Breathing New Life into Old Hardware

Posted on November 25, 2017 by Maria Langer

If it still works, why not use it?

Since moving into my home, I’ve been looking for a speaker solution that would allow me to play music or podcasts throughout my home and garage. I did all the wiring for my home, but I (sadly) did not think of wiring it for audio. Repeated Googling and Amazon shopping did not give me the kind of system I wanted: a wifi-based speaker setup that would work with my phone. All I could find was Bluetooth solutions, which were a real pain in the ass — every time I moved out of range, the sound would cut out, sometimes requiring a manual reconnect.

I was on Apple’s website this morning looking for a Homekit-compatible light switch. That’s a whole other story and I’ll try to tell it briefly: I have high ceilings in my living space and my heating ducts are pretty high on the wall. Two of them are actually up on my loft. Heat rises so, in the winter, it gets pretty warm up on the loft (and high up in the living room and bedroom). I have a temperature sensor in the loft that works with a smart plug to turn on a fan there when the loft temperature exceeds 74°F and shut off the fan when it drops back down below 71°F. (It also stays off at night since it isn’t exactly quiet and I don’t want to listen to it when I’m trying to sleep.) The fan pushes the air out into the living room where two standard ceiling fans push the warm air down into the room. It works great and keeps the furnace from running all day long, but I have to manually turn on those two ceiling fans. I want smart switches that’ll use the temperature sensor in the loft to turn them on and off automatically. So that’s why I was at Apple’s website: to see what smart switches they offered.

While I was there, I reacquainted myself with Airplay, which I actually blogged about way back in 2005 when it was called AirTunes. Back in those days, I was writing books about using Mac OS and had to buy all kinds of hardware to write about it. I’d bought an AirPort Express base station and later bought another one. I think I used them for music or printers or both. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.

Well, I still have both of those old AirPort Express base stations. For a while, I was using one of them for remote printing from my color laser printer, which I kept in my loft. My office is up there now and the printer is directly connected to my iMac so I don’t need the AirPort Express. I started wondering whether I could still use it for speakers.

The short answer: Yes.

Of course, it wasn’t easy to set up. Even though my desktop Mac is now about 6 years old and is running an old version of Mac OS — 10.10.5 Yosemite — the version of the AirPort Utility I needed to configure a 12-year-old AirPort Express would not run on my computer. I even fired up my old MacBook Pro, which is running Mac OS 10.9, and it wouldn’t run on that, either. I knew I’d configured it just a few years ago for the printer and had to do some Googling to remember how I’d done it. That’s when I found the ZCS AirPort Utility Launcher. This free utility fools AirPort Utility v5.6.1 into thinking it’s getting launched on an old version of Mac OS. That gets it running so it can configure the old base station.

An Old Version of AirPort Utility
Here’s AirPort Utility 5.6.1 running on a Mac with the Yosemite OS installed. Both of my old AirPort Express base stations are configured for speaker duty.

Even then I had trouble getting it to see the base station. I had to use an Ethernet cable to connect the damn thing directly to my ACUS router. And reset the base station by pressing in the tiny button with a pen point.

But once the software could see the base station, it configured it without any problems. I had it connect to my 2.4 G network. Then I hooked up a pair of cheap powered speakers that I used to use with my Mac, and got it playing music from my iMac and, later, from my iPhone. Success!

I went down into the garage and tracked down the other AirPort Express. I set it up the same way. I hooked that up to a stereo clock radio in the bedroom that I rarely use. I might even put it by the bed.

I still have an old Time Capsule somewhere; if I can find it, I’ll set it up for the living room and move the Express down into the garage. I’ve got an old boom box down there with great speakers; it should work fine with AirPlay.

Of course, the next hurdle to jump was being able to play music on multiple AirPlay speakers at the same time. After all, I wanted my music all over the house and garage when I was playing it. My phone could only stream to one device at a time.

More Googling. This time, I learned about an Apple iOS app called Remote. I could install it on my iPhone, pair the phone to my computer’s copy of iTunes, and be able to access my computer’s music from my phone. It works. And it sounds pretty damn good coming from speakers all over the house.

