chuma.org

That spring I was talking about on my K550DTN printer, the one that came dislodged? It actually got jammed and I had to bend it beyond repair to remove it. HP sent me a new lower tray gratis, but they haven’t updated the design.

We went to Cedar Point, Ohio for the weekend of my birthday and had a fun getaway. I rode all the coasters at the park, especially on Sunday when it was shockingly not very busy at all. I walked onto most coasters with no wait, and boy, what a selection they have. Top Thrill Dragster was the most thrilling 20 seconds of my life I think. We had a good time together but some of the coasters were too extreme for Sandy, for good reason: they run much faster than your “standard” roller coaster and so you pull more G’s. But it was still nice to get away and go someplace different, even if it was just south of the border.

We got a new printer at home after my Apple Personal LaserWriter NTR finally gave up the ghost with a misaligned scanning laser (I think). A moment of silence please.

Well, we replaced it with (gasp!) an inkjet printer. I’ve always been the first one to point out the high cost of inkjet printing and have resisted spending a lot of money on one, but this time around I was convinced. We bought an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dtn, aka “HP Alphabet Soup” as I like to call it. It has some good things going for it:

• Four separate ink cartridges, including the ability to use a high-capacity black cartridge – something I miss from the days of my Canon BJ-4000. They load easily in the front too.
• Two separate print heads – yes, the heads are separate from the cartridges, so the ink is cheaper, and the heads should last quite a while. Stupidly the black head is combined with yellow, and cyan with magenta. Considering the black will likely wear out first…
• It actually has a lower cost per page on black and colour than a colour laser.
• I got it on a frickin’ deal at Best Buy: paid $315, and am getting $70 rebate from HP.

It even comes in three flavours: basic with one tray and USB, the dtn with wired networking, duplexer, and second tray, and the dtwn with wired+802.11g, duplexer, second tray, and USB Host support. The built-in print server is obviously geared towards a corporate environment, as it automatically keeps track of users’ printing including # of pages, and even microlitres of ink used (in each colour, of course!)

It’s not stellar for photo printing but it knocks the socks off my craptastic Lexmark Z33. And the paper trays are very fragile. I had to reseat a spring that sits in the bottom of the tray 2 area this morning and HP was of no help. Still, that spring will probably get dislodged again unless I remember to put the trays back very, very slowly. You can’t just slam them home like I used to on my Apple, or any of the HPs I’ve used before.

Still, I hope it will stand the test of time as my NTR did.

Please divide yourselves into two groups:

1. Those of you who are able to walk in a straight line, at a steady pace, and don’t drag those bloody wheeled suitcases, please keep left.
2. The rest of you who insist on:

• walking like a drunk
• walking extremely slowly in the middle of the path, often while reading, talking on a cell phone, or thumbing your Crackberry
• standing in the middle of the PATH talking to your friends while thousands of people route around you
• stopping dead at the top or bottom of staircases, escalators, or doorways

Please, for your own sake, STAY OUT OF EVERYONE ELSES FUCKING WAY!

This has been a public service announcement from me.

On Saturday we went to the weekly stock car races at Mosport and I brought Calum along to take some photos of cars going in a circle really really fast. Amateur oval racing, that is. His photo gallery is here and there are some nice shots there.

Perhaps you’ve heard of a unique device called the TeleZapper. It’s a simple device which is designed to automatically disconnect and delete your number from their call list. But how? Well, have you ever called a wrong number and heard those funny three tones before the recorded message? Those tones are there to indicate to phone equipment that the number is not connected. Phone equipment like, say, a telemarketing company’s automatic phone dialer.

The theory is that if you play these tones right after picking up the phone, the telemarketer’s computer will hear them, think that the number is disconnected, and delete it from their list. In theory. In practice they’re not obligated to do so, but it’s still a fairly good idea.

Well over here at the house I have a home server, and that server has a modem that will automatically read and decode Caller ID information. Well, what do you think we could do with that power? If we have a database of “evil numbers”, we can check it against the incoming number and if it is “evil”, have the modem pick up the phone and then disconnect. It was pretty easy to hack into my Caller ID system. I would like to be able to play the tones instead, but the modem doesn’t support voice commands so this is the next best thing.

Bottom line: now I won’t have to pickup any more annoying phone calls from those telemarketers that simply won’t leave me alone.