We just bought a new printer, and it’s awesome! It’s a HP F4180.
Andrea and I have been talking about getting a printer since we met, it seems. We never got around to doing it until last week, when we had to take care of some paperwork related to our move to Atlanta. Much nicer to get stuff done at home instead of going to Kinkos.
I hadn’t bought a printer in more than 15 years, so it’s not hard to imagine how impressed I was when I saw what kind of printer one can get today for $100 compared to a decade and a half ago.
The F4180 prints, scans and copies. It’s an inkjet printer and the quality of the printouts is very good, in my opinion. It cost only $80, but HP will most certainly get us on the ink cartridges, as they always do.
Scanning works very well too. On the Mac, I scanned a newspaper story to PDF. The printer did an OCR pass, indexed the document and it showed up on Spotlight immediately. Very cool.
If you are looking for a printer, there are lots of options in the market. We didn’t do a lot of research, but for casual printing, $100 is all you need to find a good deal on a good printer.
Every once in a while I receive eBay-themed spam. Stuff like “Your account has been compromised. Please provide your account info so that we can verify your identity”.
Since at least one of my friends has had real trouble with eBay, and I hardly ever use the site, I decided it was time to say goodbye to the world’s biggest garage sale.
At one point, I regarded eBay as one of the best businesses history has ever seen. All they need to do is make sure their system is always running. No product to sell, no inventory to keep. Just improve the site from time to time and keep those servers running.
Well, the servers have been running all right, but for the last 10 years, it looks like nothing else changed at eBay. They look pretty stagnant, but somehow they’ve got enough momentum to keep going. Even their acquisition of Skype seems misguided. It didn’t add anything to their bottomline, user experience.
Anyway, enough of eBay for me.
A cool AP picture of the Kenyans finishing 1-2-3 in the 3,000 meters at the World Championships in Athletics held in Osaka, Japan.
We recently bought plane tickets to visit Boston in early October. Since we are in Atlanta, we decided to try AirTran – they are based here. AirTran is one of the “low-cost” airlines, so I am not expecting a high level of service from them. Point A to point B travel, that’s it.
But one thing caught my attention in their online reservation system. They don’t let you select seats ahead of time unless you pay. $5 for a regular coach seat and $15 for an exit row seat. I had never seen that before.
Give the sad state of affairs of commercial aviation here, that’s not entirely surprising really. I bet a suitcase surcharge is coming up next. After that, who knows, maybe they will start selling bathroom passes.
Ahh, the friedly skies.