I know this blog post makes me sound super geeky. Deep down inside, I am. I especially love taking old computer hardware that most people would have thrown away by now and use it for a new purpose. Sure — I could go out and buy new AirPort Express base stations at a cost of $99 each. But why should I when the old ones I have still work?

Bulk-Deleting Facebook Data

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Maria Langer

I’ve finally found a solution that works.

Years ago, I decided I wanted less personal data on Facebook. I figured I’d delete posts from past years, so only posts from the past year or so would remain. I’d do this regularly, at least once a year, to get rid of the old stuff. At least that was the plan.

Discovering that there was no built-in bulk delete feature really put a damper on my plans. You see, on Facebook, if you want to delete you posted or “unlike” something you “liked,” you had to make three clicks for each item. Click a menu, click an option, click a confirmation button. The folks at Facebook obviously did that to make removing old content as difficult and tedious as possible so the average person just wouldn’t do it.

Not being “average,” I’d periodically delete about a month’s worth of stuff. But then even I succumbed to the futility of it all. I figured that the best way to minimize stuff on Facebook was to post less there — which is what I do now. (I basically just share links to my blog posts.)

I tried other solutions I’d found via Google. None of them worked reliably.

Until yesterday. I found a Chrome extension called Social Post Book Manager. It looked so promising, I downloaded Chrome just so I could install and try it.

It isn’t sleek or fast, but it is functional. Here’s how it works.

Start by logging in and going to the Activity Log for your account. Use the filter options on the left side of the page to display just the type of thing you want to delete. For example, if you want to unlike everything you’ve liked, click Likes. Facebook displays only the items that meet the criteria you specified in the filter.

Now go up to the URL bar in the Chrome browser. You’ll see a tiny blue and red icon there. Click it to display Social Post Book Manager’s options.

Set the options as desired. This enables you to filter by year, month, and search word or phrase. If you’re brave, turn off the check box so you don’t review the changes before they’re made. (I’m a coward and left it turned on for the first few times I used it, but it really slows things down.) Then click the appropriate button at the bottom of the box and stand back.

The longer the period you’re working with, the longer it takes to do the job. I first deleted posts that included the word “twittering” from 2007; those were automatically posted by an app that took Twitter content and posted it to Facebook. The search took about 10 minutes. When I clicked the confirm button, it took another 10 minutes for those to be deleted. Deleting all Likes from 2012 took considerably longer. Like hours.

While the extension is running, you basically have to leave it alone. The screen will flash with a dialog box that disappears before you can click anything. Do something else — but not on Facebook. You must keep that page open without changes while the extension works.

When it’s done, the items it found are permanently gone.

Using it for the past few days has taught me that the extension works best when set to slower speeds. When left at the default speed, it often misses many items. So it’s necessary to redo a period over and over to get it all removed. But no matter how long it takes, it’s a lot quicker than manually deleting or unliking content. Best of all, you can set it up to do a long period of time and then leave it while you do other things. I think of it as a multitasking partner.

And the one thing I’ve learned from this experience: I’ve shared and liked way too much crap on Facebook. Seriously. What was I thinking?

Tired of having Facebook share your life and preferences with the world? Give this a try and get some of that data off Facebook.

My MATE Bike: The Wait is Finally Over

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Maria Langer

It’s a nice bike, but I honestly can’t recommend it. Here’s why.

Way back in September 2016, I blogged about ordering a MATE foldable electric assist bicycle. It was offered through an Indiegogo crowd funding project. The makers wanted to raise $60,000. They wound up raising over $6.1 million.

The Overview of MATE’s Indiegogo campaign, which still appears on the Indiegogo site. From Copenhagen? Not exactly.

And that’s where everything went south.

The Delays

If you’ve come to read a review and don’t want to read my whining complaints about delays, damaged parts, and customer service issues, click here to skip ahead. But if you want the whole story from an actual funder, keep reading.

