Hopeless Geek

I don’t want one. I honestly don’t want any of them. None of them really appeal to me, much less make me go raving bonkers for one like so many others. Perhaps it’s that I’m getting older and my time is so taken up with living and fighting life’s fires, or perhaps the gaming industry has hit a huge rut and I’m well clear of the sucker zone that’s buying, but for whatever reason I simply have no draw to any of the new crop of consoles.

I bought a PS2 shortly after release, along with Summoner (a game I never finished due, mainly, to its absurd 30-45 second world-reloading time every five minutes or so). It was interesting, and certainly better than the first one. All of my old PS1 games played fine on it and it was generally very enjoyable, especially when Final Fantasy X came out. I found a few gems along the way, like Mojo and Road Rage and such, so it hung around for a few years as a game and DVD player.

There’s a lot of reasons as to why I’ve only recently bought a printer after having been without one for several years. Mainly it’s because I had an inkjet and was really, really tired of how flimsy it was and how ridiculously often I had to buy more ink for it. If I used it constantly, it would dry up in a month. If I used it very little, it would dry up in a month. If I used it moderately, it would dry up in a month. No winning that one.

Then you try to get around the wallet assault of the $30-$60 ink cartridges with off-brands or refills, and not only do many of them suck, but you get crap like this:

Epson has won a series of victories in its quest to cut down on the importation and manufacture of aftermarket inkjet cartridges for its products. The company just announced that it has signed settlement agreements with multiple defendants, all of whom acknowledge that they were in violation of Epson patents.
Ars Technica

So several months ago I asked myself a simple question: how often do I really print in color? The answer is “never” and so I looked into home laser printers. When I worked in AppleCare, we’d occasionally get little Tech Talk days where third-party reps would come by and raise awareness of their products or talk about them a little to keep us up to date (or give us information to sell them to customers). During those days, I kept remarking to myself how nice Brother’s printer offerings were, so I looked them up for myself. Lo, behold, they had exactly what I needed. Ye olde standard multifunction center with a laser printer, scanner, copier, and fax for $250 ERP with toner that runs about $60 and handles 2,500 pages. Yes, that’s five reams of paper per cartridge, and they’re only twice as much as the ink cartridge that I put in my old Lexmark Z35 or the Epson 777, when with either of which I was lucky to get 200 pages out of with a normal 5% text spread. Making it even sweeter, Office Depot had it for $50 off.

Here’s the fun part about this: here I am two months later and we’ve burned about 200 pages out of it (the wife’s the major printer here, not I) and the cartridge it comes with is good for 1,500 pages. I’m still on the demo cartridge.

With laser printers, you do have to pay a little more attention. You have to replace the drum every 12K pages or so and ensure certain parts are clean, like the corona wires. Still, a little effort to maintain an investment is much preferred to repeated, near-constant financial forceable entry for the privilege of having color available. And, honestly, having a scanner/copier unit at home is just so amazingly useful when it’s attached to a really fast printer.

I honestly never would have thought, using laser printers all through school and work for the past 15-20 years, that I would have a laser printer at home as my personal printer. But I’ll tell ya something, it’s lightweight (mostly), inexpensive (but not “cheap”), and is extremely fast for everything I’ve thrown at it (unlike the early HPs that would sit there “processing” for an hour on a large page). It worked out of the box with no drivers and only got better with the drivers. I love it. I absolutely love it.

I love even more that it’s not an Epson. If I want to print photos, I’ll just pay Kodak within iPhoto. So, Epson (and Lexmark, and HP)? Bite me. Your shoddy business practices just gave Brother a customer.

The story that needs to be spread.

The video of it happening.

This is happening more and more in America. Police have been given a non-lethal torture device and are intent upon showing people how much pain they can inflict upon you for no reason, and you as a citizen have no real recourse against these individuals at the time of the abuse.

What the officers need to know is very simple for a case like this: once tased, you need several minutes before you can walk reasonably well again. Ordering someone to “Get up!” and using non-complience as a reason for an additional tase is clear abuse of power and of a citizen. Yes, the student handled the situation very badly, and yes he was in the wrong. I’l grant that. However, to be fair, the student was being repeatedly shocked with several thousand volts when he couldn’t obey orders, so I’d be a little upset as well. He then played to the crowd, which quite obviously upset the police officers. They wanted to move him to a controlled area as they had no idea what the crowd would do. I do understand this. I would say, however, their means sucked rather badly. Whatever their concern, the repeated torture of the person for being unable to combat the physical effects of the tase was absolutely uncalled for.

So I’m investigating leaving Sprint after the news of the previous entry, and this doesn’t inspire confidence in the brand for Verizon.

One would think to place basic computational arithmetic well within the realm of web monkeys that can make a web store for a multi-billion-dollar communications giant. One would also, apparently, be quite wrong.

Exactly how do you pay someone 10^-14^th of a penny?

Oh boy, this is bad. This is real bad.

BoingBoing reader Steve Parkinson has discovered a customer data security hole in the automated phone care system for Sprint Wireless.

Here’s how it works. You dial a certain toll-free Sprint customer service line (doesn’t matter what number you’re dialing from), then punch in the cellphone number of a Sprint Wireless subscriber (not necessarily yours). The Sprint voice-bot reads back to you the full name and street address of the accountholder associated with that number. Could be you, could be someone else.

Boing Boing: Security blunder: Sprint Wireless leaks customer data

I love my MacBook Pro, don’t get me wrong. Also, as I’ve said before, I really hate it when people take their problem with their own computer and then extrapolate that and say that all the computers of that kind are having it. Let me be clear: as far as I know, it’s just me. It doesn’t make it suck any less or any less weird.

It would appear the anodized coating on the case is a bit weak on mine and is coming off near the keyboard. I’m talking with Apple about getting it fixed, but in the mean time I thought I’d use that as an opportunity to show the voltage on the case. This is one weird problem. It would appear that when on AC power the case gets a good deal of voltage on it. Sometimes when I’m using it I’ll get hundreds of really weak shocks all over my palms to where it’s kind of numbing. If I change the adapter from the two-prong duckhead to the three-prong extension cable, the issue is mostly resolved. Thus, this is quite obviously a grounding issue. I’m about to get a bunch of the extension cords and leave them everywhere at home and just bring the adapter around to them so that I’m always grounded. In the mean time, here’s some fun.

Apple Defects readers: You are being misled. This is not “a widespread defect” but a simple case of bad grounding and a curious side-effect. I left such a comment on the article and the site owner deleted it. Apple Defects has a long history of censorship and deleting users’ posts when confronted with differing opinions. We need a good issues site and we have one with MacFixIt. Apple Defects is just the brain child of an undeveloped teenager.