You’ve never seen The Princess Bride? You must. It’s a true family film, with pirates for the boys, romance and kissing for the girls, and ANDRE THE GIANT for everyone!
POINT: This is just a reminder that if you were looking at a 3d printer for Black Friday, DO NOT buy one from these guys. They will snitch on you if you print a gun.
Remember when Ma Bell owned everybody’s big ol’ Bakelite rotary phone? I don’t know what their specs demanded, but my money says half of them would survive a 6-foot fall onto bare cement.
If desktop printers had been made in the 1920–before the weasels thought up Planned Obsolescence–I’d bet those ones would still be running today. Stoves and fridges used to work for decades at a time with just bimetallic strip thermostats, mechanical clocks driving cams and such, beefy motors and switches…
There’s just got to be a yuuugely unsupplied demand for “America’s Bilt-2-Last™” appliances. Even at 3x the sticker price of a plastic-geared ChiCom one, it would likely be cheaper in the not-very-long run, what with not needing to replace its brain every year or so. And it wouldn’t gossip in Mandarin to your WiFi router.
I wonder which Gummint TLA’s job it is to prevent that.
There is a reason the repair parts market for good old top-loading washing machines and old school front load electric dryers is still robust and well supplied, in spite of “it’s not energy efficient!” and “it’s not water efficient!” and “it doesn’t even connect to the internet!”
Poke around on YT and you will find plenty of videos from repair folks who document how to do repairs ones-own-self on them, and as long as there are parts they will pretty much run forever.
My washer may not speak several languages, but it actually cleans my clothes.
It’s good that we still have the Old Ones who know how to keep the old machines going, and it’s great that we have the Toob to spread the skills around.
But why is no one (that I know of) manufacturing new washers and dryers built to last the way they did in the Good Old Days? An “old-fashioned” washer built with 21st century precision manufacturing techniques and high quality materials oughta be something the great-great-grands fight over when granny’s done with it.
Of course I blame weasels. Ya just gotta know they’ve carefully determined exactly how short the warranty can be, and how much longer the machine has to run without breaking, to keep customer fury from affecting the profit margin…
Actually, I think you answered my wished-it-was-facetious closing question: At least one of the TLA’s “protecting” us from long-lived low-maintenance gadgets must be the EPA.
The ozone killed refrigerators. The new refrigerants used to replace R-whatever don’t carry oil around the system very well so the compressors fail; and so we release more of the new refrigerants (since no one bothers to collect it from dead or dying refrigerators) instead of keeping our Kelvinators forever; thustly destroying the ozone even more and selling more refrigerators.
We got into the last of those appliances when we were married and went to work at the end of the ’70s. Our first refrigerator lasted 27 years, second freezer 40 years (first one would have too but it was “too big to move”), first washer/dryer combo 17 years. Granted our subsequent freezer and refrigerator each probably dropped our power consumption by 20% (especially the freezer since it failed by continuously running, and was only ever 25% full).
The subsequent “newer” washer and dryer units seem to last 12 – 14 years. Judgement is out on the new 7 CF chest freezer, too new. The “new” *refrigerator is 20 years old. All the failed appliances “failed” under “part replacement too expensive to fix, for the part, if you can get it”.
(*) Digital displays are out. Not like we ever changed them once set. Exception is the ice maker. “Refrigerator is making weird noises again!”, “Someone brushed the ice maker button. Push the button, once to turn it off.” No water connection to the refrigerator. We use the “ice tray” for reusable cooler ice blocks.
My parents bought one of those massive chest freezers in the late ’50s; memory guesstimates it was ~20CF at least. No clue what it cost or how much power it ate, but I NEVER saw anything over -5 degF on the little alcohol thermometer inside it. Given its vintage, it was surely Freon-cooled. The sucker was still running just fine when they replaced in the middle ’90s. IDK why. (It had the old-fashioned “kid-killer” car-door style handle; maybe California banned it for that? or because Freon?) The new one was an upright (so all the cold poured out every time you opened it) and I never saw it claim a temp LESS than 5-above.
I loved that thing as a kid. I’d blow the biggest soap bubbles I could and watch them float on the cold air as they shriveled and froze and sank down onto the food. Dozens of them.
Mom wasn’t thrilled, but she was probably glad I hadn’t come up with something worse.
Grandparents had one of those. It went away when the person who bought the property, gutted the house. That was 2007.
The big 30 cu ft one we had, ’80 – ’85, was not one of those. The 40+ year old one didn’t either. Didn’t until wouldn’t shut off.
Reason why I used the “saved power kilowatts” instead of power bill is because we are not California. With our cost of power, even now, saving thousands of kilowatts, doesn’t save that much money. Saves some, but our bills just aren’t that high. (You can hear Californians cry when told our combined highest utility bill runs ~$400, in August (water, including irrigation, power, sewer, and natural gas). Deep cold of winter runs about the same, swapping water costs with natural gas. I know some of the California districts the water bill alone ran double or triple that every billing cycle. I was running tests with real data (thought I’d oops the change. I hadn’t.)
Yep, I saw that. What percentage of the possible customers even know what a “man-in-the-middle” attack is, never mind how to use one to check their printer communications? And that leaves out the real possibility (which I ran into with my Epson printer just this past week) that if you don’t install the firmware upgrades, the printer will simply refuse to print until you do.
The idea isn’t to completely stop it; the idea is to make getting around it such a pain that most people won’t bother, and the people that do will leave a distinctive trail that AI analytics will spot it if necessary.