You see, they sold a lot of bikes — apparently enough to make them cheaper in China. So they sent the project there and spent months working with a Chinese manufacturer to get the bikes made. This added huge delays to the project. I was originally supposed to get my bike in September or October 2016, which would have been in time for my annual migration south. But instead of a bike, I got numerous progress report emails that apparently went out to everyone in my situation all over the world. Emails about new features available. Emails about working through design bugs. Emails about picking a color. Every few weeks, there would be another one, but none of them would specify a delivery date.

I went online when directed and set up an account on the Mate website. I picked a color (red). I changed my shipping address to where I’d be that winter. Later, when I left Arizona, I changed my address back to my home address. I reviewed my invoice to see if I had to pay any VAT tax (I didn’t) and tried to understand the confusing instructions about finalizing payment (I had paid in advance — over $1,000).

Months went by. When the emails came, I’d scan them to see if there was any delivery date. There wasn’t. These people wasted a lot of words on email messages that talked a lot about progress but delivered nothing.

I emailed them. I got canned responses about them being busy dealing with the amazing response to their incredible bike. I seldom got any response from a real person and, when I did, it didn’t answer my questions about when the bike would arrive.

After a while, I started to think the whole thing was a con. I contacted a friend of mine in New York who had bought one. He didn’t have any more information than I had.

A Damaged Part

The next day, I set about assembling the bike. It was mostly assembled; just a few pieces had to be put on. Putting on the front tire was Step 1. For some reason, however, I couldn’t get it on.

That’s when I realized that the front fork was bent. Badly. As if it had been crushed.

In all fairness, the packing job looked good. There was lots of foam and everything was secured with plastic wire ties. Everything fit tightly in the box; nothing had rattled around during shipment.

The damage to my fork, however, had likely been caused by a crushing weight. Whether it happened before the bike was packed or when it was put into the container or while it was moving across the ocean or when it was removed from the container or when FedEx or UPS shipped to to my friend or me is something I’ll never know. And frankly, I don’t care. The bike arrived damaged and was useless.

Knowing how bad MATE’s customer service was, I took the bike to two bike shops in Wenatchee to see if they could fix the fork. Biking is a big sport here and we have two excellent bike shops right in town. They both said the same thing: the fork was too badly bent and I needed a new one.

Crap.

I contacted my friend in New York. His bike had arrived damaged, too, but not as badly as mine. They’d been able to get the wheel on, but he admitted that it had been wobbly. I don’t think he was impressed.

Of course, there was no customer service phone number. The woman I’d worked with on the shipping issue could not help. I emailed MATE. About a week later, I got a message telling me to fill out a form on their website. I did.

Then I waited.

And waited.

I went online and filled out another form. I included photos of the damaged fork, as instructed. And I waited.

And waited.

I started sending emails to the same address I’d been communicating with. I got no response. None.

I guess this is what my Indiegogo money paid for because it certainly didn’t pay for a functioning bike.
— Maria Langer �� (@mlanger) September 20, 2017

Meanwhile, I’d begun following @Mate_Bike on Twitter. When someone tweeted a photo of their new headquarters with a bunch of MATE bikes parked out front, I went ballistic. I’d helped pay for those headquarters and I had nothing to show for it other than a bike I couldn’t assemble. I tweeted a nasty response.

Any time @Mate_Bike retweeted someone’s praise for the bike, I’d reply that they were lucky to get one that worked. I was going to be the squeaky wheel, making sure that other folks knew about the crappy customer service I’d been getting.

And it worked. After a few tweets, I got a direct message (private tweet) from MATE. They were looking into my problem.

More time went by. I kept tweeting. I began using direct messages to nag them. I still can’t believe it was necessary to be such a whiney bitch.

But it was apparently the only thing that worked. I finally got a message saying the part had been shipped. I asked several times for a tracking number and after a week or so they sent me one.

And then, two full months after the bike arrived damaged, the new fork arrived.

Yes, I waited two months for them to replace a damaged part.

Assembly

I took the bike, which was back in its box, and the new fork to one of the bike shops in town and told them to assemble it for me. I was tired of screwing around with it. If there were problems with other parts — which was possible since I hadn’t been able to get past step 1 of the assembly instructions — I hoped they could deal with it.

