14 DAY TRIAL // The holiday season is approaching and many of us will be heading home, visiting our parents. Unfortunately, while this means proper home cooked meals and, hopefully, some nice time with the family, for most of us, it also means having to debug our parents' computers or teaching them how to do this and that.
This is a rather universal problem, so much so that Google set out to help with a series of videos for those less familiar with computers, the web and so on.
"I love teaching my dad how to do stuff on his computer — and he’s fairly tech-savvy as far as dads go — but sometimes trudging through that to-do list gets tedious," Google's Jason Toff writes.
"Talking to fellow Googlers, I learned that I wasn’t alone in my role as the one-man family tech support team. In fact, I was hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t have a similar story about getting their parents up to speed," he adds.
"This got a few of us thinking. Why isn’t there a site designed to help 'kids' teach their parents about computer basics? So we put our heads together and built a new site: TeachParentsTech.org," he announced.
The site is fairly straight forward. Just pick someone to help, it may be your mom and dad, or it may be one of your friends who's always pestering you with questions, and select one or more videos you want to send.
Fill out a couple more things, enter the email address you want to use and you're set. With luck, it should save off a few hours of having to do all those things yourself and you'll be teaching your friend or parent in need how to fix the problems in the future.
The video instructions range from the most basic like copy&paste to trickier things like knowing if an email is fake or not. And if you hurry, you can send your loved ones a real tech support package, on Google's treat. Google is sending just 10,000 of these packages and only in the US.