Looks at my old (circa 2010ish) Brother laser printer. No firmware updates, I have the Linux drivers and spare consumables (including a spare drum). It’s no longer printing much, maybe a half-dozen pages a week, so until some plastic gear self destructs, I’m golden.
I worked for HP, and didn’t like how they were going with inkjets. (Dot counting? No f’n way I’ll stand for that.) The first desktop that skipped the parallel port doomed the Inkjet I got on employee discount, so it got retired. HP is now an automatic noway, I’m skeptical about Epson, (and Lexmark) but when this one dies, it’ll likely be replaced by another Brother. OTOH, it might outlive me…
Amazon has USB to parallel port adapter cables starting at less than $10. Just make sure you get the DB-25 version instead of the 36-pin. And maybe don’t go for the ‘lowest bidder’. 😁
The other railroad spike in the coffin of my admiration for HP printers was the obsolescence of the print cartridges. About the time I got a new desktop computer, the relevant cartridges were pretty scarce. At least those didn’t have the dot counter* (thus killing the idea of refilling the cartridge).
(*) The idea was broached for our IC department to build the counter IC. We passed on the idea, and a bunch of the department engineers had second thoughts about staying with HP for printers.
Fun(?) fact: A friend transferred to the print cartridge division in Corvallis. He told me that the legal department for the division was very large and very busy, litigating against people trying to do second-source and/or ink refills. Valid as of the late 1990s. No idea now. F-em.
Nowadays? they update the printer firmware to reject any second source or ink refills that don’t have a matching IC in the cartridge.
This article was from 3 years ago and for a while the suggestions worked. I sent the owner an e-mail describing what I ran into (force firmware update), and we’ll see if he responds.
Wow. You go through a lot more paper than the four of us do (I print all mom’s stuff too). We might print half a dozen pages a month, if that.
I really like the newer Epsons without the cartridges. Do have to remember to run the ink test once a month though.
Never had a printer fail on me. Printers got replaced when it was cheaper to get an upgraded one than buy the ink for it. Usually when local sources quit carrying the ink.
Mom doesn’t have a printer because I’d have to go over and print whatever every single time. PS I’ve tried, sisters have tried, we gave up. Just easier to have her forward whatever to be printed, or point out to those sending docs and pdfs that she does not have a printer. If they are sending her something her girls shouldn’t see or know about? Send it snail mail.
I print the weekly shopping list a couple-three times a week, then do the final list double-sided (with appropriate formatting) to make a shirt-pocketable (totally a word) version.
That and the odd quarterly return envelope. Median usage is maybe 3 pages a week, but there can be moments. I used to do church bulletins for the steadily-dying church we went to, but that was about 12 pages a week. Still, on my own dime and labor, so it hurt when they were wasted. Given the excuse “They’re only paper”, I found my AFIB gently telling me to get the hell out.
Other, more serious, issues lead to our departure a few months later. My heart appreciated it. Surprisingly, the church lasted a few more years, though I suspect the regional Yearly Meeting (in Newburg) was bankrolling the operation until they called a halt. Said church building got sold to another church.
(When I left, I gave the remaining board members a link to a ministry that provides free computers to congregations in need. Nobody bothered.)
“Stress is the result of overriding the desire to choke the sh!t out of somebody who desperately needs it.”
They must have a heck of an AI looking through all the g-code files that are actually sent to the printers (basically “move to right here and do something” over and over again) that is clever enough to pattern match and identify that the part named “door stop spacer 3” is really a magazine baseplate, while the actual door stop that happens to resemble some gun-ish part is actually not.
And does that mean I can’t use one of this oh-so-virtuous printers to print Han Solo’s Blaster? Or a nerf gun, rubber band gun, or super soaker?
And if I change the name of my project to print a life size bust of Barry Sotoero to “Colt 1911A1” will it print?
Yeah, even assuming nobody jailbreaks these in the first three minutes, good luck with all that.
”Judge, my client should not be named a codefendant – why, they made this web page that says ‘don’t do this or else!’ How could they know these 13 year old international cyber criminals with their L337 Hacker Skillz would manage to break past such strong safeguards?”
From the comments in the tweet https://xcancel.com/CultLaser/status/1994490368474378529 , redoing the OS to “Klipper” negates the problem. Still, the company needs to be adequately rewarded for their true-blue hoplophobic attitude. Lawsuits or boycotts? Flip a coin?
I get where you’re coming from, but let’s face it, any attempt to depict the scale of Communism’s casualties would have completely blown out Sarah’s margins, and we can’t have that. :)
Estimates of the number of people killed by Communist governments range from 100 to 200 million. If we settle on 150 million and depict them as being laid head to toe depicting the scale of Communism murders, we’d have a band of bodies about 6 bodies wide stretching all the way around the earth. Yeah, that would blow out anyone’s margins.
Women are a different species. I swear it must be true. The one I have here did not understand the CAT loader meme and called me a dork for laughing so loud.
I didn’t catch the Devil’s Tower of Mashed Potatoes until my second scroll-through. Then I was nearly ROFL, much to the consternation of my coworkers . . .
It’s been too dry for snow at our elevation, but 21F is cold enough to get my attention. Still, it’s better than the single digits from a few years ago.
Also probably Starmer and I have not yet been convinced of Macron.
Also, you probably are not obligated to take any scholar seriously who is associated with a university that teaches DIE and critical theory. You can still choose to take specific individual scholars seriously based on the quality of their work, but you are under no obligations, not even to care.
