Gave up because of hardware issues. Laptops had fan problems with it on, the grub wouldn’t install right, a lot of the good distros would show up as black before or after installation. My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot. Most of these computers should work very well with Linux but they never did for me. Back then it was a matter of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Over a decade ago in our high school we had a personal finance class in 1st year; we learned about tracking stocks, limited budgeting, how to fill out a check and that was really it. However, nobody cared and why should we? We couldn’t even work until 16 years old and we were 14 and you can’t get stocks until 18. If it were at around 3rd year then it would have been more relevant.

Most of this stuff is now obsolete due to technology anyway. I rarely cash in checks but all I do is just take it to cash checking. No name signing, just give them the check, get photo taken, and get the money.

Taxes is the only thing that isn’t obsolete and should be taught at some point somewhere. Sure, some of it is just copying numbers but then there’s tax deductibles and running a business that requires quarterly taxes when over $1k.

Got an Alphasmart Neo, it’s basically a keyboard with a big enough unlit screen with a printer port and computer port. The original Neo model was made around in 2004-2006 and was made by Apple employees with education and disability in mind.

For the longest time I wrote on laptops and tablets but the fragility, battery power and eye fatigue made them not as suitable for continuous writing. I had the money and saw others talk about the Alphasmart devices as being the best writing tool, so I got it.

It’s been 2 1/2 years and the batteries I put in are at 60-56%. The device takes 3 aa for power and a coin cell (like for weight scales) for the memory. I can spend the odd multi-hour writing sessions without ever worrying about the device dying from lack of power. And it takes a lot of writing to get the aa batteries to run down a few percentages.

Features:

• Nearly indestructible exterior
• Turning it on/off and navigating between menus and screens takes seconds
• 8 file (tabs) buttons to keep 8 projects open at a time
• Each file autosaves and can save the projects into named files to keep it in the memory
• All or individual files allow for password protection
• Just words on the screen
• Has find, replace, word count, file storage %, wpm, dictionary, thesaurus and calculator
• Uses basic keyboard commands for text (Mac or windows keystrokes)
• Detects sections in the file by how many blank lines are inbetween (1-9 blanks and is set up by the user for how many blanks count as a section break)
• Change font sizes and ‘mod’ for custom fonts and set screen contrast
• Stop accidentally turning the device on by setting on to Enter + On
• Allows other keyboard layouts (QWERTY, Dvorak, right/left hand for disabled users) and special characters
• slow and sticky keys
• Allows Spanish writing and dictionary somehow

Most of the features I dont use but they are nice to have. The biggest plus is that it is not tied down to proprietary software or cables. It uses a printer cable (I have a regular one and a c-cable one for my phone/tablet) and all I need to do is select a file button, plug it in, get a blank document ready and hit the send button so it types everything out as a keyboard emulation. It is faster to get files with software but it is not a requirement.

Best device I spent my money on.

If it’s only on YouTube then it could be a non-chrome browser issue and/or youtube being messed up from the anti ad-blocker stuff. YouTube has been very glitchy over the past month and even so for the past couple of weeks.