I've had enough of technology, I'm gonna go Amish!

The last few days have been a pain.  I've been fighting against technology and losing!  Why can't things just work, and why can't they be easier?

Sky+
Getting a Sky+ box replaced?  Did you know you can't transfer existing recordings to your new box?  And if you're going to keep using the old one as a 'free' box in another room you won't have access to your recordings anymore?

I'm not getting a Sky+ replaced, but my parents are.  Guess who's spent much of yesterday trying to clear the Sky Planner?  Moi!  They don't have a DVD recorder so I had to come up with a genius plan of using their DV camcorder and a laptop.  Don't worry, I wasn't videoing the TV screen - their Canon camera does an analogue to digital conversion.

Mobile broadband
My sister was back from the Far East and wanted to get online at HQ (Mum and Dad's).  Should've been simple enough, it nearly always works without a hitch (unless I'm on the train or Nando's!)  Guess what?  It didn't work!  Tried my laptop, their laptop, my niece's laptop.  Nothing.  Put the SIM in my spare mobile.  Nothing.  Who gets the blame for this, depite it being outside of my control?  Me, that's who!

Sky Broadband / WiFi
The folks have just got themselves ADSL from Sky.  It wasn't working Saturday as far as I know but I figured it was worth a try on Sunday (especially as it was the Sunday that the 3 Mobile Broadband went pear shaped).  Surprisingly it was enabled and working.  Took little effort to connect to...

...oh I was naive to think that was that!  The connection was all over the place and even today there's issues with the WiFi.  One laptop works well (although it refused to even connect for an hour last night) and another won't work unless it's within 10ft of the router.  On top of that, their videosender is now plagued with interference.  Bugger.  That's another problem to figure out (oh, and I guess that might have some bearing on WiFi connection issues, d'oh!)

Sky Player / Sky Anytime on PC
This proved tricky as the software is kinda buggy (at least on this Vista laptop).  It's great when it works without issue though.  Picture quality is good and it's a genuinely useful application if you have the film channels.  Shame that there's been reboots and ctrl-alt-dels aplenty to keep it going!  Oh and the download meter bears no similarity to reality.

Misc.
Then there's websites not working properly or at all (issues not related to poor connectivity).  Slow downs in the calender option menu on the E71 - I just wanted to correct a time and I had to wait 30 seconds between button presses!  Push email isn't pushing.  Jaiku on mobile isn't connecting.  My sister wanted her pictures off her camera so we needed to figure out how to do so...

Kinda hilarious as it would turn out.  Her MS Pro Duo memory card was almost the same size as my SD card.  The Toshiba laptop takes both.  I figured I could probably just put it straight in without an adapter.  I figured wrong.  We then spent the next few minutes trying to get the card out!  My sister had work related photos amongst about a thousand on the card - she was panicky to say the least!

We got it out in the end - hopefully unharmed!  That's when we figured it would be a good idea to get an adapter for the card.  You saw how much of a success that was in a previous post.

Now I'm going to unplug myself.  I've had enough for the time being!  Might read a book or something.