The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[Beardy]

Ever Grounded?

[Mrs Pingu]

Sounds like BlueWater whose boats are all called... Blue Water, in various different languages

For outsiders, the names of the FPSOs in our current or former fleet may seem odd: Acqua Blu, Ayer Biru, Lan Shui, Uisge Gorm, Glas Dowr, Bleo Holm, Haewene Brim, Munin and Aoka Mizu. In fact, all (except Munin) actually mean “Bluewater” in a local dialect language.

https://www.bluewater.com/fleet-operations/our-fpso-fleet/

[Bledlow]

One of my teeth broke recently. Lump fell off. Saw dentist who said tooth was too far gone (decades of filling) for new fillings & needed a crown. Having seen the inside, this was not unexpected. Temporary filling to keep me going & appointment with a colleague to sort it out.

Today saw the colleague, who after briefly mentioning the possibily of a less drastic fix had a good look & said no, he'd been right & it needed a crown, & set to work.

Lots of work on my tooth later, I left with a temporary crown & an appointment with her for fitting the permanent one when it's been made.

While eating my dinner (all fairly soft food: nothing crunchy), the temporary crown broke. Fell to pieces. I have three lumps of it in a little bag. There's more in there than still on the tooth.

After sinusitis late last week & my second dose of BioNTech vaccine on Saturday afternoon, I'm too tired for a rant, but BUGGER!

First business tomorrow is phoning the dentist.

[Regulator]

One of my teeth broke recently. Lump fell off. Saw dentist who said tooth was too far gone (decades of filling) for new fillings & needed a crown. Having seen the inside, this was not unexpected. Temporary filling to keep me going & appointment with a colleague to sort it out.

Today saw the colleague, who after briefly mentioning the possibily of a less drastic fix had a good look & said no, he'd been right & it needed a crown, & set to work.

Lots of work on my tooth later, I left with a temporary crown & an appointment with her for fitting the permanent one when it's been made.

While eating my dinner (all fairly soft food: nothing crunchy), the temporary crown broke. Fell to pieces. I have three lumps of it in a little bag. There's more in there than still on the tooth.

After sinusitis late last week & my second dose of BioNTech vaccine on Saturday afternoon, I'm too tired for a rant, but BUGGER!

First business tomorrow is phoning the dentist.

I lost part of a filling a few weeks ago. I'm waiting until I've had my second dose next week before I book a dentist appointment, as fixing it will require an AGP.

[Bledlow]

Bloody Hewlett-Packard!

You make solid, dependable printers. Our old B&W one is proof of this. Manufactured 2006 & still working perfectly, & because it was (rightly) very popular & you sold millions of them, toner cartridges are still available - & cheap. It was an excellent buy.

So why do you hide the Windows 64 bit driver for it? It exists - I've installed it - but it was a bloody nightmare to find. No longer accessible on your site. Your troubleshooting software (latest version) finds the printer, but then gets confused & directs me to a dead HP link for the driver.

Some kind soul has put it online, which saved me powering up my old PC & digging it out (I know it's on there), but why not just leave it where it was? I'm sure you can afford the storage space & bandwidth. Has it never occurred to you that it'd be a selling point? What about "Our printers last - & so does our backup!" Lots of people like products that don't become obsolete by Christmas, & will buy them in preference to throwaway stuff.

[TheLurker]

I'm afraid HP these days is not your Grand-daddy's HP.  These days it's less about good, solid, dependably engineered products than bleeding the customer consumer dry on the cost of locked-in ink cartridges (and toner).

[ian]

Cooking a pie yesterday. Pop it in the oven. Manufacture the mash, take out the pie.

Now, during the cooking process, the thing under the stairs went kaboom and the power went out. Odd, but I flipped the switch back and everything seemed fine.

Anyway, pie was cold. Oven had died. Fortunately, I found another setting on the oven that does work, so delayed pie is better than no pie. But now I need an oven fixer. Oh woe.

[Feanor]

I've come across this issue too, for various hardware vendors.
Drivers being removed from direct download.

MS seems to be encouraging manufacturers to provide drivers and related software only via Windows Update / Windows store.

They increasingly want you to be logged on with a MS account to get this stuff, I think.

