October 2004 Archives
The municipal flag of Chicago is rife with symbolism. Most may know that the blue stripes represent the two branches of the Chicago river. And some may know that the four stars represent Fort Dearborn, the Chicago Fire, the and the World's Expositions of 1893 and 1933. But who knew that the points of each star as well as the white stripes have symbolism, too? Check out the Chicago Public Library's full explanation of the symbolism.
And for those that didn't know, the Chicago Flag was ranked the second best American city flag. How are flags ranked? Well, by the 5 basic principles of flag design, of course! Provo, UT is probably the ugliest one on that list, in my opinion. That thing is terrible!
After dealing with not having a home printer for 3 or 4 months, I decided it was finally time to get a new one. I hate abusing work for printing, and there were definitely times when it would have been nice to have a printer available during the weekends. After my miserable experience with the Epson Stylus C82, I wanted to steer clear of Epson. My two main requirements were now: a fully capable remote printer, and auto on/off. There are many home inkjet printers that either come with a network print server, or can have one easily added. In all products I looked at, network printing was always an afterthought. And there were always things that did not work remotely, so you had to resort to a local connection for general maintenance. So, I took a look at laser printers that were more targeted to small offices. Sure enough, I stumbled on the Brother HL-5170DN. This thing came with an ethernet port, was fully configurable through a web interface, and supported every major network printing protocol. The one protocol that I was looking for was the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). This is the newest printing protocol, supported by the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), and hence Mac OS X (and Linux). IPP is basically a successor to the UNIX LPD protocol. But IPP is also the preferred protocol for Windows XP. This printer also had an auto-sleep mode, as do most laser printers and could print duplex (both sides). The only downside was the $350 price tag, and it was only black and white. Color I could live without, since any cheap inkjet printer looks like crap, anyways. If I'm printing out photos, it's much more cost effective to go to Wolf or Ritz and have them printed on photo paper for 10 cents or whatever it costs. As for price, I'd rather splurge for a nicer printer that would last for years, rather than buy some cheap semi-disposable home inkjet that needed to be replaced every couple of years. At the least, I wouldn't need to buy any expensive ink cartridges nearly as often.
Well, I just set this thing up the other day, and so far it has lived up to all expectations. The network printing is awesome. It even supports Rendezvous. The printer took an address from my DHCP server, and the Mac found and recoginzed it over Rendezvous. It truly was plug-and-play. And the quality of the printing is awesome. It's faster and far, far more crisp than any inkjet I've seen, even on when the inkjet is set to the "best" quality. Finally, it does go to sleep after about a minute of inactivity, and then promptly wakes when a job gets printed to it. The web admin interface is also very nice. One finaly test was printing envelopes, which it passed with flying colors. The printer automatically knows when the manual feed try is open, and will print from it. I also stumbled across this nice envelope printer software for OS X called Snail Mail. It's got nice address book integration, and can print those little USPS bar codes.
In any case, so long as this printer doesn't just stop working, I will be in printer bliss. One of the nice things about laser printers is that there is no head to get clogged full of ink, so I don't see this thing breaking any time soon. And I can finally print from my laptop while at home.
About a year and a half ago, I decided to finally break down and buy a printer. I'm not one of those guys who prints out everything. I can even read large manuals in PDF form online. So my printing needs are rather modest. I didn't really need color, but just about every printer targeted for the home user was color. So I decided on the Epson Stylus C82. Epson had a history of making good printers, and their products are usually well supported under Linux. I wasn't planning on hooking up to my Linux machine, but that fact is still good karma for a company.
After first getting this printer, I had really liked it. The quality was decent for an inkjet, and the color was sorta cool, to boot. But I didn't use it that much, maybe only a few times a month. And while I tried to turn it off when I didn't use it, I would often just forget and leave the thing on. About 3 or 4 months ago (about a year old), it just stopped printing. The head would move, and it would feed the paper, but the pages always turned out blank. The Mac utility it ships with has the capability to clean the heads, which I tried a few times. In the past, this has always cleared up any spotty printing issues. Not this time. After reading the troubleshooting, I was told to try new ink cartridges. The ink was almost done, anyways, so this seemed like a good thing to do. I splurged $50 (at least) for 4 new cartridges, and still nothing got printed. Finally fed up, I emailed Epson technical support. Now they did get back to me rather quickly. Unfortunately their answer was "try cleaning the heads, and if that doesn't work you'll need to bring it in to an authorized Epson dealer for repair." They also said the cause of the problem was dried ink in the heads, which occurs if you leave the printer on, but do not use it often. Apparantly, when you turn it off, the heads get moved into a "locked" position such that the ink heads are protected. Not so, if you leave it on. Now if the heads being protected are that critical, it should "lock" them in after a period of inactivity or something. They basically turned a crappy design issue into consumer error, probably to cover their ass on warranties.
At this point, I was pretty pissed. I just dropped $50 for new ink, and now I had to drop who knows how much on repair, due to my neglect. This $150 printer was turning into a money sink. I had always wanted to move the printer into my second bedroom to clear up room on my desk. I have an Airport Exteme which has the ability to turn any USB printer into a remote printer. Of course, this feature is really half-assed. You can't, for example, check the ink levels or run the head cleaning remotely. That only works if it is plugged directly into a Mac. So I decided to not fix the printer and sink anymore money into it. I could just print stuff at work, for now.
In conclusion, this printer really turned out to be a dud. Not only was the quality shotty, it didn't really fit my needs of remote printer. So I'd say, steer clear of this piece of junk. Any printer that can't stand up to a years worth of use, is not recommended.
