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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

#221

Post by opheliate »

slezyr wrote: post #217
opheliate wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around th…

EcoTanks have a DRM chip on the ink dump container instead.

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I’m not sure what you mean.

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

#222

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tempest_ wrote: post #8
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…

Here in eastern Canada milk is often offered in bags. I know bags use a great deal less plastic and probably are easier on the environment shipping wise but they are also not recyclable. I have seen some examples on the internet where you can refill shampoo/cleaning liquid from a dispenser into your own container. I think it would be cool if that could be done for a number of products that are liquid into a standardi…

I think we should have every company use a standard, probably plastic, container based on product lines. Takeaway food containers are almost standardised and can be used for 100s of uses and only appear to use about 5 times the plastic. You'd send them back to the store they'd wash them and reuse them.

Require reusable packaging.

Also, all suppliers would have to take back any packaging they distribute - use the supply chain in reverse.

My position is that plastics are not evil, lack of reuse is where the malevolence lies.

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

#223

Post by benhurmarcel »

hyperman1 wrote: post #208
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.

I got one too, so I found out which site was giving the ads, then created a script to do all kinds of invalid traffic on their port. Every hour or so I do 20 malformed HTTP requests on the ad server, after which their firewall locks me out for the rest of the day. The TV traffic gets locked out too as it shares my IP address. Presumably I violate some laws in some country on the other side of the planet, but as I don…

A simpler solution is to set up https://nextdns.io/ on the TV. You can easily block the ads.

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

#225

Post by martin-adams »

coopsmoss wrote: post #127
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…

It used to be the norm. Why did the "milk man industry" go under? Could it not compete with bulk buying milk once refrigeration became the norm?

My guess would be the rise of supermarkets. Newsagents, post offices, grocers, sweet shops I suspect have been decimated by supermarkets and more people with cars to get to them.

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

#226

Post by habosa »

There should be a law that states for any subscription product I should be allowed to buy a fixed-term version with no auto-renewal. In the past two days I've had the following experiences:

  * Wanted to buy a Font Awesome "Pro" license for their icons. The only way to do this is a 99/year subscription. Reading the fine print says that I can buy it and cancel it the next day and still have lifetime access to the version at the time of my purchase. Why make me jump through the hoops?
  * I wanted to support a writer on Substack by subscribing for a year. But I can't, I can only start a perpetual sub. So I subbed and canceled 1 day later. Then I got a "why did you cancel?" email. I didn't really
  * I saw a cool open source project I liked and wanted to donate. They only had a Patreon link. Patreon only has recurring subs. So I had to email them and ask for their PayPal so I could send them $100.
I really wonder how much of SaaS revenue is people who have forgotten to cancel. I would guess 25% industry-wide.

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

#227

Post by trasz »

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…

Except this only makes sense in office-like environments. It’s not a solution for a typical home, simply because getting it to run is too complicated.

Unless there’s a way to make it work like normal printer does, eg with AirPlay?

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

#228

Post by reader_mode »

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…

My problem with laser combos (printer + scanner) is that they are >50% larger than an inkjet with same features. Inkjet is just the right height where you can use it on a shelf/desk and it won't be unbearable + you can stack some stuff on top.

WiFi kind of helps but still not a fan of having a giant box around for something that I rarely use (but still need often enough to justify owning)

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

#229

Post by salamandersauce »

glenngillen wrote: post #56
derefr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedE…

> Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. FWIW, I live in the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia. By no means a small town. It’s a 20min drive to my closest place that does printing, which is apparently out in an industrial estate. There’s absolutely nothing in the 3-4 most accessible shopping/retail areas. These types of places have b…

Is there a library nearby? They probably do printing.

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

#230

Post by imagine99 »

ludocode wrote: post #29
NortySpock wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

This whole thread has got to be among the most, shall we say, eyebrow-raising ones I've ever read on HN. It has everything from "just drive 20 minutes to 2 hours to the next town to print a couple pages" to "just don't be poor" and "why do you even print". ;-)

But disregarding the staggering amount of unwillingness to look any further than one's own nose, everyone considering printing on a public / shared printer should know one this: I can guarantee you that a copy of anything you output there gets saved. Not just statistics & metadata (page coverage, timestamp, copies...) but an actual picture of the page (at least as a thumbnail), regardless of what anyone will tell you. Even if the feature is not turned on for compliance reasons and gets collected by a central server, it will be stored on the printer's internal hard drive at least until the next maintenance cycle and can be retrieved for a significant amount of time.

If you pay by card or connect to it with your phone and thus add another level of personal data, you might as well just put it up on your Facebook publicly and ask anyone to print & mail it to you.

Modern commercial printers (such as those you will find at larger offices or at Staples) are basically full-blown PCs with a scanner and laser unit attached to them and as such nothing you put through there is ephemeral by default. It also means they are vulnerable to all kinds of horrible exploits that pretty much never get patched.

Almost nothing stops you from refilling a $30 inkjet with generic ink cartridges at $5 a pop (even cheaper, although messier, if you refill yourself). Or, if you print more, by all means, get that $100 mono laser. But "just go for a drive and print at Staples" has got to go on that wall of worst HN ideas ever.

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