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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I have a form like this I do regularly for work. I actually fax the form, I don’t even send it electronically. But I like to fill it electronically so I have my records on the computer. Because it is 2023. I had to use my home computer (linux) to generate a copy of the form, then use a floss editor I managed to get working on windows work computer to annotate on top of the form fields. For some reason it’s really hard to get the annotations to line up with the form fields. So sometimes I have to correct it by hand after printing to clarify.

    It is a zero security form, there is no need to have all this rigamarole. The form is freely available on the internet and anyone with a fucking fax machine could fill it in and send it on behalf of anyone else. Fax machine is the biggest hurdle; who the hell has one of those.




  • I mean if I’m going to buy component for the purpose, and there is a clip type thing on the board already, it seems like just obtaining the correct part would be the thing to do if possible. Rather than buying the wrong piece, dismantling the device further and possibly breaking it in the process. (It is really cheap and flimsy.) I’ve spliced things but that’s like more something to do when salvaging or putting something together from what’s on hand.

    Neat little gizmos though I’ll file it away for another project perhaps.



  • thanks for all the info!

    i am definitely a person who will always change the defaults for no particular reason. so I appreciate the warning. except I don’t quite know what you mean by “assignments”. do you mean like the names? eth0? or their functions? I do like the idea of having a physical jack that’s always guaranteed to allow access no matter what I foul up otherwise.

    all these years I have been running my home network with a collection of routers just kind of attached together in a way that shouldn’t work due to “double nat” according to everything I ever read, but it is pretty much functional if not at all optimized. maybe if you don’t believe in double nat it won’t happen to you.







  • imaradio@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldPrinters
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    1 year ago

    People who run printer companies should be incarcerated and forced to hand copy the source code of the linux kernel with a very small pencil.

    Several years ago, I decided to finally buy an all-in-one so I could print my favorite photos and do some scanning. I did what I thought to be pretty adequate research to find a model where the ink wasn’t too expensive. It was Epson x-something.

    Printed a few pictures but then, foolishly allowed to update software.

    After that, it doesn’t scan (scan!!) if one of the inks is low. When I bought it I thought, if nothing else I will have a scanner. Wrong!

    It turned out to be impossible to obtain the epson ink cartridges. No retail location near me sold them. Not on amazon. They sold it on the epson website. I ordered some. When the delivery came I was at work. So what this shipping company does is leaves a note saying “you can pick up your parcel at our facility” with an address that was miles away from my house in an industrial park hardly served by public transit. They were only open during business hours so I would have had to book a day off work and the google maps estimate was >3 hours round trip. I don’t even think I ever got a refund for the package which sat at the courier for 2 weeks and got returned to epson.

    At the time I bought the printer, it was possible to use 3rd party ink. However their “security update” robustly protected against this. I had intended to buy the epson ink but I was never able to. So I tried 3rd party. It didn’t work, the printer wouldn’t use it because it could tell it was not epson brand.

    There was no way to do a factory reset on the device, which IMHO is crazy for all kinds of reasons. The ink vendors had stuff up about how you could use some closed-source hack tool to force it to down grade. It primarily ran on windows which I don’t have. Also it seemed to me that the application could be doing literally anything to the printer, it was mysterious. I tried some things I read about how to force it to return to original hardware but it never worked.

    I spent sooo much time researching, troubleshooting, reading on forums, shopping etc. And some money, I think about $100-150. What I got for it was a half dozen prints, mostly testing out how the printer worked. 2 of these were worth keeping in any respect so I have 2 photos that costed >$50 and many hours of work each. After a few years I gave up and threw it out.