The writer who wants bestselling works without being personally perceived hits veeery close to home. I did put Claude and Suno to work on the problem of Thanksgiving Carols this year, but way too late, like, a week before Turkey Day? I suppose I should schedule Thanksgiving Carol posts for next year at this point.
I was an early adopter of micro-computer word processors, Wordstar, Word Perfect, MS Word, as well as things like runoff (DSR, roff/troff) on ‘big’ computers. Unfortunately, they came too late for my first undergraduate degree.
My girlfriend in college, later wife, had a nice new electric typewriter, and she let me use it for papers. Early on, I had accepted the wisdom of carbon paper or NCR paper, so I would have a copy should my paper get itself losted.
I am a slow typist. My style of writing had me working from a first draft and pretty much on the fly building a revision; I would average about half an hour per page.
And of course, I made typing errors. I found it effectively impossible to erase an error, as I could never get the alignment correct after the fix.
Most often with a typing error, it would be at the beginning of a word. I would then think up a word that had that beginning and fit the meaning of my sentence.
Eventually my girlfriend offered to type my papers for me. That was wonderful, except that I had to have a final draft for her. She became the only other person but me who was an expert in reading my handwriting. (How professors ever tolerated my hand-written essay test question answers I do not know.)
A professor once wrote on one of my particularly badly scrawled essay questions, with inserted words all over the place: “I wish I could take you to the center of a labyrinth and run away…”
:D I think mostly his head hurt from trying to decipher it, and being stuck in the middle of a labyrinth was the experience he thought it was most like. (He was from Central/Eastern Europe, IIRC, and although he read English very well and spoke it adequately, he sometimes had quirky ways of expressing himself.)
Depends how desperate you are. I spent a summer on a broken typewriter (I had to manually wind the tape when it unwound) and Dan’s high school typewriting manual. Get to the end, start again. ten hours a day.
I started at 20wpm.
Last time I was tested I was 120. Now? I don’t know. Keyboard go brrrrrt.
I type 3000 words an hour when writing original ficiton….
I had two years of typing, in middle school. That’d be 8th and 9th, of 3 year middle school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (after dirt was invented). Never got very fast, let alone accurate and fast.
Have a funny story from after I started coding and we moved. Middle ’80 so temp agencies had no idea what computer programmer, let alone coder, was. They asked if I could type. Well “yes” said I. They’d have to test me. Me? Sure why not. 🤷Results? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣Accuracy? 100% Because I corrected as I typed (doesn’t everyone? FYI sarcasm.) But speed? About 60 WPM (which is failing). I reiterated I wasn’t an executive or secretarial assistant material that typed up dictation or others reports, that I wrote the software.
I do type up hubby’s stuff, he doesn’t touch type at all. Also correct as I do (sometimes even get away with that). Also mom’s, but that is only because she doesn’t have a computer (she does touch type). At least I can read mom’s writing. I have 47 years of experience reading hubby’s handwriting, but dang it is bad.
I took a typing class in 1969; the typewriters all had blank keytops and I learned to touch-type. I’ll NEVER be fast. My first IBM-clone computer came with the “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” software (as one of a stack of 3.5-inch “stiffies”.
One (1) time I got up to 40-something WPM. Low 30s is more the usual.
Same for musical instruments. I used to play guitar with friends, and I was the one to figure out new songs by ear. Then they’d play the cool riffs while I just strummed and hummed.
An episode of The Simpsons clued me in to the diagnosis: Stupid Fingers.
No idea what my typing speed is now. As fast as I can write blogs and, through 10 years ago, write code, both composing as I go. Including backspace rewrites.
I didn’t ever care much about speed; I’m still slow.
But I cared about accuracy. Once I hit ~50% typing errors, I was done for the day. That point came increasingly quickly as I aged – about 14 hours in my 20s, 13 in my 30’s, 12 in my 40s, 10 in my 50s, 8 in my 60s, and I have not needed to worry about that in my 70’s.
I had a portable typewriter mid-’70s for first degree. While I touch typed, between my spelling, lack of typing skills, and “communication” and content were critical for the degree (yes, being a little sarcastic) any written paper grade for the degree was almost guarantied a “fail”. Spelling errors (which included typing errors) down graded the paper. Also one of the reasons I took so long to pass dendrology – wasn’t that I couldn’t learn the dang plants, common and scientific names, it was the dang spelling. Things improved once I could correct papers electronically, even before spell and grammar checkers were available. Now I only change sentence structure, not if the tool spell checker can’t find the correct word, but if I can’t find the correct word using internet search (at least VS WP google casts a wider net). Been known to happen. I base “spelling” of how I hear the word or pronunciation. I’d spell wash as warsh, if I didn’t know better.
I wondered where the Rs from Boston (where they pahk the cah) went. Then I went to school in South Dakota where they warsh the car after changing the earl.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the facts: Gurgle hates cats. Boo. Doofus disagrees with Gurgle most vehemently. He demands laps for naps, rescue from obviously escapable situations as inescapable, and chicken for his addiction. Treats or nips! Nom on chicken, or nibbles on you.
Of course, he does that anyway in jest. Mostly when pets are not immediately applied on his demanding schedule.
We could use your hunting cat (Nastycat?). Last night I was in the kitchen, looked down and beheld a rat. A very calm, slow rat who actually ate a scrap of green pepper off the floor while I watched.
Rat spent the night in a bucket with a sheet of plywood on top, before being taken to the dumpster behind the restaurant and dropped off. Our son said the dumpster cat seemed very pleased with herself, but the fate of Other Rat will remain unknown.
