My friends suffer for want of better technology.

I am always amazed at the kind of low-end or unusually broken technology a lot of my friends are forced so subsist on. It makes me want to buy them stuff because it's so ridiculous sometimes. But a situation came to mind tonight that I want to talk about.

There's this 17-year-old friend of mine who made the mistake of staying up past his bed time, and his mother caught him. His punishment was having the laptop taken away and his bed time moved to 9:00pm. This sounds reasonable at first, until you realize that he had two school projects on the laptop, and she doesn't care that the projects are due by Monday. He doesn't have access to another computer at home, and he would have to write three times slower on a smartphone starting from scratch (he doesn't have a Bluetooth keyboard so it would take forever). On top of all this, his writing hand is injured such that if he tried to write on pencil and paper, it would hurt him.

The solutions I've come up with involve using a borrowed USB keyboard with his Wii U. Seriously. I worked out a way for him to use a cloud-based text editing website called Collabedit which actually works on the Wii U's Internet Browser. I also found that Gmail works, but only if he specifically enables basic HTML view instead of standard view because the latter uses too much RAM. Google Docs would obviously be out of the question. One of these two solutions should yield a result that will allow him to finish up the body of the document at home, typing on the Wii U, and then download the resulting document at school Monday morning to add in all the formatting and headers that can't be used with a basic text editor.

They have this weird rule that anything his parents paid for can be taken from him as a punishment, but not anything he paid for himself. So if I were to send or buy him a computer, in theory, they wouldn't take it from him because it's "his." I'm seriously tempted to buy him a Raspberry Pi or a Bluetooth keyboard at this point.

If I had a lot of extra money to spare, I have a feeling I'd spend a lot of buying technical gadgets and games for my friends.

Entertainingly, I had trouble turning on the monitor the Wii U is attached to in the process of figuring this out. I had trouble finding the power button because it's not on the front, and then I couldn't get it to work. My Mom had to be the one to figure out that I had the monitor unplugged for some reason. Kind of embarrassing, like an old tech support joke. But that just shows it can happen to anyone. Sometimes you don't think of the obvious.