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For many residents of the Downtown Eastside, an older-generation smartphone handed down from a loved one or local charity is a lifeline that gives them access to the internet to apply for a job, get on a housing wait-list or sign up for income assistance.

Sometimes, though, they need a little help figuring out how to use it. And for more than a year the DTES Adult Literacy Roundtable and University of B.C. Learning Exchange have been providing free training at a “technology cafe” at the Oppenheimer Park Field House.

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Each Friday at 10:30 a.m., a handful of trainers throw on a pot of coffee, lay out some snacks, set up a couple of laptops and for two hours help people overcome their technological woes.

“They have technology,” said William Booth of the Literacy Roundtable. “They just don’t necessarily have the latest.”

Some have more difficulty solving their problems than others, such as the man who dropped in with a stack of floppy disks wanting to transfer their contents to his new device (production of the disks ceased in 2011).