AIRSTRIP ONE

A lovely printer.

It is a bit broader than my trusty old Epson Stylus series printer and so the front foot pads have to hang off the top of one of my towers instead of fitting neatly on top of it but the results are fantastic.

It must be said, however, that I think the best results are from ordinary 80gsm paper. I’ve always felt that this is so. Ordinary paper soaks up the ink and all the misgivings in the original photo seem to blend in with the ink distribution. The print outs to photo paper (semi-glossy) seem to be a bit lighter and the definition is a bet better. However, this does not always translate to a better picture.

I just printed out a hi-def picture of Billie Dove and she looks great. A pity that she had to go and die in the 1990s.

All in all, I feel very happy with the purchase of this printer. I does come with head cleaning utilities however, that have me reminiscing to days-of-old with Epson, but (touch wood) I have not needed to use these utilities so far.

I was slightly wrong (in an earlier post) about the print heads being a part of the cartridges. They are housed in a separate unit that one installs as per a cartridge. The actual cartridges are then installed inside this print-head-cage. I suppose that the head unit can be replaced easily enough but I am wondering what such a part will cost when it needs to be replaced.

In a nutshell. Seemingly a great little printer. Having two paper feeds (one I use for ordinary paper and the other for photo-paper) is a great advantage in itself.

So far - five stars out of five.

Thanks must go to Sarah for reminding me that change in Life is not necessarily a bad thing.

(Give it a month and I’m sure I’ll have a gripe or two) - Just showing my age there.

A few posts back, I was banging on about the Epson DX6000.

Whilst I still believe that it is a great all-in-one printer/scanner, I recently heard great things about Canon and have been doing some investigating.

Canon printers have the print head in the cartridge itself and so you effectively get a new print head every time you change the cartridge and whilst Epsons do give pretty good quality, I have had many blocked-nozzle experiences that have led to the need to use the cleaning utility, sometimes many times, before the problem has been rectified.

So - I’ve taken the advice of a good friend and have just purchased a Canon Pixma iP3300, which will set you back about 50 quid (inc. delivery) from Dabs if you are interested in buying one at a good price.

It is only a printer to be fair - and a Canon of comparable quality that includes an in-built scanner is generally more expensive than the DX6000. The cartridges are also a bit dearer for the Canon but I’m hoping that not needing to use the cleaning as much as with the Epson will make up for this (cleaning uses a great deal of ink, as most of us know).

Here are some links to save legwork if you are interested in the Canon.

A good review and where you can buy it cheap (UK and at the moment).

Unfortunately I have to visit that armpit of London known as Finsbury Park from time to time and am forced to circumnavigate slovenly groups of Asian youths as they stand in the middle of the pavement, with their dirty jeans hanging under their arses, smoking and making guttural sounds to each other. That, I’ve learned to deal with; I simply walk into the road and around them.

Today threw up something different however. Approaching the station on the bus, we passed two cars with hastily open doors and three men who were in the midst of what was obviously a heated argument. Two were holding long machetes and one had a billy truncheon. Luckily the bus, which had had to slow down at that point, was able to speed up and we went past them without incident or injury to ourselves.

Here’s the thing that I found really frightening though. Sitting next to me on the bus was a Community Support Officer; you know, dressed like a policeman but he earns half as much and has only been given enough training to boil a kettle because our government considers that someone else’s land hundreds of miles away is worth pouring billions into but doesn’t want to spend a penny on our own country.

I couldn’t see whether this guy was equipped with a radio transmitter; probably not, I don’t believe they are. Bus drivers, on the other hand, do have radio transmitters and I was surprised when he didn’t seem to be bothered about heading down to the driver to radio in the state of affairs. Instead, he just looked on with the rest of the passengers and continued reading a newspaper once we had driven past.

We know that gun and knife amnesties are a waste of time. Now, it seems that our Community Support Officers aren’t even worth the little they do get paid.

There is one way to stop knifings and shootings. We need more proper coppers on the streets and more prisons to be built; at least enough of both to bring us up to the same proportions per capita than we had in 1959! Instead, what do we get? Virtually no policemen on the beat and the occasional convoy of paramilitary looking policemen peering from their darkened transit van windows as they drive past going to arrest some bloke for calling someone a “poof”.