Neighborcat, Slayer of All that is Small brings his kills to the porch on the daily. There’s a field next door and the woods up the hill. The Verminous Forces of the RLF besiege Neighborcat’s chosen ground with regularity. And with same, they die.
Neighborcat does not play with his food. He simply breaks their necks or eviscerates them and lets them bleed out rapidly. Despite the constant smell of death and promise of same, the squirrely nation and its filthy minions have tried for years now to cross into the neighborhood and form thence to the restaurant dumpster down the way.
All forces thus far have run into the stone wall that is Neighborcat. None have made it past the property alive.
what do you think of this week’s science experiment?
The Fragile Frontier
Verse 1 – Red Sun Rising
We came with dreams of steel and stone Four light-years from the place called home Built our domes beneath a crimson sky Where towers reached but couldn’t fly
The red sun never sets or rises here Just twilight painting rust and fear We thought we’d bend this world to our design But Proxima had other plans in mind
Chorus
On the fragile frontier, we learned to fall Before we learned to stand at all Not conquest but surrender saves As two worlds meet in subtle ways
Verse 2 – The Breaking
The spores came creeping through every seal They taught us what was truly real We fought with all our human might Lost the battle, found new sight
Sarah Chen was first to change Her consciousness grew wide and strange We had to choose: adapt or despair Golden tracery grew everywhere
Verse 3 – The Siege
The stars fell like fire from the sky Thirty thousand had to die Walkers rose in burning night Our domes collapsed despite our fight
But Proxima remembered all The spores we feared became our call They ate through metal, turned the tide Four thousand souls survived inside
Bridge – The Question
Generations in the glow The bloom taught us what we should know Earth returned with judgment clear: “Are you human standing here?”
Verse 4 – The Choice
Deep in valleys where networks grow We found those who came before They chose what we’re afraid to be Merged with planetary consciousness free
Fifty-eight to forty-two The colony split in two Some left on the Meridian’s flight Some stayed to join the light
Verse 5 – The Triumph
Twenty years and now we fly Ships that breathe beneath the sky Not metal cold but living stone The Synthesis has flown
Tarek sails the light-year seas Kaia waits to merge with ease We opened evolution’s door We are not strangers anymore
Final Chorus
On the fragile frontier, we became Something Earth would fear to name Not just human, not just alien But synthesis of what has been The fragile frontier set us free To be whatever we could be
Outro
The networks whisper on the breeze Humanity’s not fixed but flowing A thousand futures cross the seas Forever changing, forever growing We’re Proximans beneath these stars This alien home, forever ours
According To Hoyt 
OK the one with the AI and the hands, the hands are the least of the problems. Unless it’s a lore reference to some show I mever watched.
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Tell me you’ve never seen The Princess Bride without telling me you’ve never seen The Princess Bride :)
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I think it’s probably been about 20 years or so…
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HA! I’d forgotten about that. Good one!
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You’ve never seen The Princess Bride? You must. It’s a true family film, with pirates for the boys, romance and kissing for the girls, and ANDRE THE GIANT for everyone!
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There is also a man with six fingers.
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“The piano player really did have 88 fingers.”
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And Tom Lehrer had an 88 string guitar. (Introduction to “The Folk Song Army”.)
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The latter. Hint: hello, my name is Inigo Montoya; you killed my father.
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According to my prophecy:
https://instapundit.com/759253/
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I need to additively manufacture some parts for a twenty year heat pump. Don’t suppose anyone has a file for that taking up space on their hard drive?
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Remember when Ma Bell owned everybody’s big ol’ Bakelite rotary phone? I don’t know what their specs demanded, but my money says half of them would survive a 6-foot fall onto bare cement.
If desktop printers had been made in the 1920–before the weasels thought up Planned Obsolescence–I’d bet those ones would still be running today. Stoves and fridges used to work for decades at a time with just bimetallic strip thermostats, mechanical clocks driving cams and such, beefy motors and switches…
There’s just got to be a yuuugely unsupplied demand for “America’s Bilt-2-Last™” appliances. Even at 3x the sticker price of a plastic-geared ChiCom one, it would likely be cheaper in the not-very-long run, what with not needing to replace its brain every year or so. And it wouldn’t gossip in Mandarin to your WiFi router.
I wonder which Gummint TLA’s job it is to prevent that.
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There is a reason the repair parts market for good old top-loading washing machines and old school front load electric dryers is still robust and well supplied, in spite of “it’s not energy efficient!” and “it’s not water efficient!” and “it doesn’t even connect to the internet!”
Poke around on YT and you will find plenty of videos from repair folks who document how to do repairs ones-own-self on them, and as long as there are parts they will pretty much run forever.
My washer may not speak several languages, but it actually cleans my clothes.
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It’s good that we still have the Old Ones who know how to keep the old machines going, and it’s great that we have the Toob to spread the skills around.
But why is no one (that I know of) manufacturing new washers and dryers built to last the way they did in the Good Old Days? An “old-fashioned” washer built with 21st century precision manufacturing techniques and high quality materials oughta be something the great-great-grands fight over when granny’s done with it.
Of course I blame weasels. Ya just gotta know they’ve carefully determined exactly how short the warranty can be, and how much longer the machine has to run without breaking, to keep customer fury from affecting the profit margin…
Actually, I think you answered my wished-it-was-facetious closing question: At least one of the TLA’s “protecting” us from long-lived low-maintenance gadgets must be the EPA.
