Something Random

[Mercutio]

Reviews on Amz are terrible for almost any brand, model and type. The new one I got had good reviews for a change, and my personal experience confirms it.

This is because every printer is fucking terrible.
I've had better experiences with Brother, so they're what I recommend and support. I don't even hate Brother MFC inkjets very much. Truthfully, I think the best way to print is to use whatever network printers you can use over a VPN to someplace you were meaning to go anyway. This works extremely well for me.

One of my customers had a giant stupid made in 2011 Brother 9970CDW that had printed less than 400 pages since 2011. They asked me to recycle it, so now it's my very own place to stack clothes that aren't dirty enough to put in the hamper.

 

[sedrosken]

Turns out the LaserJet I have did some hours -- it's from a lawyer's home office, but really all it needs is a good can of air let out inside it and a fresh set of toner cartridges. Although it did seem to clear up the yellow dots in the printout after a few test pages printed.

It's from 2016 so it still has the very spooky mid-2000s looking web UI for configuration. It does do PCL/PS -- PCL5, in fact, the best driver I tried without it actually being the intended driver was the Color LaserJet 8550 PCL driver included with XP, at least with SP3.

Being as old as it is it actually stands a decent chance of not freaking out over third-party toner cartridges, although HP was experimenting with this at their low end at this time, this was a high end "prosumer" product as far as their range went -- the MSRP was $629.99 in 2016.

I will likely keep the Brother around in case this thing beefs it. The lawyer I got it from (for free, I might add, I wouldn't pay money for an HP printer unless it was at least 20 years old, myself) never really told me why they replaced it. The weird issue with the yellow toner leaking may have started because it got moved or something and the printer's actually just fine.

 

[mubs]

I bought an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo scanner from Staples for a very good price in 2004 when I was living in the US. It still works great, I still use it quite a bit. Only downside was, it came with software that was W98 compatible. So I ran W98 in a VM and continued using it.

When I built my current PC, just couldn't install W98. Kept erroring out during install. I must have spent hours trying to solve this, researching the web. Eventually found out the the CPU was too fast for some sub-routine which was blowing up. I tried the Epson software in Win XP; it worked, so now I'm using it in an XP VM.

Ditto with Calendar Creator Plus. Version 2.0, 1987 - 1993. I did purchase subsequent versions, but they were crap. Amazingly, this version, purchased in 1992, continues working correctly after Y2K. We used it to track birthdays, anniversaries, etc, but don't anymore after the rise of smartphones. I think this originally ran on Win 3.1. I continued using it in VMs. Currently installed in the scanning Win XP VM, but not being used.

These older products were built to last, unlike the "replace every two years" crap being made today.

 

[Mercutio]

You may be interested to know that someone did ultimately buy the Calendar Creator code base and there's a new version as of ~2021-ish. There was for a time an incompatible release when the source code couldn't be found, but the most current version is based of the old Broderbund code and is fully compatible with Windows 11. One of my customers is a big fan of it. I probably even have the install files on one of the thumb drives in my pocket right now.

I have a friend staying with me the remainder of the month. This friend has an 18 month old. I've never given any particular thought to child proofing my home and we had to go buy a playpen at 11PM because apparently my place is nothing but sharp edges, monitors at exactly the end of arm's reach and long cords that are all ways to hurt a baby. Even my mission-style furniture is scary to somebody who hasn't been walking all that long. My cats are utterly terrified of this child, none more than my 8lb long-haired girl cat, who has been puffed up to double her normal size since the second the toddler came in the door.