Grrrrr! Finding a good home printer boils down to ink choices, I guess
Posted on March 5, 2010 - Filed Under Tech News
Unless you've got some business need for a thermal printer like the epson tm-t88iv or some other cash-register-like options, you probably struggle with finding a good home printer, just like I do. And after YEARS of relying on good old HP printers, I'm about ready to throw my current HP out the window and look at Kodak, Epson, or some other inkjet brand printer.
Grrrr -- as in growling with anger. We have an All-in-One style printer that prints, scans, and copies. We bought it so my wife could scan some family photos. But from the end of the first month we had the thing, it has always messed up with feeding paper. If you print more than one page at a time, the darn feeder fails to pull the sheets out properly. You end up printing the first two lines of a page at the bottom of the page before.
Unfortunately, the printer itself was dirt cheap, so it isn't worth trying to repair or exchange it now -- it's cheaper just to buy a new one. But something about that rankles me: Why toss out a printer and just buy another?
My major pet peeve about printers, however, lies with the ink, not the printer. It's absolutely incredible to me that printer manufacturers have made the machines so cheap that it ALMOST costs less to toss the printer and replace it than it does to replace the printer ink cartridges!
Anyhow, I've had my little rant now. I suppose I feel better. Anyone else out there think it's outrageous to pay $40+ for an ink cartridge to put into a $60+ printer??
Tiny bit of Internet traffic generates hefty amounts of sp*m
Posted on February 28, 2010 - Filed Under Personal News
Funny how just a tiny increase in Internet traffic to a website can generate hefty amounts of sp*m.
For those of you who don't know what "sp*m" is, it is my abbreviation for that unsolicited and usually worthless garbage that comes as a comment on a blog post. The word itself came from that well-known ham-like canned meat product that's been popular in America and throughout the world for a couple of generations now.
I choose to write "sp*m" for that term because I have a theory that using the full word might draw more of it to my site. Call me paranoid, though, because I have no proof of that. All the same, why tempt The Fates.
I got my first foreign-language sp*m comment to this site just yesterday. It was written in Spanish and tried to link my blog to a "get-rich-quick" scheme website of some sort. I deleted it from the blog's sp*m collection and it never got posted. So the jerk who sent it never saw the light of day.
Which brings me to the friendly request I try to put on all of my websites from time to time:
Please, sir and/or ma'am, don't target this site for your worthless, cr*ppy sp*m. I want nothing to do with it, nor do my site visitors. Thank you for honoring my request.
There. Since I know that will do absolutely no good, I have a couple of pretty effective sp*m filters installed and I check the site regularly, so your sp*m efforts most likely will fail. So please just give it up. Posting some of the p*rn*graphic and semi-p*rn*graphic stuff you're trying to sp*m the site with is about as useful as looking for life insurance leads at an octogenerians' dance party.
Google can lead to ’sort of’ a backwards time machine
Posted on February 18, 2010 - Filed Under General
Yes, I journeyed into the past yesterday. My wife came along. We used Google Maps -- Street Level view.
For three years in the early 1970s, we lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Mission, South Dakota. We were back there to visit for the last time in about 1984, I think it was.
Yesterday, I thought for fun I would search Google Maps for Mission -- and I found street level viewing available for the one "main drag" through this little town. My wife was home from work, so she and I gathered around the computer and journeyed up and down, back and forth, through three very formative, eventful years of our lives.
It was like traveling into a past we could see but no longer touch. And, of course, many of the buildings and streets in this small town were changed radically, as they are in most small towns of the "heartland" over any 20-30 year span.
It was great fun, though, and we smiled (and almost cried) at some of the memories brought back.
For tonight: Maybe Denver, to recall an earlier time in my childhood. (Oh, hey -- anybody here reading this from Tecumseh, Nebraska? I grew up there until the age of 10; left there in 1957.)
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