They did. The fork arrived partially crushed but they were able to repair it well enough to put it on the bike. They got the bike assembled and even took it for a test ride, although they didn’t seem able to figure out how to get the motor running. (They thought that something needed to be in the USB port on the computer to turn it on; in reality, the port is provided to provide battery power to a mobile phone or other device.) They did, however, charge it up for me. So when I returned the next day, in pouring rain, I had a working bike.

Not a moment too soon. It was Friday. I was due to leave on my two-week autumn vacation south on Sunday. One purpose of the trip was to reposition my truck and camper in Arizona for the winter. If I didn’t get the bike on board my truck before I left, I wouldn’t have it with me for my big winter vacation.

Of course, it was raining like hell all day Friday so the only place I could test ride it was inside my garage. My garage is big, but not really big enough to test out a bike. Because I was kinda sorta hoping to leave on Saturday, I folded the bike up and packed it in the truck that morning.

First Test Ride

It wasn’t until Monday, at an autumn leaf strewn campground along the Salmon River in Idaho that I got a chance to finally test it out. The campground roads were paved and there was only one other camper around. I pulled it out of the truck, unfolded it, inserted the key in the lock, and turned it on. I turned on the computer display. I got on and started to pedal.

The electric assist gave me a little push between pedals. I dialed it up to help more and it did. I dialed it down to help less and it did. I used the “throttle” lever and let the electric motor do all the work.

Yes, the bike worked as advertised. And from what I’d seen so far, I liked it.

Here’s my MATE bike, parked after my first real ride in an Idaho campground. Does that look red to you?

Of course, I couldn’t seem to set the on board computer to display distance in miles instead of kilometers. I tweeted to MATE about that and was shocked to get a fast response with an image laying down step-by-step instructions for getting the job done. When I finally got around to trying them a few days later, they worked. (Unfortunately, when I tried them again to change the bike’s maximum speed, I couldn’t get back into the settings. I shut the bike down with the key and tried again in the morning; it worked. Go figure.)

The Big Test Ride

I put the bike through its paces on Sunday. I was winding up the traveling portion of my vacation and my last night on the road was in Natural lBridges National Monument in Utah. I found a campsite in their very pleasant campground but the parking area was so small I had to unhitch the boat I’d been towing for the past week and leave it parked on a gravel area near one of the restrooms just so I could back the camper in. Once I was parked and semi leveled, I wasn’t interested in moving the camper. So I decided to take a bike ride through the park. I knew there was a paved loop road with overlooks and figured that the bike should be able to handle it.

When my campground neighbor saw me getting on the bike with Penny in my backpack, he asked if I was doing the loop road. I told him I was.

“It’s nine miles long,” he told me. “And it has some pretty steep hills.”

I told him the bike had electric assist and should be able to do it. I sure hoped it would. The return trip was uphill and I had no desire to walk several miles rolling a bike with a dog on my back.

It didn’t take long to fully understand the power assist feature. It has six levels of assistance: 0 (none) to 5 (the most). It seemed to work at certain speeds (depending on the setting) when I pedaled down on the left pedal. So it was like a pulsing timed with my pedaling. Kind of annoying, frankly.

The model I bought also has an independent throttle that I can use whether I pedal or not. That’s limited to the speed you can set in the computer. (Which is why I wanted to try to change it; it was too slow.) It seems to have plenty of pep on level ground and gentle uphill climbs. But when roads get steeper — as the loop road did — the motor can’t seem to keep up. I soon learned that if I kept the bike in top gear (7) and pedaled while using the throttle, I could keep the speed above 15 miles per hour and not get fatigued with pedaling.

The trip computer crapped out on me once during the ride. It registered zero speed and the odometer didn’t click. I had to turn it off (thus turning off the electric motor) and then turn it back on to get it to work again. I have a feeling that the computer is going to be a problem in the future.

Going down hill with pedal power only is pretty fast. At one point, I had it up to 30 miles per hour, which probably wasn’t a good idea. But the bike is very solid and stable. It felt good, even at that speed. The brakes work well, although they do squeak a bit.

My MATE bike parked near one of the bridge overlooks at Natural Bridges National Monument. I’m thinking it’s orange.

