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It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

calpaterson.com

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Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#111

Post by AussieWog93 »

gruez wrote: post #95
PostOnce wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other side of the coin: 1 truck delivers milk (and bread?) to an entire neighborhood, instead of 50 people driving 50 cars to get 50 bottles of milk.

Right but what's the ratio of people making dedicated trips for milk vs people who buy it with their other groceries? I'd think most people plan ahead to avoid dedicated trips, but that's just based off my experience.

>Right but what's the ratio of people making dedicated trips for milk vs people who buy it with their other groceries

From my experience, definitely more than 1:50.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#112

Post by vvarren »

I just canceled one of my credit cards and then started getting DOZENS of emails from services warning me that they were canceling soon. It is absolutely stunning to me how many different subscriptions were flying under the radar. Sneaky sneaky!

Huge shoutout to Adobe for making a stellar product but come on... I need it for so much that it is basically like paying rent.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#113

Post by joenathanone »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #58

He mentions "Smart TVs". I always thought you could just buy a SmartTV and not connect the internet and have a dumb TV. Nope. HDMI changed that. I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI. That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore. Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat. But Adobe? That smells like extortion.

>it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI.

That is really cool but also very scary.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#115

Post by Merad »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. 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…

+1. I have a Brother HL-5250 that's 15 years old. I think I paid $250 for it, but it has to be one of the best pieces of technology I've ever bought. It's been a while since I looked at its internal counters but it probably has printed close to 50k pages. The printer itself is still 100%. About 5 years ago something gave out in the paper tray and it stopped feeding correctly, but these days I don't print more than a couple times a year so I just load paper manually in the front tray.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#116

Post by bombela »

NortySpock wrote: post #21
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. 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…

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…

I have the same printer. Sometimes it randomly locks up. And disappears from the network (ethernet, wifi is off).

Otherwise it is precise enough for me to toner transfer masks to manufacture little PCBs with traces of 0.2mm. And with colors I can print in green to make a poor's man solder mask and silkscreen.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#117

Post by dreamcompiler »

gruez wrote: post #79
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

A 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…

>Glass-contained milk delivery seems great ...until you realize that having a dedicated truck driving around delivering milk is probably going to cause as much oil usage (if not more) than picking up a plastic jug of milk on your weekly shopping trip.

In the UK at least, many milk trucks had been electric since the 1940s. They would make even more sense with modern EV technology.

https://www.treehugger.com/electric-milk-trucks-still-workin...

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#118

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

NortySpock wrote: post #21
dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. 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…

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…

An Ethernet printer can easily become WiFi with a bridge mode AP.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#119

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mkl wrote: post #32
MR4D wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have a second router bridged to the main one. Wireless Ethernet ports for you to enjoy.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#120

Post by mythz »

zizee wrote: post #41
ludocode wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

> 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 I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have…

Never used Staples, I've done most of my printing in the last decade at libraries. AFAICT they're still pretty common in Australia.
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