. And when I tried to get help online, I got rude responses from Linux users who just seemed to assume that I was a young guy that ought to learn how to code and fix my own problems (I am not young and I will never be a coder) or accused me of wanting to be “spoon fed” the answer (yes I do, and exactly what is wrong with that? When I ask a question in an Apple-related forum people there have no problem just giving me an answer if they have one!). So I turned to AI for answers so that I didn’t get all that attitude, and AI is great when it gives you correct answers but very often it just made shit up, and it’s hard to tell if it’s giving you a correct answer or hallucinating. And even an AI doesn’t know everything, not yet anyway.

I live in a rural area and there are no local sources of help that I’m aware of, and definitely no Linux user groups if those are even still a thing now, but even if there are, if they were using a different distribution than whatever I am trying to run they probably couldn’t help much.

Oh, and I absolutely hate typing stuff at a command prompt, I may do it occasionally to fix some weird issue (assuming someone else tells me what to type) but all the normal stuff should be doable using a GUI app. My Macintosh hardly ever asks me to type anything at the command line and that is how I like it! I am a computer USER, not a programmer, not a coder, not someone who wants to spend a great deal of time “learning” a new operating system. I want to be able to turn the computer on, read my email, browse the web, watch YouTube videos, type and print the occasional letter, save and view/play my photos and music, etc and not have the operating system get in my way, or force me to try to learn how it works internally.

And the final reason is that only Linux users still seem to think that reading a bunch of documentation is a prerequisite to using a computer, I have yet to see one good video that explains to someone that has never used Linux before how to use it (an “explain like I’m 5 - or 10 - and this is my first ever experience with a desktop computer that happens to be running Linux” type video). It is wonderful that so much random documentation exist but hardly anyone is going to just start reading it as if it were an instruction manual on how to build a garden shed, and even if they tried, anyone that doesn’t have a photographic memory will quickly forget everything they’ve read because so much of it makes no sense at all to anyone who is not already very experienced with Linux. Nor will they remember all the options associated with various Linux commands that are typically shown in such documentation.

Like I said, kind of a compilation of things I have read or heard, and I didn’t even get into the gaming stuff because I’m not personally into that and therefore don’t really understand the issues there.