you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
A community for memes and posts about tech and IT related rage.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27501866
source: @[email protected]
There are tech savvy people in every generation and some dumbos. IMO the low bar for being tech savvy has nothing to do with PDFs, it's whether or not you can install a functioning operating system on a device. Anyone who can do that can figure out any of that other stuff.
That's a terrible bar for who is tech savy. I can guarantee Zoomers, on average, are far less competent with technology. It's not their fault they grew up with apps and iPhones.
That's not the bar it used to be. You don't even need to worry about device drivers anymore.
Even the most difficult Linux installs now aren't that much more complicated than XP was.
Anything from Home Assistant / Sonarr / Radarr / ntfy / MQTT / LoRa would make my current basic savvy list.
It's a low bar, being less about knowledge and more about willingness and curiosity.
I've long said that I believe Millennials, as a generational cohort, are the best at typing that ever has been and ever will be. We were the first generation where adults really recognized that we'd be using computers our entire lives and took steps to teach typing. But, so much more importantly than that, we socialized through typing. I had typing classes in school, sure, but I learned to type quickly on AIM and in chat rooms.
Earlier generations only really typed for business or school. Later generations socialize over phones, so they, too, only use a physical keyboard for school and business.
I guess I should amend this theory to include all tech literacy in general.
As a Zoomer, I also had typing classes, but I learned how to type because I wanted to be able to quickly send messages in Minecraft when I was like 7 years old 🙃
I didn't teach my older zoomer kid to type. He learned on his own out of the necessity of chatting with friends in online games, played on his computer. He uses the first two fingers of both hands, and he's faster than me, who learned in school and has been a touch-typist for 40 years.
I think we're moving away from keyboard and mouse, anyway. It will be AR headsets with voice, eye tracking, and hand gestures for most use, and keyboards will be used only when direct input is needed.
To be fair, PDFs suck and the only software that handles them well is paid and proprietary
Is this some Acrobat functionality or something?
Off the top of my head, there's pdfjam, pdftk and imagemagick (don't forget the --dpi switch) who could probably do that, after reading the man pages. Or ghostscript' gs, if you want to go in-depth.
But generally, just rotate the source material you've got the pdf from. That's how it is intended.
I've used ghostscript a few times to reduce the quality of images within a pdf, so they wouldn't be freezing my phone while reading. From ~80mb to 25mb
The folks at Corvus Belli could learn a thing or two about that when making the pdfs for their Warcrow game (the core rules pdf is 118MB for 60 pages)
Guess me and my partner are exceptional zoomers? Them having a diploma in computer science and i am a software developer
I was pretty worthless with computers at 16 too.
Now I’m almost 40 and I’m working In the industry and slowly getting worse again
There's one generation between boomers and zoomers? I'm pretty confident I know who it is you're forgetting.
Gen X and Y
X MARKS THE HIDDEN TREASURE
Gen X: the forgotten generation.
LOAD"*",8,1 generation
Goomers and hoomers and foomers and schroomers are all alike and your generation is smarter.
The thing is most of us cant even rotate a pdf, but we do know how to learn it.
Load up Adobe Acrobat, like the button that looks like it will rotate the document.
I assume that's the process. Never needed to do it but I have no doubt I'd be able to work it out
“like the button” - not sure if typo or using “like” to mean “click”.
Like that button. Love the button. Gently caress the button.
like that smash button
truth
YES! being able to google (or read) goes a long way.
Eh PDFs are just annoying to deal with. I could do this stuff the adobe acrobat when I had the paid version in school but I'm cheap and no longer have it. If I'm feeling desperate I'll find the ghostscript command that does it otherwise I just do something horrible (for example scanning to jpeg rather than PDF creating an HTML page with both images and printing that to PDF)
From writing a limited amount of code to generate PDFs from scratch the standard is just cursed. It was using 7 bit ASCII until fairly recently resulting in an eighth of the document being wasted space. Also when the switched to PDFs being an open standard the specs went from something freely available on adobe's web site to a challege of how to send 98 swiss francs to ISO to get access.
PDF24 has been my savior for anything pdf related. I learned about it and suddenly I no longer hate pdfs.