I answered a lot of tourist questions about the bike when I stopped at viewpoints. My speed was almost enough to keep up with the people driving the road (where the speed limit was 15 mph) and making the same stops as me so I saw a lot of the people a few times. The bike obviously looks different and that starts conversations.

The battery seems to last well. It was fully charged a little over a week ago and I put nine miles on it Sunday after about two miles of screwing around with other short rides last week. When I finished on Sunday, four of the five battery level indicator bars were still solid. I can’t remember offhand how long MATE says the battery should last, but I’m sure I’ll get at least 25-30 miles out of a charge, even using the motor as much as I did on the loop road.

On ease of folding, I give it a 6 out of 10. The handlebars fold down and then the bike folds in half. There doesn’t seem to be any way to hold the two halves together; I use a bungee cord. Once the bike is folded, it’s awkward to roll. And it’s heavy — more than 50 pounds — so it isn’t very easy to lift in and out of the back seat area of my pickup truck, which is where it’s riding on this trip. I have learned to fold and unfold it right next to the truck door.

And the manual? Very nice looking waste of paper. It has very little useful information in it. I shouldn’t have to figure out how the bike works. The manual should explain it. And I shouldn’t have to use Twitter to get instructions for setting the computer with miles instead of kilometers. That should be in the manual, too.

Do I like it? Well, it meets my needs: it provides portable transportation that I can take with me in my truck, boat, or helicopter. The electric motor, if fully charged, will give me a good range on steep uphill climbs that I likely would not be able to pedal on my own. That means I don’t have to worry much about how far I might have to ride from, say, a landing zone to a local restaurant or motel.

But do I like it? I really don’t know yet. I don’t think I regret buying it, and that says a lot. But after talking to other people about electric bikes they’ve used, I’m not convinced this one was worth the wait and aggravation.

Customer Service is a Real Concern

Despite any level of satisfaction I have with the bike itself, customer service remains a serious concern.

What I want to know is where the customer service person who finally helped me with the fork issue and was so prompt with computer instructions was last year when I was waiting for my bike to arrive and two months ago when I first reported the fork problem. It’s almost as if it took the company fourteen months to set up a decent customer service department and even then, it only works through Twitter.

So no, even though I like the bike I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone.

Why would I? Until recently, I’ve had almost zero customer service. I can imagine recommending the bike to a friend and that friend having the same frustrating experiences I have had. And that friend coming to me and saying, “I thought you said this was a good bike?”

And don’t even get me started on the fact that when I dished out $1,000 for a bike thirteen months ago, I thought I was getting a bike made in Denmark. There’s no way in hell I would have bought the bike if I knew that manufacturing was being farmed out to China and I’d be waiting a year to get it.

This has been a big lesson for me about crowd-funding purchases. I realized that funding a project doesn’t mean you’ll get what you paid for timely. Or get any kind of acceptable customer service related to it. Or, in the case of Lily, an amphibious drone a friend of mine funded, it doesn’t mean that you’ll get what you paid for at all.

So even though I’ve now participated in three crowd funding projects through either Kickstarter or Indiegogo, I will not fund another one. Nothing is so amazing that I can’t wait until it hits the market to buy it from a real store with real support.

I just hope I don’t have any other issues with my MATE bike in the future.

The Joys of Having an Expired SSL Certificate

Posted on July 5, 2017 by Maria Langer

A frustrating waste of time.

A few months ago, when it became clear that the Republican led congress was going to allow ISPs to sell our browsing history to the highest bidders, I got a bit more concerned about security. In my research, I came across an article that recommended that users never visit a website without an SSL certificate.

If you don’t know how to tell whether a site has an SSL certificate, the easiest way is to look at the full URL. If it starts with https:// instead of http:// it has an SSL certificate. Think of that extra character, the s, as standing for secure.

Also, some web browsers display a special icon — such as a lock — near the URL or possibly in the status bar at the bottom of the page.

One thing is for sure: You should only enter personal data in pages that are SSL-protected. So if you don’t know how to check for a secure page in your browser, learn.

