I hate my freeview box.  Its some piece of junk made by Tatung (who used to make quite good monitors)

Its not that difficult to use, its just it often takes a few seconds to action any command from the remote control, it sometimes freezes or crashes and requires me to cold restart it (ie: yank the power adapter out and put it back in)  I dont think its any physically wrong with the hardware, I think its just the software the makes it all work together was made on a friday afternoon.  Theres a serial port on the back of the unit which is not documented in the manual, a call to Tatungs technical support would not tell me what its used for, and told theres no firmware updates for it.

Now if I struggle to operate it, how is a retired person supposed to use it?  I do not honestly think we will be ready for big switch off of old style aerial television, despite big campaigns elderly people are going to be baffled by a screen of fuzz when the big day comes.  Reminds me, seems you wont be able to use a small portable camping telly either, as my local market still sell 5″ black and white units for £20 or so.

I dont have any interest in cable or satellite TV, as I dont think I watch enough telly to just to justify the cost.  With regular telly, BBC has the business model of a yearly subscription, ITV and Channel 4 use adverts.  So it seems that with Sky and co, having subscription and adverts seems like a con that you are paying twice?  Hmmm.

It seems a lot of electrical items focus on having a lot on putting as many features as they can and little effort is made to the whole user  interface experience.  Mobile phones are good example of this.

I would quite like to get one of those boxes that record TV to hard disk.  A few things worry me about this.  Do the manufacturers take into account things like ability to restore the software on the hard disk itself?  or, how to defrag or scan disk the disk when a large amount of programs are in a big jumbled up order?  Such an item could be a huge disappointment if you are not able to manage the structure and files on the drive, or put on a firmware update to take advantage of newer channels etc.

We are always advised when using computers that, we make sure our keyboard is comfortable so we dont get repetitive strain injury, which is quite true. My Compaq laptop comes with a big warning sticker above the keys. Health and Safety is preached everywhere, that you can go on a work training day on state-the-bleeding-obvious type things like how not to fall of ladders and trip of electrical cables, and I am just referring to regular office workers rather people who handle machinery and chemicals.

What I want to know is did people get this illness before computers?  In the days of heavy mechanical levers on typewriters which required a lot more effort to type, did people get this problem then? I have always wondered that a lot of modern complaints seem exactly that, modern, they just didnt seem to exist despite similar equipment and practices, decades or hundreds of years ago.

I say this as I tend to get pains in my hands if I write more than a 2 sides of A4, my handwriting has always been bad, which is one reason why I took an interest in IT, as it seems less effort and gave neater results typing. I was slow to learn how to hold a pen properly at school and probably still don’t do it correctly now. Did people in ancient times, like writing the Bible get this problem?

Lots of people are allergic to nuts these days, but 10 years ago, or at least when I was at school and college, I am sure this type of food intolerance wasnt heard of.

Have we in todays society become more fussy, get ill more often, or have our bodies changed?