Should I pop a cheque in the post or brave the dangers of online banking?

There’s an electronic device on my desk that looks — through its bubble- wrap — like a cheap miniature calculator. It’s still in the packaging a month after it arrived because I’m irritated by the idea that I have to master a new gadget specifically designed to complicate a familiar action. The thing is a debit-card reader, and I gather I must activate it whenever I want to send money from my bank account via the internet to a new payee. At first that was done simply by typing the payee’s details into boxes on my laptop screen; then it involved waiting for a security code to pop up on my phone, sometimes requiring a walk round the garden waving the phone to find a signal; now I must have my card and reader to hand each time, and it will probably be quicker to write a cheque and walk down to the postbox.