Of course, at the time, this blog did not have an SSL certificate. I’d done some research in the past and decided it wasn’t worth the cost. After all, although I do get a few donations — thank you generous supporters! — it isn’t as if this site earns any money for me. Hosting costs enough money; buying a certificate wasn’t in the budget.

Still that article made me wonder if I were losing visitors because I didn’t have that certificate. So I did some more research and discovered that my WordPress host, Bluehost, offered a free SSL certificate for subscribers. I made a few calls, clicked a few links, installed a WordPress plugin, and voila! I had a coveted https:// URL.

And then I pretty much forgot about it. After all, typing in the old URL (without the s) still pointed people to the new one. And who types in the whole thing anyway? If you put in any combination of URLs to get to this site — or if you clicked a link that took you here — some sort of behind-the-scenes magic put you on a secure page.

Yesterday changed that. I went to check the site and was faced with the following message:

WTF?

Of course, I discovered this about 30 minutes before a friend was due to arrive to detail my helicopter and I had about a half dozen other things I wanted/needed to do before he arrived — like get dressed? (It was 5:30 AM.) So I did the easy thing: I called Bluehost and asked them what the hell was going on.

The support guy I got was very fond of the hold button. I don’t know if it’s because he really needed help or if he was working on more than one call at a time. I was on hold for most of the 45 minutes our call lasted. While I waited, my friend came, I greeted him in my pajamas, I made him coffee, and I put a bowl of cherries in front of him, occasionally interrupting our conversation to speak with the Bluehost support guy when he came back on the phone.

My big concern was this: people would be scared away by that message. They’d click a link, get to my site, and leave, thinking they’d get a virus or something. I needed the problem resolved quickly.

I was told that Comodo, the organization that provided the SSL certificates, had sent me some sort of verification email that I needed to click a link in. I told him I’d never gotten a message, although it could have been sorted into spam and automatically deleted. He asked me to check a specific email address. I told him I didn’t have that email address. “Well, that’s where the message was sent.”

This made no sense. It was not the email address I had on file with Bluehost. It was an email address on my domain that I had never set up. I checked and verified that it didn’t exist. Comodo had sent an email message to an address that I’d never created or used.

Seriously: WTF?

Mr Hold Button told me to create the address, which I did while he waited. Then, after putting me on hold for a while longer, he told me they’d send a new message and that I should follow the instruction in it.

By this time, I was tired of dealing with the problem. I needed to get dressed. I needed to pull the helicopter out so my friend could get started on it. I needed to do the other things I needed to do. So I told him I’d check in a while and hung up.

And then I forgot about it.

You see, I have a life and that life does not revolve around dealing with computer issues. That was my old life. My new life is far more interesting.

Besides, I had no intention of adding that new email address to any of my email clients on any of my devices. That meant I had to sit at a computer and go to the Webmail feature on Bluehost to check the message. Not exactly something I’m likely to remember.

But I got reminded again this morning when it still didn’t work right. One of my readers emailed me. I also noticed when I attempted to approve two comments.

I checked that stupid email inbox. Empty.

I got on the phone with Bluehost.

This time I got a guy who didn’t like touching the hold button. He stuck with me while we worked through the problem. There was a lot of silent time. He was texting with Comodo. I was starting to write this blog post. Occasionally, he would update me. Occasionally I’d whine to him about how ridiculous the whole thing was. He was suitably sympathetic. I was as apologetic as I could be. After all, it wasn’t his fault.

In the end, the email message finally came. I clicked the link — but not after lecturing him about how we’re not supposed to click links in email messages. I entered the secret code. He confirmed some stuff on his end. I snacked on some cherries. When he said, “Try now,” I did.

The problem was fixed. It had taken 22 minutes.

We wished each other a nice day. When I got the survey at the end of the call, I gave him a good score.

So it looks like this site is secure again — at least until the next time Comodo decides it needs to verify me.

And yes, this did impact site traffic. I had less than half my usual visitors yesterday and started today at about one quarter the traffic I should have had by noon.

It’s Not That Simple

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Maria Langer

A response to a reader’s request.

