Printer Karma

I'm in love with my Leatherman New Wave multi-tool! (affiliate REI link). I traded away my original Leatherman last week and almost immediately started missing it; I had seen and admired the Wave, then was pleased to discover that they just released a new version in the last couple of months. Everything locks back, the blades support comfortable one-handed operation, and there is an integral tool-holder that accomodates a set of 20 additional bits (hex drivers and the like, not included with the basic unit). The thing is exquisitely engineered, and just feels good to use... definitely a permanent part of the technomadic pack.

Nice mechanical things like that are a special comfort sometimes. At the other end of the spectrum, I wasted more than half of yesterday dealing with printers. First, my trusty SparcPrinter E (made by Lexmark and donated 7-8 years ago by Halted Specialties) died from the cold in the lab (now that there's no insulation, thanks to the “Pioneer mouse problem,” it's very hard to keep the office at even a low-level maintenance warmth). So I wrestled with that for a while, needing to print a label for shipping... then decided to try Jeannie's HP officejet 5110xi all-in-one printer/fax/copier/scanner thingie that has been in the cozy house since she moved from Seattle.

But after discovering that none of the generic HP printer drivers had any idea there was now something plugged to the Mac's USB port (CUPS was no help), I went hunting on the web and discovered that the "driver" for this is a 53-megabyte download! That's rather impractical in my broadband-free zone, so Ned snagged it via DSL and handed a CD to Jeannie on her way home. Then the real fun started.

First, the installation. This is bloatware on an almost Microsoftian scale... 1,314 items were installed on my hard drive (requiring that all other applications first be quit), then I was launched on a browser-based "tour" that covered all the features of the machine and oh, by the way, requested my personal info. Where was the clickable option for "Damn it, I'm just using this stupid thing temporarily because my laser printer died from the cold, so no, I don't need fax cover pages, product registration, and rollover eye candy describing machine features"? But I pressed on, since the 1-page document I wanted to print all day was still on the desktop, needing to become hardcopy.

But now that I could actually see the machine, thanks to the 53 meg of mystery code, it turned out that the printer itself is exhibiting a chronic, apparently unfixable carriage jam... or at least it thinks it is. Various online help sites (including one from HP that's locked to prevent new posts, yet still presents a cute little floating javascript widget that prompts me to tell them how helpful it was), offered ideas about what to do when confronted with this problem... generally consisting of various forms of resetting and re-initializing, culminating in the advice to contact tech support.

I hate printers, and it’s ironic that in my last post I reminisced fondly about the Model 28 teletype. Now that was a thing of beauty, ayup.



Anyway, I managed to uninstall most of the bloatware from the Mac after digging around and finding an uninstaller tucked away deep in some directory... but even that turned out to be a sloppy process with a half-dozen items declared "in use" and thus undeletable. (Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that in the trash they were called "HP Registry Items," a distinctly Windozian term.. suggesting that this might have been a crude port intead of real Mac OS X software.) But what’s even more obnoxious is that even after uninstalling, something mysterious called “HP Communications” was gobbling over 50-70% of my CPU at any given moment, dramatically slowing all other applications. Restarting the system today finally got rid of it.

My advice to fellow Mac-heads is to avoid this installer (5100_634_EN.smi.hqx) at all costs; it is ugly and ill-behaved! I’m sure it works fine under Windows; Jeannie used it on her Compaq before moving to the island, and loved it. I have always been fond of HP engineering across all their product lines, so I suspect this is an anomaly... or just bad printer karma. (LATER NOTE, ADDED Feb 12, 2005: I'm not alone. Into the dumpster it goes.)

The fallout of all that is that I’ll buy a throw-away inkjet from a friend to print shipping documents until I can either fix the stalwart Lexmark or afford to replace it with something else of the workgroup (networked) class. Or, as was suggested today, I could learn to use one of those manual text-recording devices. Ah, here’s one from Silicon Valley (it says “Santa Clara Marriott” on the side). That should work.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Japanese-English Dictionary - $9.75 to Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Winnebiko II Poster - $20.00 to London, England

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Site updates:

Just a few fixes in the Gear Shop.