Posts in Category: Printing

The yellow pages are now useless

Some time ago, I got the 2012 issue of the Italian Yellow Pages to my home.

It's this:


 

It's just an handful of pages! It's completely useless, maybe there are just 3-4 firms for each category!

If you think that every firm paid 500-1000 euro to be included, it's not an advertising investment anymore. This is wasted money!

But, the makers are going digital! In this way:

WFT??? It's just a PDF conversion of the printed edition or something like that!

It's senseless to do something like that! Why not just list my search in an intuitive way, instead of presenting minuscule text without a decent search!

Nowadays, springs are so expensive...

At job I bought a Xerox Phaser printer, and it's not bad. That printer has an optional kit to that enables to take extra thick media. Cool, I say, and I order it. I open the box, that is a normal dvd case, and the content is this:

The kit it's just a cheap spring???????

Before that I tell you how much this spring is sold, let's do a survey: How much this spring is sold for?

After answering the survey, you can see the price on the official Xerox price list.

The color cartridge is over, total color pages printed: 0

Earlier this year, at work, I was out of thermal rolls for my fax. I went to a local store: they asked me over 22 euro for a roll. The same roll that, when I went in Shenyang I bought for less than 50 cents (and in fact I bought a lot of them).

22 euro it'a lot of money, because a roll lasts me a few months due to a lot of unsolicited spam...

So, I bought an inkjet fax from Brother, since it seems to have a very good price/quality ratio. I chose a simple one, one that looks like a fax, not a printer.

I buy it, I install it and I am very happy.

After a few months I notice that the yellow, magenta and cyan ink cartridges are drained out, while the black is still 20% left! WHAT?? I printed ZERO color pages! ZERO! Probably this machine combines all four colors to make black ... Or do regular cleaning in night hours to keep the nozzles clean, wasting a lot of color.

I went to see on Amazon how much it's a new set of cartridges: as expensive as unicorn blood! An original set of LC1000 costs over 45 euros!

Almost like a new fax machine! (Note: the set of cartridges that comes a new printer, both inkjet and laser, lasts much less than normal, as the first initialization wastes a lot of ink)

Fortunately, a compatible set cost less than 5 euros (yes, ten third-party cartridges cost the same as an original one) But, I found an even cheaper solution:

See that transparent window? The printer can see the remaining ink with a photocell. Just darken the window with a sticker or color it with a permanent marker, and the cartridge will be seen as full forever. (But the printer also have an internal counter, sometimes you have to remove it and put it back, the printer will think it is new and will reset the counter)