Category Archives: Technology

HP Photosmart 7510: Why I will never buy another HP printer

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I hate printers.

There isn’t any way to sugar coat it. Printers rarely work for a long period of time, throw up arcane errors, ink costs are insane, and have stupid limitations. Given that printer companies make money only on the ink cartridges, they do the absolute bare minimum to develop a functional printer.

Nearly 5 months ago, I bought a HP Photosmart 7510. The idea was simple: all-in-one printer/scanner with a document feeder that would allow me to go paperless.

First there was a very light but audible hissing noise the printer makes that several Amazon reviewers have since noted.

Then there was the brilliant idea by HP to have icons for a bunch of web site services on the printer itself. This isn’t the touchscreen of your iPhone…very non-responsive and tough to move around. Sorry HP, no one uses the printer touchscreen itself to print from Facebook, Disney, Yahoo, or many other sites.

The final straw was an artificial limit that has been imposed on this printer. In an effort to prevent business users from using a HP consumer printer, you can only use the Automatic Document Feeder for up to 75 scans at full speed. After that, each page after that takes takes several minutes to even begin scanning.

You think that sounds insane? HP admits it themselves on this forum post:

“The behavior that you are seeing  in your printer is normal in that product, this printer is merely  design to home users where their needs are not as high compared to business users. The unit  reduces its speed to prevent overheating the motor in the Automatic-Document-Feeder (ADF). So, there is nothing wrong with that behavior  and you can still use it even if the speed of scanning or copying through  the ADF reduces. I hope this information is helpful.”

The reduce speed to prevent overheating makes sense at first…except it will do this even if you wait a hour between scans. I’ve tested this myself. There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for this behavior.

Amazon was wonderful. Even though I contacted them 5 months after I bought the printer, they are issuing a full refund. I am instead going to Epson for my new printer. Never again will I go with HP.

The started a simplified home tech life

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An new iPad (3) in hand, I am beginning an experiment to simplify my home computing life: go without using my home computer for two weeks and still do all of my needed computing tasks.

The reason is straight forward: as the iPad gets more and more amazing software, there is less and less computing tasks that requires a home computer. I have a smaller amount of time to do my home computer tasks than I used to, thus I need to do them in ways that are easy and efficient.

I am also simplifying my entertainment needs. I am selling my PlayStation 3 as it collects dust and as I realize that I get just as much if not more entertainment playing $0.99 iPad games compared to $60 PS3 games.

What else can I do to simplify my home tech life? That is something I hope to explore in the next few weeks, with a series of blog posts written on my iPad or iPhone (just like this blog post).

Sony’s critical error

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Reading about how bad the security breach of the PlayStation Network is, I don’t know how I could ever trust Sony again. At least not anytime soon.

Waiting six days to tell us that all of our personal information is most likely compromised (including my password) and they cannot guarantee the security of my credit card data?

I can deal with name, e-mail address, etc. But password? That tells me they didn’t follow standard practices for password security. Which definitely doesn’t give me confidence about them protecting my credit card information.

Since I have linked my Facebook account to my PlayStation Network account, I think I am going to change that password too. Since I have no confidence that Sony hasn’t safely stored that password either.

I would sell my PS3, but I am sure there is a flood of them hitting the market this second.

What a mess. They have a lot of explaining. The next week and what actions they take to calm our fears and compensate the PlayStation Network users is going to be make or break for the PS3 in gaming market.

Removing the search bar in Firefox

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I like Chrome’s unified search/address bar, but Chrome otherwise just doesn’t fit how I use a web browser. Luckily there is an easy way to make Firefox’s awesome bar do something similar. In fact, it is even more powerful.

  1. Customize your Firefox toolbar and remove the search box.
  2. Go to your favorite search engine
  3. Right-click the search text field on the search engine page and add a keyword. For example, for Google you can simply call the keyword google.
  4. Now in the awesome bar, type ‘google searchterm’ and hit enter. The search is automatically done on Google.

The best part about this trick is that you can do it on just about any site on the Internet that has a search field. You can create many keywords to search your favorite sites, such as Amazon, Newegg, Twitter, etc.

Would we switch to Verizon for the iPhone?

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With the recent announcement that the iPhone is going to be available on Verizon Wireless in less than a month, I thought about whether it would make sense to leave AT&T. At this time, I think no, although not by choice.

First reason is simple: we are under contract until June 2012, because we bought the iPhone 4 when it it came out. Thus to break our contract now would cost over $250 per phone.

Verizon’s reliability is going to be interesting to see. They have long been the best wireless provider in New Hampshire, but with thousands of new iPhones being activated in the next month on their network, it will be interesting to see how it holds up. I rather wait to see how happy the early adopters are.

That said, the following is why I would switch from AT&T if it were an option:

  • AT&T sucks in New Hampshire. Once you get out of the major cities in the south eastern part of the state, you are lucky to get EDGE coverage, nevermind 3G. Verizon 3G is so much faster compared to EDGE. Pretty much everywhere in NH you can get Verizon 3G coverage.
  • Everyone in NH that doesn’t have an iPhone already is on Verizon. Thus new Verizon iPhone users would get unlimited mobile to mobile minutes for the vast majority of people they call in NH.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out the next few months. My mother is getting an iPhone on Verizon and one of my brothers might as well.