Little Things That Irk You: The Hateful 08

[wakka]

There is a really good episode of the podcast Planet Money about the printer industry. The whole thing is a giant grift. It's really interesting.

I hate when I have to print something. I don't even own a printer so I have to go to an internet cafe like it's 2003

[speedlolita]

It is actually hilarious how little ink you get in a standard HP print cartridge. Their 305 inkjet cartridges include 2ml of black ink (about £15) if I remember rightly, and the 305 XL includes 4ml of ink which was the old piss take amount of ink.

Tank inkjets work out better economically but then you have to worry about your printhead. I'll stick to my mono laser.

[QualityChimp]

We had some cheaper laser cartridges for an HP.
The user ended up snapping bits off, which I then had to repair.
Then the cartridge came with a little drill that pushes out the microchip in the official cart.
Then you put that into the new one and carry on printing, ignoring the error message.

It was rubbish.
I don't know if they'd damaged the new cartridge, but I had to find an official cart from another office for it to print properly again.

Then the big A3 printer/copier's ink in that office ran out and I'd taken the toner from their normally spare printer!

All-in-all, I lost a morning chasing supplies and drilling microchips just because HP are money-grubbing basts.

[Asura]

All-in-all, I lost a morning chasing supplies and drilling microchips just because HP are money-grubbing basts.

It's this, right? I mean I know they say it's because they sell the printers at rock-bottom prices to make it up on the ink, but who wanted that?

[Lebowski]

We've had a few funny IT gaffs with our printers in our office over the years, an old inkjet we had was eating ink and not printing so the IT guy came to collect it for the IT graveyard, when he picked it up all the ink must of pooled in the bottom of this thing and it came poring out all over this poor guys shirt and trousers. he just stood their looking stunned absolutely dripping. We talked to him the day after when he came back with a replacement his hands where still blue and he said he had stains all over his chest that he couldn't get out

Same guy a number of years later came to have a look what was going wrong with our laser jet printer as it wasn't printing correctly it had 4 cartridges that clipped into these header units so that when you replaced the tonner you just replaced the bottom part of the cartridge and not the whole thing we normally handled replacing cartridges when it ran out of ink, it had a two clip system one made it so you could remove the whole unit and the other made it so you could remove the powder part of the toner cartridge once the unit was out.

So in he comes he comes and starts to dismantle the printer. he starts ripping out the tonner cartridge but undoes both clips when removing the ink this is fine until he gets to the last one as he removes it the ink part separates and falls back down inside the printer smashing the transfer belt and coating the whole of the inside of the printer in blue powder. He went for a very sweary walk round the carpark after destroying Four grands worth of printer.

[fuse]

BBC trolling me today re: the Mercury Music Prize. Per this article:

Other first-timers include indie duo Wet Leg, post-metal girl band Nova Twins and jazz musician Fergus McCreadie.

I love me some post-metal, and there's a post-metal band getting a nomination for a prestigious award signifying proper mainstream recognition that I've not even heard of?! I nearly spat out my drink! Sadly it took all of a minute to shoot this down entirely. Per Wikipedia:

Nova Twins have been described by The Guardian as a "bass-heavy duo fusing grime and punk", and by themselves as "urban punk"

A quick listen would then confirm this. I'm glad for them and am sure they're very good at what they do, but bloody hell BBC, you almost gave me kittens. FWIW of those nominated whose records I am familiar with, hoping for Self Esteem to win it!

[Lebowski]

Facebook marketplace really is a hive of scum and villainy, trying to buy games on their falls into three groups

its sold instantly and you get put on ignore.

They wont let you do local pick despite them living ten minutes from your house and wants you to bank transfer or paypal gift them the money/scam you.

Or the worst one you end up with idiots with the most basic of Ebay knowledge who have done a search of active listing and think that that represents the price they should get, "Oh look this mint and sealed game is £50, my second hand used copy must be worth at least ten pounds more than that, despite all the used copy's sold in the last 20 days being around a tenner.

[Cepp]

Got a nice little letter from HMRC saying I underpaid on tax and owe them £250 (:

[wakka]

Dislike.

[Golgo]

Got a nice little letter from HMRC saying I underpaid on tax and owe them £250 (:

Pity you didn't owe them millions, mate, you'd have got a free pass.

[Cepp]

Pity you didn't owe them millions, mate, you'd have got a free pass.

First thing that crossed my mind.

[dataDave]

The Westcotes region of Leicester. It’s a total ****ing toilet. It makes the very worst parts of Burnley seem like Beverly Hills. At least we found some utterly amazing vegetarian food where we felt like we wouldn’t get shot and then stabbed.

[QualityChimp]

Instagram.

It's such a weird site, where it feels like the whole purpose is to make you feel like everyone else is living a better life.
However, it seems to be totally populated by bots, recirculating other photos.

I'm currently posting all my pics of the Florida theme parks, not because I want people to be jealous of my holiday, but because I like seeing pics of roller coasters and stuff, so figured others would too.
I'm hashtagging the pics to make them easier for people to find, but each and every one gets at least one bot saying "DM pic".

Then I'm getting tagged saying I can buy a certain amount of followers, but what's the point in that?
What's the difference between 0 human followers and 500 robot followers?
It's just this self-promoting circle that needs you to constantly provide content or you'll lose followers.

As it is, I think I've gained 1 human follower, but I really like their pics of coasters too, so happy just keeping things as human as possible.

So yeah, it's this weird narcissistic site of recycled content!

[Dogg Thang]

Instagram is basically just broken now. It's useless. You can have thousands of followers but only a few hundred might see your pics and, out of those, often a whole bunch aren't even your followers. And my timeline shows me so little of the people I follow. Instead it's all promoted content or suggested content from people I don't follow and have no interest in. It's just a mess now.

[Asura]

Instagram is basically just broken now. It's useless. You can have thousands of followers but only a few hundred might see your pics and, out of those, often a whole bunch aren't even your followers. And my timeline shows me so little of the people I follow. Instead it's all promoted content or suggested content from people I don't follow and have no interest in. It's just a mess now.

Twitter has similarly gotten way worse since they introduced the "top tweets" feature. It should've stayed chronological, no algorithm.