The other day, I got the following email message in my In Box with the subject line “Quicken 2017 for Mac”:

As I write these words your “Quicken 2002 Deluxe for Macintosh” book sits in front of me. The time has come, whether I like it or not, to update to Quicken 2017 for Mac from Quicken 2007 for Mac. Sadly, thee’s no good documentation to use. In fact, I haven’t found any good material since your 2002 book! For all I know, you’ve moved on and no longer write books such as the one published back then. That being said, I’d like to request you consider writing a new Guide similar to the one your wrote way back then. All the best to you whatever your future ventures may be.

First, I want to thank the sender for phrasing his request so politely and understanding that I might not be writing books like that one any more. A lot of the email messages I get regarding my writing work is a lot less polite and a lot more demanding, which partially explains why the Contact page on this blog seems to discourage communication from readers. (It’s actually toned down a lot more than it used to be.)

Now let me tell you a little bit about the rise and fall of tech publishing.

The “Old Days” of Tech Publishing

This is the first book I was involved in; I was a ghost writer on 4 chapters and am mentioned in the acknowledgements.

I got into the world of computer how-to book publishing way back in 1991. I’d left my last full-time job as a Financial Analyst at a Fortune 100 Corporation the year before and was trying my hand at freelance writing. Through an odd series of events, I wound up ghost writing four chapters of a book by John C. Dvorak, Bernard J. David (who I worked with directly), and others. That led to a book that Bernard and I co-authored, which led to another 80+ books that I mostly authored alone.

Back in those days, the Internet was in its infancy. Hardly anyone had a website — I didn’t have my first one until 1995 — and services like Google, which was founded in 1996 and wouldn’t become the powerhouse it is for years, didn’t exist. When people wanted to learn, they turned to books.

Software developers knew this. They provided printed manuals with their software products. Manuals for some software could be voluminous — I remember the one I had for a version of FrameMaker that had to be at least 800 pages. But despite the availability of these reference guides, users wanted something easier to read and understand. So computer how-to books were born. I happened to be at the right place at the right time to write them.

And I was very good at it. I had a knack for learning how to use software, breaking it down into simple tasks that built progressively through the book to more complex tasks, and writing it in a way that readers found helpful.

With a lot of competition, however, not many readers got to see my books and there wasn’t much money in writing them. No problem: I’ll just write more books. My publishers — especially Peachpit Press — really liked my work and my ability to meet deadlines. They kept me busy. I once signed six book contracts in a single day. One year, I wrote 10 books.

I wasn’t the only one cranking out books. Numerous publishers had tech imprints and dozens of new titles appeared every month. Bookstores — and there were a lot more of them in those days — had trouble keeping up, but they did. Publishers published these books and bookstores stocked them for one reason: they sold.

Demand only got higher as software developers stopped including lengthy manuals with their software, favoring Quick Start books instead. And then switching to digital only manuals that they might or might not include on the software CD.

Thus began the glory days of computer how-to book authors and publishers, a period that lasted from around 1995 through 2010.

Success Comes with Sales

This was one of my first bestsellers. Revised annually until I gave it up after the 2009 edition, it was a major source of income for me.

My financial success as the author of computer how-to books didn’t come from writing a lot of books with average sales. It came from writing two particular books, revised often, that were bestsellers. My Quicken 1999: The Official Guide was one of these bestsellers.

I was very happy to be able to write about Quicken for Mac, since I was a long-time user.

The success of one book often spurs a series of books. Quicken Press (later Intuit Press), an imprint of Osborne-McGraw-Hill, soon began publishing other Quicken and QuickBooks books. That’s how I wound up authoring Quicken 2002 Deluxe for the Macintosh: The Official Guide, the book referred to in the email message above.

I was pretty happy about this. Truth is, I’m a Mac user and had been writing Windows books only because there were more Windows users so the sales potential was higher. I’d been using Quicken on my Mac for years and knew it better than the Windows version I’d been writing about since 1998.

But my Quicken Mac book didn’t take off the way we’d hoped — there were a lot fewer Quicken Mac users and Intuit still had viable competition to Quicken on the Mac OS platform. To complicate matters, Intuit didn’t revise Quicken for Mac as often as it revised Quicken for Windows. When the next version, Quicken 2007, was released, neither Intuit nor my publisher saw a sufficient market for a book about it. So I was never asked to revise my book for future editions.

