Computing

New Gear: Epson EcoTank ET-2850 Inkjet Printer/Scanner

Computer printers suck. Every last one. Maybe some suck just a little less.

Epson EcoTank ET-2850

Over the years, we’ve had a litany of printers in our household. We started with an Epson 870 color inkjet. It was photo printer bought specifically for a project. We wanted to scan a bunch of old family photos, to create a booklet for each of Stella’s brothers and sisters.

It was a nice idea. But it took a vast amount of time. And consumed a monstrous amount of fancy paper and ink, in tiny little, high-priced cartridges. In the end, we might have been better off to have a local pharmacy output the images to real photo paper. It would have cost about the same, and the photos would have lasted longer.

That was over 20 years ago. In many regards, nothing has changed. In a recent podcast, Cory Doctorow reminds us that inkjet inks are the single most expensive fluid in existence.

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Laptops Past & Present

This is gonna come off as self-indulgent. Since this non-commercial blog, I’m gonna go with it anyway. It’s a collection of thoughts brought about by the purchase of a new laptop, a process that was not simple. It could have been, but it wasn’t.

You see, it’s been along time since I last bought a laptop. All the way back in January 2013. I had forgotten a lot of things in the intervening six-and-a-half years.

The last laptop I carried when I worked for Pixel Power was an HP 8510W. This was not standard company issue. In the UK, they had a standard issue laptop (I think.) In the US, lacking central admin, we were given a spending allocation to go procure something for ourselves.

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My New Laptop is a Vintage Chromebook Pixel

Back in June Stella and I took a vacation. Not just time off work, but a real vacation, the first in years. We spent a week in Hawaii. It was great, but this is not about that, exactly. It’s about the computer that I bought to facilitate our trip.

Stella has never owned a laptop. Nor has she been issued one by her employer. As a public relation professional, she lives and dies by staying in touch, but it’s always by desktop or mobile phone.

In contrast, I’ve traveled on business extensively, which means a laptop is a standard part of my equipment compliment. My former employer issued Dell or HP laptops, but for the past several years I’ve owned a Lenovo X1 Carbon.

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