Such is life in a “tolerant” society.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!
(1) CSO (2) Friendly Bobby (3) Paramillitary

Please.

If you are a “user” of PCs then don’t ever entertain the idea that you know anything about them.

If you ever need your PC fixed (You know - like the one that you bought 3 years ago and had never plugged into the internet until 3 weeks ago, when you plugged it in with Service Pack 1, no anti-virus software and no anti-spyware software), then just leave people like me to get on with the job without looking over any shoulders and allow a full day’s work to pass by before your eyes.

Then pay me (or people like me) and thank your lucky stars that you still have your photos and documents.

If you can’t do that then piss off and die!

It was today announced on the BBC News that according to the Local Government Association, two thirds of us wouldn’t mind seeing the introduction of a “pay-as-you-throw” system for our household rubbish.

And so, with without anyone producing any evidence to back up this claim, the idea of pay-as-you-throw has been given further legitimisation.

Let us not forget how this has happened however. An organisation which is dependent on local councils for its own existence has released a press release to the BBC and the rest of the media making this claim. They have not needed to produce any evidence to do this and are highly likely to have used statistical analysis techniques that have produced a desired and biased result.

I don’t believe for one moment that two thirds of people don’t mind getting charged by the pound for their rubbish disposal service. The idea that this could possibly be the case is insulting and its promotion is Orwellian.

Local councils (and organisations that look after their interests, such as “The Local Government Association”), as well as our own New Labour government, all use the same techniques these days. They spend our money sending out surveys etc. to appear to care about what people think then they spend even more of our money collating and analysing the results. Of course what they are really doing is finding a reason to do exactly what they had planned to do in the first place and by presenting the right “spin” on the information that they have collected they can seem to be going about their business with the “people’s consent”.

The result is a collective fascism that no individual or group of individuals is ever able to question. In such a society, people are effectively robbed of the ability to be able to change anything without resorting to violent measures.

That two thirds of people want a “pay-as-you-throw” system is BULLSHIT and we all know it. The Local Government Association is looking after its own interests by use of “damned lies and statistics” and that they should do this is unsurprising. That the BBC takes their claim at face value and just “serves it up” to us without doing any of its own independent follow-up analysis is both shocking and insulting. Can anyone be blamed for expecting more from the BBC News?

Quick software tip here.

Foxit is a nice little app that can replace the large and cumbersome “Adobe Acrobat”.

It has a very small “footprint” and can display a PDF document in the time that Acrobat takes to show its splsh screen.

It also writes PDFs.

Amusing website tip for ya here.

“Simpsonize Me” is a site that lets you upload a picture of yourself and then create a Simpsonized version of yourself.

I hate to admit it but I think there is more than a passing resemblance!

I’m pretty “old school” when it comes to printers.

I am up to my 3rd Epson Stylus Colour 740 and had a 640 before that.

I have always used the old generation printers ‘cos the cartridges are cheap (£1.50 for black and £2.50 for colour) and they give very good print quality, even printing photos on glossy paper.

As somewhat of a skeptic of all things new (on the grounds that they usually cost more, do less and break more easily) I was pretty surprised by the Epson DX6000 Printer/Scanner when I recently installed it for a client.

The proper Epson cartridges can cost as little as £4 a piece (it takes 4) and cheapo ones cost £2.50. They are smaller than the ones on my trusty 740 so I’d guess that they don’t last as long but having said that the print quality is just as good (superb) and the scanner is OK too and if one is going to move on to new tech then this is a good place to do it printerwise. In case you don’t know it already, some cartridges for some printers are a total rip-off.

Me, I just bought an Epson Stylus Colour 860 (used) from eBay for 20 quid inc. p+p. Well, my 740 just died and I do have a whole bunch of cartridges to use up. The 860 takes the same cartridges and it is a good “workhorse” of a printer. I guess I’m just too cheap to spend the £80 that an Epson DX6000 would cost me and I do have a perfectly good scanner. Besides, the scanner fits neatly under my desk and the 740 or 860 has a footprint the same size as the top of one of my towers and sits neatly out of the way on that. I just don’t have space for the new Epson with its much larger footprint.

If you are in the market for a good printer, you can find an Epson DX6000 at Novatech in the UK, a company I’ve learned to trust.