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 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).

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.

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.

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.

The bedroom TV is literally used for two things: morning news and movies. That is it. In fact, even saying movies was kind of inaccurate since there wasn’t any DVD player in there. In the past, if I really wanted to watch a movie in there, I had to lug my PS3 into there and hook it up.

Not anymore. The HD Cable Box is unplugged and will be dropped off at Comcast shortly. The AppleTV plugged in, configured, and in use. Cable TV cord plugged directly into the TV so we can access the Clear QAM channels such as our local TV stations (all still in HD). Took less then 20 minutes to pull this off (plus the time to do a channel scan on the TV).

The setup is vastly easier to use. My wife always had trouble getting the cable box and TV to be turned on at the same time. That issue is gone. The AppleTV is always on or in standby, a simple button press on the spartan Apple Remote away from being active. Using just the TV remote for switching channels, inputs, and volume is much better.

Test streaming of Netflix and content from our laptop worked flawlessly without issues. Watched two Firefly episodes and really enjoyed it. Ripped DVD’s from our collection work perfectly and look remarkably good. Still have to get all of our movies ripped and encoded, but we are getting there.

Curious to see if we ever miss the cable box in there (based on our usage the past few months, I am almost certain we won’t miss it). I am also going to see how often in the living room we really watch a TV channel not available on Clear QAM. I suspect only when it comes to live sports.

Once Apple allows apps on AppleTV (it is a matter of time before that happens) and if the major sports remove blackout restrictions for local sports viewing, we will easily have enough content to officially cut out the TV part of our cable bill.

I have signed up for Google Apps for the domain. The free version does everything I need, whether it is e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I do not need to worry about running a mail server and I can use Google Apps on any device I own.

In one sense, moving e-mail over to Google Apps would be easy. Setup a filter on Gmail to do all of the hard work and that is it. Yet it really isn’t that easy. The perfectionist in me would require that every online account I own be immediately switched over, which will take hours to do all of the updates. Then again, do I really want a bunch of web sites to know about my new e-mail address?

My calendar right now is just hosted on my home computer and isn’t synced in the cloud. I will use this opportunity to move everything over to Google Calendar.

I plan on configuring my iPhone and my iPad to both use Gmail & Google Calendar via the Google Sync feature. Instantly I will have over the air calendar and contact updates, plus push e-mail.

I am almost certain I will just 301 redirect chrisgonyea.com to chris.gonyea.com. I just have to setup the proper .htaaccess rules and setup WordPress on chris.gonyea.com.

This made me to wonder, what is the safe way to securely wipe an iPhone? I do not want any of my personal data on the old phone to get in the wrong hands.

EverythingiCafe.com has a great article on how to do this. It essentially boils down to doing a restore of the iPhone and then using the “Erase All Content and Settings” setting on the newly restored iPhone to securely erase all of the data on it.

A quick look at my data usage shows that my wife and I could easily live with the 200MB data plan. Below is my data usage:

The next is my wife’s data usage:

The closest I ever got to the max that a 200MB plan would allow is 170MB. Closest my wife got was 143MB in one month and usually averages below 100MB.

We now have three options here:

1. My wife and I could both drop down to the 200MB plan. Our phone bill drops about $30, which results in a $360 savings over the course of a year.
2. My wife drops down to the 200MB plan, I use the new 2GB plan with the tethering option selected (for work and traveling reasons, it would be very nice to have). Her drop to the 200MB plan saves $15 a month, plus my drop to the 2GB plan saves $5 a month for a total of $20 savings. Then with tethering for me costing $20, we break about even with what we pay now.
3. Keep our current “unlimited” data plans.

I am leaning towards option #2 here. I am not losing anything, since I never went near the “unlimited” data plan’s max of 5GB a month. I am gaining tethering and end up paying about the same monthly bill.

I initially thought I could do the old keep a hard drive off-site at all times with a whole backup. That however would require me to remember to do it, which I have proven time and time again I could not. After all, for years I had a hard drive on my desk, but never manually ran the backup.

I decided finally that I should give the online backup companies that have sprung up the past few years a chance. I haven’t heard any downright horror stories involving them. In fact, most reviews I have heard were very positive. Their prices are quite reasonable: $50-60 a year for unlimited backup per computer.

Right now I am trying out Backblaze, which seems to have gotten great reviews from what I can see, has great Mac support, and has a wonderful option of paying to have a hard drive shipped to you with your data. Mozy does not have this option outside of DVD’s (great a stack of 100 DVD’s should be fun to restore) and Carbonite doesn’t seem to have any option outside of download restores.

I am currently finishing up day two of the initial backup to Backblaze. So far so good, I have about 25GB of 99GB backed up, which works out to just about 12-13GB a day. At this pace, I should be backed up completely in about six more days. After that, from what I understand the service continuously backs up any file changes and only the parts of the files that actually change, so future backups should almost be instantaneous.

I will report my experiences with this service as time goes on and I get to use it. Hopefully I will never have to test how good the restore process is.