It’s sad to think a tesla might fall into this category.
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
31–40 of 326 posts
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color" My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now with…
Plug the printer into your WiFi router - instant WiFi. Cheaper, and much easier.
Except then you need to put your router in the same odd location as the printer or run cables.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#33Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…
I've had my Brother for well over half a decade, never needed to change it's original in the box toner... and it broke and doesn't feed paper now. :/
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color" My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now with…
Plug the printer into your WiFi router - instant WiFi. Cheaper, and much easier.
I do powerline ethernet adapter instead with my bro. definitely more reliable than wifi wakeup.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great advice, and I echo 95% of it. My observation is that I have found Wifi useful when I need the printer in an odd location in the house, and color is useful for non-professional usage like "the kids need to print out their report for school" and "the med school student needs anatomy diagrams in color" My trusty color Brother laser HL-3170CDW cost ~$300 at the time and has been trucking along for 7+ years now with…
Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts. I'm just not convinced that ha…
"I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#36This would sound strange but the biggest subscription I pay annually (which does not seem like a subscription) is my DMV registration renewal fees. It comes around $300+ every year out-of-the-blue in my mailbox and I realize then that is indeed a subscription for a product which is my Car that I never thought about.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the older double-edged safety razors were designed around such a model, but at least there is a 'standard' for those, with plenty of different companies producing interoperable consumables. Would it be fair to say that any product with consumables that are proprietary to the vendor, is a subscription?
I actually shifted to using a double edged safety razor when the cost of the disposable blades felt like too much. It isnt quite as easy, and I still cut myself from time to time but I also am still using the variety pack of 100 blades that I bought two years ago for like 10$.
Try disposable blades from Feather, a Japanese razor and blades company. It is sold on Amazon. I settled on their cartridge razor just for convenience. Blades are excellent.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#38Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…
People knock inkjets but I've loved my Brother inkjet. Finding cheap ink is not a problem; Amazon has knockoffs for cheap. And in spite of what others do I gladly print color at home for random purposes. Sometimes for a family gift, other times for kid projects or hobby stuff. Printing color on photo paper produces great results.
I also enjoy using WiFi. It makes printing with a laptop less of hassle and gives you flexibility with where the printer resides.
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines. For anyone who hasn't done it, it's incredibly streamlined. You don't have to talk to anyone and you don't have to wait in line. You just walk up to one of the many printers, put in your flash drive, tap your credit card and collect your printouts. I'm just not convinced that ha…
"I plugged my flash drive into the printer station and all I got was my financial documents uploaded to a Russian server and 4 viruses written to the boot sector." -- my paranoid assumptions about public print stations with USB ports.
it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).
Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
#40A lot of good thoughts in here. The one I personally want everyone to take away is that most plastics are not recycled. Unless it’s glass, fibre, or aluminum, you are lying to yourself if it’s going into the blue bin. Glass-contained milk delivery seems great. Someone needs to start a company. Sure it won’t be sexy or use AI but it’s useful. I have a local co-op that delivers local produce. It’s amazing to see a pile…
#1 and #2 are well recycled in the US. It's all the other weirdo plastics that are recycled poorly.
Milk usually comes in #2.