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The ozone killed refrigerators. The new refrigerants used to replace R-whatever don’t carry oil around the system very well so the compressors fail; and so we release more of the new refrigerants (since no one bothers to collect it from dead or dying refrigerators) instead of keeping our Kelvinators forever; thustly destroying the ozone even more and selling more refrigerators.
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That’s TLA’s for ya!
1) Pretend to be fixing The Problem while actually making it worse;
2) Pretend the worse woulda been even worser without the TLA;
3) Pretend that giving the TLA More Money And Power will Turn The Tide;
4) GOTO 1
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We got into the last of those appliances when we were married and went to work at the end of the ’70s. Our first refrigerator lasted 27 years, second freezer 40 years (first one would have too but it was “too big to move”), first washer/dryer combo 17 years. Granted our subsequent freezer and refrigerator each probably dropped our power consumption by 20% (especially the freezer since it failed by continuously running, and was only ever 25% full).
The subsequent “newer” washer and dryer units seem to last 12 – 14 years. Judgement is out on the new 7 CF chest freezer, too new. The “new” *refrigerator is 20 years old. All the failed appliances “failed” under “part replacement too expensive to fix, for the part, if you can get it”.
(*) Digital displays are out. Not like we ever changed them once set. Exception is the ice maker. “Refrigerator is making weird noises again!”, “Someone brushed the ice maker button. Push the button, once to turn it off.” No water connection to the refrigerator. We use the “ice tray” for reusable cooler ice blocks.
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My parents bought one of those massive chest freezers in the late ’50s; memory guesstimates it was ~20CF at least. No clue what it cost or how much power it ate, but I NEVER saw anything over -5 degF on the little alcohol thermometer inside it. Given its vintage, it was surely Freon-cooled. The sucker was still running just fine when they replaced in the middle ’90s. IDK why. (It had the old-fashioned “kid-killer” car-door style handle; maybe California banned it for that? or because Freon?) The new one was an upright (so all the cold poured out every time you opened it) and I never saw it claim a temp LESS than 5-above.
I loved that thing as a kid. I’d blow the biggest soap bubbles I could and watch them float on the cold air as they shriveled and froze and sank down onto the food. Dozens of them.
Mom wasn’t thrilled, but she was probably glad I hadn’t come up with something worse.
Miss ya, Mom.
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Grandparents had one of those. It went away when the person who bought the property, gutted the house. That was 2007.
The big 30 cu ft one we had, ’80 – ’85, was not one of those. The 40+ year old one didn’t either. Didn’t until wouldn’t shut off.
Reason why I used the “saved power kilowatts” instead of power bill is because we are not California. With our cost of power, even now, saving thousands of kilowatts, doesn’t save that much money. Saves some, but our bills just aren’t that high. (You can hear Californians cry when told our combined highest utility bill runs ~$400, in August (water, including irrigation, power, sewer, and natural gas). Deep cold of winter runs about the same, swapping water costs with natural gas. I know some of the California districts the water bill alone ran double or triple that every billing cycle. I was running tests with real data (thought I’d oops the change. I hadn’t.)
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Yes, Karen will always be with us. Male, female, corporate, all the same.
On the other hand, now I know to never offer them any of my filthy Conservative money for their oh-so-virtuous snitchware.
Always remember my friends; you can get more with a smile, a mill and a lathe than you can with just a smile.
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The Xeet and responses give a solution for those who already have the snitchware-infested printer and want a better solution.
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Yep, I saw that. What percentage of the possible customers even know what a “man-in-the-middle” attack is, never mind how to use one to check their printer communications? And that leaves out the real possibility (which I ran into with my Epson printer just this past week) that if you don’t install the firmware upgrades, the printer will simply refuse to print until you do.
The idea isn’t to completely stop it; the idea is to make getting around it such a pain that most people won’t bother, and the people that do will leave a distinctive trail that AI analytics will spot it if necessary.
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Looks at my old (circa 2010ish) Brother laser printer. No firmware updates, I have the Linux drivers and spare consumables (including a spare drum). It’s no longer printing much, maybe a half-dozen pages a week, so until some plastic gear self destructs, I’m golden.
I worked for HP, and didn’t like how they were going with inkjets. (Dot counting? No f’n way I’ll stand for that.) The first desktop that skipped the parallel port doomed the Inkjet I got on employee discount, so it got retired. HP is now an automatic noway, I’m skeptical about Epson, (and Lexmark) but when this one dies, it’ll likely be replaced by another Brother. OTOH, it might outlive me…
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If folks have a parallel printer they want to use, and no such port on their pc, one option is a “parallel to ethernet adapter”.
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Amazon has USB to parallel port adapter cables starting at less than $10. Just make sure you get the DB-25 version instead of the 36-pin. And maybe don’t go for the ‘lowest bidder’. 😁
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The other railroad spike in the coffin of my admiration for HP printers was the obsolescence of the print cartridges. About the time I got a new desktop computer, the relevant cartridges were pretty scarce. At least those didn’t have the dot counter* (thus killing the idea of refilling the cartridge).
(*) The idea was broached for our IC department to build the counter IC. We passed on the idea, and a bunch of the department engineers had second thoughts about staying with HP for printers.
Fun(?) fact: A friend transferred to the print cartridge division in Corvallis. He told me that the legal department for the division was very large and very busy, litigating against people trying to do second-source and/or ink refills. Valid as of the late 1990s. No idea now. F-em.
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When they put more effort into suing their customers than building decent products, you know they’re F-ed. ☹️
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Nowadays? they update the printer firmware to reject any second source or ink refills that don’t have a matching IC in the cartridge.