Google and the Death of Tech Publishing

Meanwhile, as publishers and authors were churning out computer books as fast as we could, the Web was growing. People were writing how-to articles and publishing them on blogs, on software support websites, on user group websites, and in online magazines. Even I did this for a long while, mostly to help promote my existing titles. These articles were free and available immediately. When search engines like Google proved to be extremely effective in helping readers find the content they sought, people started thinking twice about buying computer how-to books.

After all, why go to a bookstore or go online at Amazon to find a book that may or may not answer your specific question when you could spend a few minutes searching with Google and find the answer you need? Why wait for a book you ordered online to arrive when you could find the information you needed immediately? Why depend on the voice of one author when you could access information provided by dozens or hundreds of them?

Book sales dropped off dramatically in the late 2000s. I could see it in my royalty statements; my income peaked in 2004 and 2005 and then began a steady decline. Books about software staples like Word and Excel, that I’d revise with every new version, were dropped one after another. Publishers who had once agreed to a contract for nearly every title I proposed now declined, saying they didn’t think there was a sufficient market for the book. There were fewer and fewer new software-related titles being published. Editors who’d worked on dozens of titles a year suddenly found themselves unemployed. Publishers or imprints merged or disappeared. The few brick and mortar bookstores that managed to survive the rise of Amazon reduced or even eliminated their computer book shelf space.

By 2013, all of my book titles were officially dead — not scheduled for revision. And I know I’m not the only tech author who lived and thrived through the computer book glory days to find myself without a book market for my expertise. There are lots of us out there. The ones like me who saw it coming had a safety net to fall into; others weren’t so lucky and find themselves struggling to stay relevant and earn a living writing words few seem willing to pay for.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that computer how-to books no longer exist. They do. There just aren’t many of them. And rather than appeal to the beginner to intermediate user I wrote for, they’re mostly written for a much higher level of user about far more complex topics. Or very narrow markets that are easy to sell to.

This Reader’s Request

Fast forward to today.

The very politely worded email request from a reader quoted in full above is asking me to revise my Quicken 2002 for Mac book for Quicken 2017 for Mac. If you’ve been reading carefully, you know why this is unlikely to happen.

There is not a sufficient market for such a book.

And that’s what it’s all about: being able to publish a book that will sell enough copies for the publisher to make a profit. It has nothing to do with the author; publishers really don’t care what authors make. Their contracts routinely minimize author royalties to help the book’s bottom line. That’s all that matters. They have spreadsheets that calculate breakeven and if a title can’t break even with a decent profit, they won’t publish it. Simple as that.

Would I write and self-publish a book about Quicken 2017 for Mac? Probably not. Even self-publishing such a book doesn’t mean I’ll earn enough money to make such a project worthwhile. Let’s do the math. It would take me a good 400 hours of time over two months to write the book and prepare the manuscript for publishing. Say I need to make a minimum of $25/hour. That means the project would have to net me $10,000. Even if I managed to net $5/book after fees paid to Amazon, Apple iBooks store, Nook, etc., I’d still have to sell 2,000 copies. Are there 2,000 people out there willing to buy a book about Quicken 2017 for Mac? I seriously doubt it.

And I’ll share a secret with you: I still use Quicken 2007 for Mac. I bought but decided I didn’t like the 2015 version and I haven’t even bothered to buy the 2017 version.

So if I — a loyal Quicken user since the early 1990s — haven’t bothered to upgrade, how many other people have? And how many of them want a book about it?

The answer is simple: Not enough for me or apparently anyone else to write a book about it.

This Explains It

And this pretty much explains why I don’t write books about how to use computers and software anymore. I can’t make a living doing it.

But I’m lucky: at least I’ve found something else to make a living at.

An Eclectic Mind

Web site and blog for Maria Langer, writer, video producer, jewelry artist, boat captain, and helicopter pilot. Blogging since 2004.

Category Archives: Call Me a Geek