After seven years, I decided to replace my home printer with something a bit more modern. Something with better Wi-Fi support (2.4Ghz AND 5Ghz support). Something that supports HP’s Instant Ink service. Maybe upgrade to a laser printer? I don’t mind sticking to black and white as I don’t tend to print much in colour anyway.
So, I bought an HP LaserJet MFP 234dwe at Amazon for £149.99 (but paid over 5 months at £29.99). It includes a 6-month trial of HP Instant Ink (well, toner) and includes an additional year’s warranty. It’s small, it sits nicely on my desk that I use for stationery related items and doesn’t make too much noise. It is almost perfect.
The only downside to this thing was having to use the HP “Smart” app to set everything up. Despite my Netgear router being able to talk to everything and anything in the home, neither the iOS nor macOS HP Smart app would get the machine to connect to the Wi-Fi network. I even disabled WPA3 authentication and dropped it down to WPA2 on the 5Ghz bands to see if that was the problem. Nope.
After a LOT more faffing about, I got the printer set-up on the 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi band by rebooting the router completely. Everything worked simply fine after that. The stupid thing is that the HP Smart app couldn’t see any of the three broadcast networks my router advertises – it could only see one and I wasn’t able to change it. Looking at the “simple” push-button WPS set-up, even that involves the use of the dreadful HP Smart app.
But now everything has been set-up and working, I’m going through toner like no business until my HP Instant Ink toner arrives within the next week. I’ve printed my father’s memoirs (in their current form) double-sided – some 43 pages and I’m impressed with the quality of text. I’m using HP Premium paper for this, so I ruddy well hope it came out well!
Photos are a different story. Obviously being black and white is going to have a massive difference, but I printed a landscape from my trip to Iceland taken on my ex high-end compact Sony camera and a iPhone 13 Pro Max photo that I took of my sister and dad at Christmas. The results are okay-ish, a bit like having a newspaper cutting.
But then again, I’d have bought an ink-jet printer if I wanted to print mainly photos. Most of what I print are documents, forms, and instruction manuals, and this printer will do me just fine.
I’ve now got to reconnect my old OfficeJet printer to the network, have it disconnected from Instant Ink and HP services, and then I can sell it for £25 or so.
This test was completed via monkeytype.com on Apple’s £180 (RRP) full-length wireless keyboard with Touch ID for Apple silicon Macs.
I should note that I am not a touch typist, but I’m still pretty good at finding keys without looking at them, and I do use both hands to type. I’ll need to repeat this test on my:
HP Omen laptop’s built-in keyboard
M1 Pro MacBook Pro’s built-in keyboard
Keychron V2 Brown switches mechanical keyboard (that I use with the HP Omen)
Razer Blackwidow V3 Yellow switches mechanical keyboard (also used with the HP Omen, occasionally)
Overall I prefer the tactile feeling of mechanical keyboards, but they are noisy and none of them have any form of Touch ID biometric support for Mac or Windows Hello biometric support for Windows – something Apple and most other keyboard manufacturers need to start working on.
As temperatures climb to uncomfortable figures this week, something needed to be done to keep cool whilst working both from home and in the office. So I saw this Tripole fan on Amazon, and immediately bought one. It has three speed settings and I’m currently on a small break in the office typing this up blog post whilst the fan is on full blast. It’s lovely. How long the fan will last before the motor conks out or befalls some other tragedy, I don’t know. But at £11 I can’t complain.
I took my iPad mini 6 to bed with me last night with one of the USB-C to USB-A adaptors from the MacBook Pro and ran the fan off the iPad mini throughout the night. It only drew 10% of the iPad’s battery. And I had a great sleep (until 4am when I had to get up and get ready to go to work due to early morning power maintenance).
Back in my halcyon days at university (1994-1996) where I first dipped my toes into the magical and mysterious world of the internet, the World Wide Web was just starting out, Facebook wasn’t even thought of yet, and spam was just something you ate from a can. But there was social networking in the form of terminal based BBSes.
A BBS is a Bulletin Board System that allows people to connect to (usually via dial-up) and read/write messages directly to each other or on public forums. Many were accessible via the ‘telnet’ terminal application which connected you directly to a BBS’ terminal.
There were also things called MUDs – Multi-User Dungeons – which allowed anybody to play a (usually) text-based fantasy game that involved other online players. And then there were Talkers which combined BBSes with MUDs. I was firmly in the Talkers camp.
Having watched this video about an old DEC terminal:
it made me become very nostalgic and I wanted to find out what happened to my Talker of choice – the one that kept me going throughout university until I left to embrace the internet as a commercial venture. That Talker was called Surfers. It was based around a system called EW-too. It was accessible via telnet, and everything was completely command based.
Surfers is still around in 2022 – 26 years after I used it in 1996! (with apologies to those viewing the above text on a mobile device)
It was there that I met quite a few people online, and while I used to spend my evenings in the university library playing around with the DEC Alpha machines (which undergraduates were never supposed to use, but I did so anyway – I loved DEC’s Tru64 OS) and regular PC terminals, the more I got involved with Surfers.
I even met a fellow student (Vicky) who was at a university (in Pennsylvania, USA) and started to correspond in real-life with her, sending – shock and horror – actual physical letters and photos! Even spent a bit of time calling the States – which was super expensive in those days, and you had to use the shared telephone in the student accommodation to do so. Real conversations were rather short, as you can imagine.
My time with Surfers ended when I eventually left university to pursue a career. I never heard back from Vicky, and it’s difficult to say what became of her. But all this is the precursor to modern social media, and back then it was just as addictive. My modern social media tends to go in bursts – sometimes I’m there, other times I’ll delete the account for a few weeks/months. I usually return after having a new break from the madness of it all. Social media can often be addictive, but it can also affect my mood quite a bit.
With Surfers, it was a quite different break-up. We were moving into an ever-increasing web-based world and telnet was eventually seen as being weak because of the lack of encryption between host and client. Besides, telnet was only useful now as an internal tool within a business for maintenance work (usually to access switches and other network equipment – it took some time for SSH support to appear even in higher end products).
But I am very pleasantly surprised that Surfers is still up and about. I’m fairly certain I recognised one of the super users on the board when I logged in a few hours ago, but everybody else has changed: all my previous Surfers friends have since long gone.
Telnet is not quite ready for retirement, it seems.
The two images below represent a new branding across all my social media and email. Ever since I learned about the family crest and motto, I’ve been itching to make use of them in some form. It certainly beats having the screenshot of me staring at the camera in the Top Gear studio.
As for email signatures, I’m using a company called WiseStamp to generate and host the images (they use AWS, so it’s speedy and should be reliable). It’s strange because I’ve always been quite averse to HTML and image-based email signatures and now here I am fully embracing them.
I couldn’t stand having to use the Google Sites editor for a moment longer when composing recent blog entries, so I’ve resorted to rolling my own WordPress site again. All of this is still under construction, so things may change a bit, but I like this theme and it’s hopefully not going to cost me the Earth to host this myself.
RSS feeds are back, and so is commenting.
I’m glad that I wrote bash scripts to help configure the virtual machine, install nginx, PHP and MariaDB in order to get this blog up and running again from scratch. Everything’s checked into Bitbucket for change management. But I do need to start converting everything into Ansible to make life a bit more easier.