This article was from 3 years ago and for a while the suggestions worked. I sent the owner an e-mail describing what I ran into (force firmware update), and we’ll see if he responds.
https://bchtechnologies.com/blogs/blog/epsons-update-disabled-my-printer-what-to-do-firmware-roll-back-or-something-better
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Wow. You go through a lot more paper than the four of us do (I print all mom’s stuff too). We might print half a dozen pages a month, if that.
I really like the newer Epsons without the cartridges. Do have to remember to run the ink test once a month though.
Never had a printer fail on me. Printers got replaced when it was cheaper to get an upgraded one than buy the ink for it. Usually when local sources quit carrying the ink.
Mom doesn’t have a printer because I’d have to go over and print whatever every single time. PS I’ve tried, sisters have tried, we gave up. Just easier to have her forward whatever to be printed, or point out to those sending docs and pdfs that she does not have a printer. If they are sending her something her girls shouldn’t see or know about? Send it snail mail.
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I print the weekly shopping list a couple-three times a week, then do the final list double-sided (with appropriate formatting) to make a shirt-pocketable (totally a word) version.
That and the odd quarterly return envelope. Median usage is maybe 3 pages a week, but there can be moments. I used to do church bulletins for the steadily-dying church we went to, but that was about 12 pages a week. Still, on my own dime and labor, so it hurt when they were wasted. Given the excuse “They’re only paper”, I found my AFIB gently telling me to get the hell out.
Other, more serious, issues lead to our departure a few months later. My heart appreciated it. Surprisingly, the church lasted a few more years, though I suspect the regional Yearly Meeting (in Newburg) was bankrolling the operation until they called a halt. Said church building got sold to another church.
(When I left, I gave the remaining board members a link to a ministry that provides free computers to congregations in need. Nobody bothered.)
“Stress is the result of overriding the desire to choke the sh!t out of somebody who desperately needs it.”
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They must have a heck of an AI looking through all the g-code files that are actually sent to the printers (basically “move to right here and do something” over and over again) that is clever enough to pattern match and identify that the part named “door stop spacer 3” is really a magazine baseplate, while the actual door stop that happens to resemble some gun-ish part is actually not.
And does that mean I can’t use one of this oh-so-virtuous printers to print Han Solo’s Blaster? Or a nerf gun, rubber band gun, or super soaker?
And if I change the name of my project to print a life size bust of Barry Sotoero to “Colt 1911A1” will it print?
Yeah, even assuming nobody jailbreaks these in the first three minutes, good luck with all that.
Virtue Signaling Morons.
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More likely “on advice of counsel”, trying to avoid the inevitable lawsuits.
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I can see this.
”Judge, my client should not be named a codefendant – why, they made this web page that says ‘don’t do this or else!’ How could they know these 13 year old international cyber criminals with their L337 Hacker Skillz would manage to break past such strong safeguards?”
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From the comments in the tweet https://xcancel.com/CultLaser/status/1994490368474378529 , redoing the OS to “Klipper” negates the problem. Still, the company needs to be adequately rewarded for their true-blue hoplophobic attitude. Lawsuits or boycotts? Flip a coin?
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SFBS!
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Minotaur skinning is a WAR CRIME.
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reply to Druid:
BULLSHIRT!
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Unless a friend bequeaths you his hide to be made into a bulletproof coat. 🙂
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To be fair.
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‘Communism according to history’ should have far more than just one person getting shot. Along with a big pit for the mass grave.
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Yes, it should be an AI generated image rather than an actual photo from history.
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I get where you’re coming from, but let’s face it, any attempt to depict the scale of Communism’s casualties would have completely blown out Sarah’s margins, and we can’t have that. :)
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Estimates of the number of people killed by Communist governments range from 100 to 200 million. If we settle on 150 million and depict them as being laid head to toe depicting the scale of Communism murders, we’d have a band of bodies about 6 bodies wide stretching all the way around the earth. Yeah, that would blow out anyone’s margins.
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https://i.ibb.co/hRMwsDDS/IMG-0496.jpg
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Hm, WPDE being weird – trying again:
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Shouldn’t Vader be on a tomater? ;D
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He’s sitting on a ‘tater.
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”I have altered my seating vegetable. Pray I do not alter it further.”
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:D
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Also, he has the high ground.
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I thought that was Kenobi…? :D
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Learned his lesson.
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Women are a different species. I swear it must be true. The one I have here did not understand the CAT loader meme and called me a dork for laughing so loud.
Also the pumpkin pie is a work of art. Genius!
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I didn’t catch the Devil’s Tower of Mashed Potatoes until my second scroll-through. Then I was nearly ROFL, much to the consternation of my coworkers . . .
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I couldn’t figure it out–it reminded me of the DT from mashed potatoes scene, but I completely spaced out on Richard Dreyfus’s appearance.
Loved the Cat-carrier meme. And the pumpkin pie topper.
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I got it! The CAT loader.
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Well, more missing emails showed up. 😉
And I woke up to snow on the ground (less than an inch). 😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀
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It’s been too dry for snow at our elevation, but 21F is cold enough to get my attention. Still, it’s better than the single digits from a few years ago.
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Us too.
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Did anybody else see that as ‘more missing entrails showed up’ on the first read? 😁
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Never upset a dragon, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
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Do not meddle with the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
By the time you are worrying about upsetting them, it’s probably too late.
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Aye. Couldn’t remember the canonical quote.
