The PlainManual

About

The Plain Manual is a how-to guide for everyday technology, written for people who are not technical and have no wish to become technical. Something is full, slow, broken or suspicious, and the official instructions assume knowledge you were never given. These pages try to close that gap.

What this site is not

It is not a developer or IT publication. There is no code here, no terminal commands and no server configuration. If a problem genuinely needs any of that, the guide says so and points you to the manufacturer rather than pretending a general article can cover it.

It is also not affiliated with any previous owner of this domain. ajmm.org was registered by someone else years ago and lapsed; the current publisher bought the expired domain and has no connection to whoever used it before, republishes none of their work, and does not write in their name.

How the guides are written

Each article is produced by an editorial process rather than by a named individual, and is checked against a fixed set of rules before it is published: no invented statistics, prices or model numbers; no exact menu paths presented as though every device is identical, because they are not; and an explicit warning to back up before any step that can lose data.

Nothing here promises a fix will work. Each guide gives the likely cause, the thing worth trying, and what it means if that does not help — which is more honest than a headline claiming five easy steps.

Corrections

Technology changes and wording moves between versions. If something here is wrong or out of date, corrections are welcome through the contact page and are made directly to the article.