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It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

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

#271

Post by acdha »

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…

I second your advice but disagree on the WiFi point: there's a solid convenience aspect to anyone in the house being able to hit print on their phone with no further work. Guests can print boarding passes without asking, kids can print from their iPads, etc. with zero friction.

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

#272

Post by gldnspud »

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…

I followed this advice right after the last time I spent 20 minutes having an ink-jet printer clean its nozzles thrice before I could print one sheet of monochrome text. I print infrequently enough that the nozzles would often dry up and get clogged.

It had been so long since I looked at laser printers, I didn't realize their prices had become so affordable for home/personal use.

Now, when I print something, I know it'll "just work", and that the text will be crisp and legible every time, with no banding and wasted paper.

Plus, it's so much faster.

The cost and reliability of toner vs ink is one thing... but the lack of stress surrounding the occasional small print job at home? As stated by a much-parodied ad campaign, "priceless"!

(Edit: and I still have 60% capacity in the complimentary toner cartridge it came with!)

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

#273

Post by risfriend »

mnadkvlb wrote: post #259
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…

Just want to add another advice for “brother” as well as any other brand laser printers. If your printer says it cant print any more as the ink is gone, just go search to internet to find how to reset the cartridge counter, and then the same (wink) “empty” cartridge will print for another couple 100 to 1000 sheets of paper. For me that meant 3 more years of printing and still going on reportedly “empty” cartridges. W…

Wow, thanks a lot, didn't know this. I've been forced to buy cartridges as I run out of ink way every few months, don't think the black HP cartridges today even last the promised 500 pages, they can literally configure it to their whim.

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

#274

Post by leokennis »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #239
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…

I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period. But then, one day I decided to suck up…

Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color.

I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo (https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw) and it's magnificent.

* From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds

* It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, photo paper, weird formats etc.

* No jams. No confusing setup. No dingy and confusing on screen menu but a good small touch screen.

* It takes 4 separate CMYK cartridges so you can replace a color at a time. 3000 BW prints for €30 (€0,01 per page). Color cartridges good for 2000 pages go for €20.

Concluding, laser printers have obvious benefits for certain printing use cases. No discussion here. But please do not conflate the butchering and crappyfication of inkjet printing by HP and Canon with inkjet being slow/annoying/expensive/useless in general.

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

#275

Post by flyinghamster »

SilverRed wrote: post #28
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…

I don't think reusable milk bottles and subscription vs product are linked together. There is no reason why a van couldn't deliver plastic milk bottles and there is no reason why a supermarket couldn't take a deposit for returned glass milk bottles. Supermarkets already do this, many will take back used sodastream CO2 canisters for a discount on the replacement. It just happens that these two changes happened at the…

Up until the mid-1970s in the US, sodas were often sold in eight-packs of thick glass pint* bottles, returnable for deposit at the store. The delivery trucks picked up the returned bottles and took them to the bottling plant, where they were washed and reused. Coca-Cola bottles were famous for being stamped on the bottom with their originating bottling plant.

Then came the thin-wall non-returnable glass bottles, followed quickly by plastic. I don't think it was an improvement.

* US pint = 16 fl. oz. = 473.2 ml

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

#276

Post by Kalium »

solarengineer wrote: post #158
ludocode wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We subscribe to a local CSA as well [1]. We chose to pick it up about a ten minute drive away rather than have it delivered. But we collect it in re-usable cloth bags so there's nothing disposable or recyclable. It's just food, and the trimmings all go in the compost. I highly recommend it to everyone. I get incredibly excited when I pick it up; I feel pretty ridiculous to be honest. But the food is so much fresher a…

Are aquaponics, hydroponics or vertical farming an option that the local CSA could consider?

As I understand it, your typical CSA is a fairly light organization that works with a handful of local farms. Some seem to be a single farm's retail arm.

So, yes! A CSA could absolutely consider aquaponics, hydroponics, or vertical farming. Indeed I suspect many farmers have considered precisely these things. Taking a wild guess, I would speculate that there are questions of capital at work here. Every successful urban hydroponic farm I've seen or read about to date has focused on high-value, crops used in small quantities where freshness is at a premium. Herbs, spices, and similar flavorings or luxuries.

For other things, it still seems to be the case that shipping in apples or avocados or ground wheat from thousands of miles away is cheaper than trying to grow them in a repurposed office building in a city center. Plus there's likely a non-zero cost to acquiring, repurposing, and providing ongoing resources (electricity, water, nutrients, etc.) to this brand new vertical farm.

Again, you're absolutely right. Those are all things a local CSA could consider! It's perhaps possible that that consideration has been taking place carefully, deliberately, and with financial calculations at hand for something like eighty years now. Or perhaps I severely and deeply misunderstand the resources a typical local CSA commands.

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

#277

Post by ImSorryButWho »

reilly3000 wrote: post #4
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…

Staples-as-a-Service. I would totally buy that service vs overpriced meal boxes or on-demand grocery delivery. An app could be used to coordinate your order/inventory levels, and a reusable cooler could sit on your porch or lobby for exchange and temp storage. Pop a cheap tracker and lock in it if piracy is an issue. There are major efficiencies associated with route delivery vs on-demand ordering- pick&pack in batch…

I know there's already Imperfect Foods, which uses a route delivery model rather than traditional shipping. I haven't tried them, but I'm considering signing up.

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

#278

Post by jimktrains2 »

schwartzworld wrote: post #261
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…

WiFi printing feels like an essential feature to me. Being able to print directly from a phone or tablet is huge.

The printer doesn't need wifi if it's connected to a network bridged with a wifi ap, like nearly every soho router/ap combo or isp-provided modem/router/ap combo is by default.

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

#279

Post by thescriptkiddie »

leokennis wrote: post #274
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never buy something else than a laser printer again. The alternatives are unreliable junks with gold priced cartridges that will dry on you at the sightless neglect. The machine will find a way to end up breaking, jamming or printing garbage at some point anyway, after what you end up buying the new one in a moment of panic, which again lasts barely the honeymoon period. But then, one day I decided to suck up…

Disagree here. Sure, for pure BW printing, buy a laser. But I like to occasionally print a photo or a document in color. I am using a Brother inkjet/scanner/everything combo ( https://www.brother.ee/printers/inkjet-printers/mfc-j5330dw ) and it's magnificent. * From CMD+P to page rolling out of the printer is less than 5 seconds * It prints on anything you can imagine and scans from anything too. Duplex, envelopes, p…

Even fancy inkjet printers tend to get their print heads irreversibly clogged if you let them sit too long without printing anything.

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

#280

Post by hyperman1 »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #223
hyperman1 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. But where's the fun in that?

Sometimes I want to write an ad blocker that actually goes on the offence. Every time it blocks an ad, it should download a few hundred megs of ads from the offending server and drop them in the ethernal bitbucket in the sky. It would either cost them money or get me banned from seeing ads, both are fine by me. Then drop it in an app store, get a few thousand users, and see them squirm. I'd call it Do Not Track, with a mind diseasing number of exclamation marks after it.

Alas, this would probably violate some real laws, plus messing with shady businesses might make them search out other than legal means for getting redress. At the very least, Baron Google would banish me from their land.

Oh well, a man can dream.

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