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Whelp, it seems that we can confirm that the PRC is behind these politicians, judges, and military officials deposing leaders.
It was suggestive for the US, but not definitive.
Brazil was suggestive, but could be explained by an excess of international sentiment among the PMC.
South Korea is apparently confirming the fraud hypothesis, and tying it very strongly to the PRC.
https://redstate.com/erik-durneika/2025/11/29/the-situation-in-south-korea-continues-to-deteriorate-implications-for-us-national-security-n2196644
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Also probably Starmer and I have not yet been convinced of Macron.
Also, you probably are not obligated to take any scholar seriously who is associated with a university that teaches DIE and critical theory. You can still choose to take specific individual scholars seriously based on the quality of their work, but you are under no obligations, not even to care.
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“Also, you probably are not obligated to take any scholar seriously who is associated with a university that teaches DIE and critical theory.”
That effectively means no university-associated scholar ever gets the benefit of the doubt. Works for me.
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Thank you.
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I just finished A Diabolical Bargain and enjoyed it. Thank you.
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Glad you liked it!
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LOL on the turkey pardon.
Rest are good too.
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The writer who wants bestselling works without being personally perceived hits veeery close to home. I did put Claude and Suno to work on the problem of Thanksgiving Carols this year, but way too late, like, a week before Turkey Day? I suppose I should schedule Thanksgiving Carol posts for next year at this point.
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Honestly, it’s me. And having the blog is even worse. SIGH.
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hugs you have my sympathy there.
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Avoiding words due to spelling …
I was an early adopter of micro-computer word processors, Wordstar, Word Perfect, MS Word, as well as things like runoff (DSR, roff/troff) on ‘big’ computers. Unfortunately, they came too late for my first undergraduate degree.
My girlfriend in college, later wife, had a nice new electric typewriter, and she let me use it for papers. Early on, I had accepted the wisdom of carbon paper or NCR paper, so I would have a copy should my paper get itself losted.
I am a slow typist. My style of writing had me working from a first draft and pretty much on the fly building a revision; I would average about half an hour per page.
And of course, I made typing errors. I found it effectively impossible to erase an error, as I could never get the alignment correct after the fix.
Most often with a typing error, it would be at the beginning of a word. I would then think up a word that had that beginning and fit the meaning of my sentence.
Eventually my girlfriend offered to type my papers for me. That was wonderful, except that I had to have a final draft for her. She became the only other person but me who was an expert in reading my handwriting. (How professors ever tolerated my hand-written essay test question answers I do not know.)
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A professor once wrote on one of my particularly badly scrawled essay questions, with inserted words all over the place: “I wish I could take you to the center of a labyrinth and run away…”
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Ah, so he was amazed by your answer!
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:D I think mostly his head hurt from trying to decipher it, and being stuck in the middle of a labyrinth was the experience he thought it was most like. (He was from Central/Eastern Europe, IIRC, and although he read English very well and spoke it adequately, he sometimes had quirky ways of expressing himself.)
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Writing in Cursed…
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I was 5wpm “hunt, peck, cuss” typist when I enlisted Infantry
-naturally- I got drafted into battalion HQ as a Mailclerk and Awards Clerk. (Typist, basicly)
Mom was 90-100wpm. Her Selectric ran like a machine gun. Obviously not on the Y chromosome.
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Depends how desperate you are. I spent a summer on a broken typewriter (I had to manually wind the tape when it unwound) and Dan’s high school typewriting manual. Get to the end, start again. ten hours a day.
I started at 20wpm.
Last time I was tested I was 120. Now? I don’t know. Keyboard go brrrrrt.
I type 3000 words an hour when writing original ficiton….
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I eventually got that rate up to 35wpm.
Anything faster and the cypher circuits kick in. (Grin)
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Oh, I know the 3k words thing, because older son and I had contests. He averaged 1k words an hour, I averaged 3k.
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I had two years of typing, in middle school. That’d be 8th and 9th, of 3 year middle school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (after dirt was invented). Never got very fast, let alone accurate and fast.
Have a funny story from after I started coding and we moved. Middle ’80 so temp agencies had no idea what computer programmer, let alone coder, was. They asked if I could type. Well “yes” said I. They’d have to test me. Me? Sure why not. 🤷Results? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣Accuracy? 100% Because I corrected as I typed (doesn’t everyone? FYI sarcasm.) But speed? About 60 WPM (which is failing). I reiterated I wasn’t an executive or secretarial assistant material that typed up dictation or others reports, that I wrote the software.
I do type up hubby’s stuff, he doesn’t touch type at all. Also correct as I do (sometimes even get away with that). Also mom’s, but that is only because she doesn’t have a computer (she does touch type). At least I can read mom’s writing. I have 47 years of experience reading hubby’s handwriting, but dang it is bad.
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I took a typing class in 1969; the typewriters all had blank keytops and I learned to touch-type. I’ll NEVER be fast. My first IBM-clone computer came with the “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” software (as one of a stack of 3.5-inch “stiffies”.
One (1) time I got up to 40-something WPM. Low 30s is more the usual.
Same for musical instruments. I used to play guitar with friends, and I was the one to figure out new songs by ear. Then they’d play the cool riffs while I just strummed and hummed.
An episode of The Simpsons clued me in to the diagnosis: Stupid Fingers.
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No idea what my typing speed is now. As fast as I can write blogs and, through 10 years ago, write code, both composing as I go. Including backspace rewrites.
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I didn’t ever care much about speed; I’m still slow.
