Sure that’s high, but I don’t think that’s quite what makes this truly asshole design though. It’s that the trial is on a weekly subscription of $4.99 when a year is only $9.99. $4.99/week for a year is $259.48 which happens to be 2,597% more expensive than the annual subscription. They are hoping people select the trial and forget about it while they rake in an astronomical amount for a third party app for an open source social network.
The whole privacy thing started ten years ago already. People talk about it, protest about it, but at the end of the day they log into facebook and use messanger “because its easy”. Why would they take us seriously?
The only social media I’ve ever had is Reddit and Lemmy. Whenever I tell people that I don’t have the others they always say, “WhAt dO YoU hAvE tO HiDe,” as if I’m a criminal masterind poltting to take over the world or something 🙄
I am sitting here with HP’s very first printer / scanner copier the PSC1200 on my right from well over 20 years ago still working fine and an HPCP1518n1 laser jet on my left that I got from govt surplus used in 2017, and it is a work horse that prints beautiful brochures for me.
I use aftermarket toner and ink with zero issues in bulk.
I had a LaserJet4M I’d trashpicked from a university. The odometer had rolled on the page counter, and it needed a new set of rollers. Ten bucks got it back to new condition. The main issue was that the toner (even aftermarket) had shitty or dry-rotted squeegies that meant toner leaked during use, and pages came out grey. I used that damned thing until I got in trouble in grad school for handing in grey pages.
Laserjet 4Ms were incredible printers. Rock solid, reliable, cheap to run. I used to work at a place that did personalised junk mail stuff, and they’d do it by laser printing in b+w over pre-printed colour, using a giant shelf covered in Laserjet 4M+s (with ethernet cards). They could churn out hundreds of thousands of custom pages per day with that batallion of printers, and ran it all with one teenager and a cupboard full of old printers used to donate parts.
They were constructed like consumer electronics aren’t any more - a thick, sturdy bent steel chassis with plastic panels over the top. You could strip the whole thing down and rebuild it without very much specialist knowledge, and parts were cheap.
I took one of those printers when I left and continued to use it for many years. The only real issue with it was it was kinda slow and a bit noisy, otherwise it was perfectly usable. Eventually got rid of it when I moved in with my partner, but my dad still has it. I bet it still works.
They wanted me to know I owe them $74.10. I received that letter instead a final bill confirming I canceled my account on June 13. I was waiting until I got my final bill to just pay them one final time and be done with them.
Long answer, the reason I only want to pay one final time is because it’s an old MCI long distance account, Verizon bought them about 5 years ago and it was a shitshow and hasn’t changed one bit. They even still have the same recording from 5 years ago saying they were bought by Verizon. I can’t pay my bill or manage my account online, my particular account doesn’t work with that for some arcane reason and they aren’t doing new accounts. Talking to rep usually takes 15-30 minutes on hold, if their phone system doesn’t hang up on me. I was able to auto-pay by credit card for years but then I got a new card and their system to accept a new credit card was broken for weeks and every time I called I had to wait on hold for 15-30 minutes only to be told it’s still broken. They let you pay by card over the phone but then charge you a $5 fee to do that. Still better than writing a check, I hate checks. I tried my bank’s billpay but MCI/Verizon didn’t process the payments and sent me late notices, so I gave up on that after 2-3 months. So yeah they are a ridiculous company.
Yeesh, this just gets worse and worse. :-(. I have zero respect for a company that can’t even make it easy for you to pay them. It doesn’t even benefit them to make it hard to pay. It’s just a failure.
I can recommend Ivory, it’s from the same developers that made Tweetbot.
Subscription price is $1.99 per month or $17.99 per year, which I think is somewhat justified. Yes, one-time payments are usually my preference, but as a developer I understand that keeping an app for a social network up-to-date is a huge task that never really stops.
The problem for me is scanners. I need a printer with a scanner, but scanning seems to require installing proprietary drivers :(
So I realized I probably need a printer that doesn’t require a computer to use. It’s ridiculous that it came to this, but there are printers that can print from USB and scan to a USB device. They seem to be rare though.
I’ve thought of doing hardware design attempts on this before. My rough mental notes:
.
Ink:
Ink tech is mostly the heads (either piezo or thermal). There are some projects on the web where people repurpose these for other stuff, so it’s doable, but you then have to rely on parts from 1st party printer makers (?)
.
Toner (aka “laser”):
Toner and drums are cheap and made by many 3rd parties. Design around whatever models are easiest to get clones of, don’t reinvent the wheel.
Similar for coated fuser rollers (hot rolly bit that melts the toner to the paper).
To put the image on the drum you will need either a high res LED bar (only available 1st party?) or a spinning prism + laser (probably easier to get parts for to make).
Work around prism spinning stability issues by attaching a honking great rotational inertial mass to it.
Stick to single colour (single laser, single drum, single toner) to begin with; colour is the same thing x4
.
Paper path:
Modern printers folder the paper over several times in complicated ways. It’s very space efficient.
Stuff that: do everything flat and linear. The printer will be an awkward shape (long and thin) but will be many times easier to work, test and modify.
.
Electronics:
Chuck a small SBC on it and keep the software as portable as possible to other platforms (not tied to the one micro/brand/peripheral set). This means using simple GPIO for paperpath sensors and standard buses like I2C for digital sensors. (My current work project has been burned by a microcontroller going out of stock, it would have been much better if we threw a more generic SBC at the problem).
Best interface to throw high bandwidth sync’d laser pulse data (image) out of? For compatibility and headache reduction maybe a USB bridge chip to some simple SRAM that gets dumped as a row when the laser starts a row across the drum. Maybe that doesn’t exist.
.
Extras:
A printer that scans and prints with almost the same mechanism. Feed a page over the drum where the laser hits, record the reflected light intensity, produce a B&W (or maybe even grayscale) image from this.
.
Legal:
Do it in a country where you are free to break patents for non-commercial use
Commercial attempts: LOL I suspect the existing printer companies will own patents on everything including the concept of human vision. Be prepared to spend your entire life savings (and lifetime) in courts. They do NOT want more competitors.
That’s about when I initiate the refund and block all companies listed in production.
Heroes of Might and Magic for me. Bought it, installed, saw I needed a 3rd party launcher, went through the hassle to create an account, got spammed with upsale bullshit once, Uninstalled and demanded refund. Steam was like “ok, fair enough”
Haven’t bought a 3rd party launcher game since, except GTA which I didn’t really understand that’s what I was doing.
I’m not usually big on boycotts since corporations are entrenched enough that they need gov’t intervention to do anything meaningful but the totality of the circumstances and the likelihood of a better local coffee shop in your area would tell me to skip the awful Starbucks setup.
assholedesign
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.