But I cared about accuracy. Once I hit ~50% typing errors, I was done for the day. That point came increasingly quickly as I aged – about 14 hours in my 20s, 13 in my 30’s, 12 in my 40s, 10 in my 50s, 8 in my 60s, and I have not needed to worry about that in my 70’s.
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Same experience.
I had a portable typewriter mid-’70s for first degree. While I touch typed, between my spelling, lack of typing skills, and “communication” and content were critical for the degree (yes, being a little sarcastic) any written paper grade for the degree was almost guarantied a “fail”. Spelling errors (which included typing errors) down graded the paper. Also one of the reasons I took so long to pass dendrology – wasn’t that I couldn’t learn the dang plants, common and scientific names, it was the dang spelling. Things improved once I could correct papers electronically, even before spell and grammar checkers were available. Now I only change sentence structure, not if the tool spell checker can’t find the correct word, but if I can’t find the correct word using internet search (at least VS WP google casts a wider net). Been known to happen. I base “spelling” of how I hear the word or pronunciation. I’d spell wash as warsh, if I didn’t know better.
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I wondered where the Rs from Boston (where they pahk the cah) went. Then I went to school in South Dakota where they warsh the car after changing the earl.
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Autopen pardoned eight Thanksgiving turkeys, so I guess turkey is on the menu for the next week or two at the White House.
Though maybe the older ones are past their prime for roasting. Maybe a nice turkey soup…
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OT: I just got an e-mail from Eli Goldberg and confirmed on Facebook that Leslie Fish has died.
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Another pioneer has crossed the horizon, whence we shall all inevitably go ourselves. We will miss a friend today.
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Oh NO! Much sorrow.
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Aw no….
This has been a heck of a year for good people.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the facts: Gurgle hates cats. Boo. Doofus disagrees with Gurgle most vehemently. He demands laps for naps, rescue from obviously escapable situations as inescapable, and chicken for his addiction. Treats or nips! Nom on chicken, or nibbles on you.
Of course, he does that anyway in jest. Mostly when pets are not immediately applied on his demanding schedule.
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We could use your hunting cat (Nastycat?). Last night I was in the kitchen, looked down and beheld a rat. A very calm, slow rat who actually ate a scrap of green pepper off the floor while I watched.
Rat spent the night in a bucket with a sheet of plywood on top, before being taken to the dumpster behind the restaurant and dropped off. Our son said the dumpster cat seemed very pleased with herself, but the fate of Other Rat will remain unknown.
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Neighborcat, Slayer of All that is Small brings his kills to the porch on the daily. There’s a field next door and the woods up the hill. The Verminous Forces of the RLF besiege Neighborcat’s chosen ground with regularity. And with same, they die.
Neighborcat does not play with his food. He simply breaks their necks or eviscerates them and lets them bleed out rapidly. Despite the constant smell of death and promise of same, the squirrely nation and its filthy minions have tried for years now to cross into the neighborhood and form thence to the restaurant dumpster down the way.
All forces thus far have run into the stone wall that is Neighborcat. None have made it past the property alive.
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Where did Karl Marx get the pan?
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Stole it from the kitchen, of course.
As with everything else in communism, it’s not only an empty promise, it was your pan to begin with.
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He stole it, of course.
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He stole it, I presume.
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Given usual Marxist behavior, I would presume he shot at least eight people for it.
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Free video: https://youtu.be/C4m7GTg4Iio
what do you think of this week’s science experiment?
The Fragile Frontier
Verse 1 – Red Sun Rising
We came with dreams of steel and stone
Four light-years from the place called home
Built our domes beneath a crimson sky
Where towers reached but couldn’t fly
The red sun never sets or rises here
Just twilight painting rust and fear
We thought we’d bend this world to our design
But Proxima had other plans in mind
Chorus
On the fragile frontier, we learned to fall
Before we learned to stand at all
Not conquest but surrender saves
As two worlds meet in subtle ways
Verse 2 – The Breaking
The spores came creeping through every seal
They taught us what was truly real
We fought with all our human might
Lost the battle, found new sight
Sarah Chen was first to change
Her consciousness grew wide and strange
We had to choose: adapt or despair
Golden tracery grew everywhere
Verse 3 – The Siege
The stars fell like fire from the sky
Thirty thousand had to die
Walkers rose in burning night
Our domes collapsed despite our fight
But Proxima remembered all
The spores we feared became our call
They ate through metal, turned the tide
Four thousand souls survived inside
Bridge – The Question
Generations in the glow
The bloom taught us what we should know
Earth returned with judgment clear:
“Are you human standing here?”
Verse 4 – The Choice
Deep in valleys where networks grow
We found those who came before
They chose what we’re afraid to be
Merged with planetary consciousness free
Fifty-eight to forty-two
The colony split in two
Some left on the Meridian’s flight
Some stayed to join the light
Verse 5 – The Triumph
Twenty years and now we fly
Ships that breathe beneath the sky
Not metal cold but living stone
The Synthesis has flown
Tarek sails the light-year seas
Kaia waits to merge with ease
We opened evolution’s door
We are not strangers anymore
Final Chorus
On the fragile frontier, we became
Something Earth would fear to name
Not just human, not just alien
But synthesis of what has been
The fragile frontier set us free
To be whatever we could be
Outro
The networks whisper on the breeze
Humanity’s not fixed but flowing
A thousand futures cross the seas
Forever changing, forever growing
We’re Proximans beneath these stars
This alien home, forever ours
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Worf, chabvaD QaQ jaj Hoch jaj.
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