[spesh]

I'm afraid HP these days is not your Grand-daddy's HP.  These days it's less about good, solid, dependably engineered products than bleeding the customer consumer dry on the cost of locked-in ink cartridges (and toner).

I was reading a great thread by Cory Doctorow a little while back on the subject of printer ink...

<tappity tappity>

A little further back than I thought - it was in November last year:

HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.

Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.

The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers' interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.

https://eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer…

[continues...]

For the full thread: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1324498946220154885

The article linked in the quote above inspired this one by NPR's Planet Money team:

https://npr.org/2021/02/17/968704526/why-printers-are-the-worst

[ian]

To be fair, if you make a product and say 'it's going to cost you £500 but it'll be cheaper in the long run' and your competitor comes along and says 'ours is a £100, sure you'll have to buy some ink but £100!' you know what happens.

[Kim]

I'm afraid HP these days is not your Grand-daddy's HP.  These days it's less about good, solid, dependably engineered products than bleeding the customer consumer dry on the cost of locked-in ink cartridges (and toner).

Also, Real Printers don't need drivers.

*pats Laserjet 4050*

[TheLurker]

To be fair, if you make a product and say 'it's going to cost you £500... ...sure you'll have to buy some ink but £100!' you know what happens.

You get a thriving market in third party replacement cartridges and refills costing a fraction of the price, still too expensive, but cheaper than (say) HPs.  Until HP* (the greedy, gouging bastards)  make their cartridges with extra little circuits which mean you can't use any but HP cartridges and new ones at that.



*HP aren't alone in this.

[ian]

Yeah, but that doesn't really benefit HP and they aren't a charity (I think it's shit, but I have an old Laserjet that eats knock-off toner cartridges at a third of the price of the originals, so they have to gouge someone).

[TheLurker]

Gouging doesn't benefit HP in the long run either because people do (eventually) work out that HP printers are an out and out rip off and buy from other people and HP go to the wall.  TBH I'm surprised that HP didn't go to the wall about 10 or 15 years ago.

It's amusing to note that at least 3 people here using *old* HP printers because they were built well and and don't have all the walled garden / lock the sucker in crap, but no-one has chipped in to say that they'll buy a new HP printer.  John Deere (big green tractors) are also busy finding out the hard way that this lock-in model doesn't work.  In their case it's more a lock-in to their support network than DRM on parts, but there is an element of that as well.  Farmers in the US are still buying John Deere tractors, but they're buying old, sometimes decades old, JD tractors because they can fix them themselves and not lose a harvest because the nearest approved technician is a 2 hour flight away and won't be able fix the bloody thing when he gets to it.

[ian]

It's a financial gamble though, many home printers are pretty much impulss purchases that get used occasionally (business users are a different animal), and no business thinks on ten-year timescales. Quarterly revenue and units shifted if you're lucky. Any kind of subscription is much preferred to transactional revenue for obvious reasons. I doubt we're typical users (I spent fifty quid plus on a razor – and I have a beard).

[Cudzoziemiec]

Must be a crap razor, send it back for a refund.

[ian]

Life is disappointing that way. I still have 9,985 Gilette Seven O'Clock Shadow razor blades. (To be fair, I trim the borders, unruly beards make for poor dictators.)

[Hot Flatus]

Life is disappointing that way. I still have 9,985 Gilette Seven O'Clock Shadow razor blades.

Yeah but from what I saw in the supermarket yesterday, razor shopping for the first time in 3 years, that is now just one razor head

[ian]

I did wonder where they'd get to. It's a matter of time before they have an infinity blade. All the blades ever made and all the blades that will ever be made in one single shaving head. Women, when they attempt to stroke the resulting smoothness, a chin unblemished by even the most tentative facial scrub, will find their hands slip right by and they will plummet gratefully into your arms. Gillette, I'm writing the advert in my mind now.

(Apropos of nothing, reminds of the brilliant Massive Dad's Commercial Break sketch, which people should google if they haven't because it's very funny.)

[Polar Bear]

Shoe sizing:  <sigh>

I have been putting off replacing the daily trudgers hoping for shops to reopen but getting desperate I decided to buy a couple of pairs of shoes mail order.  I bought shoes from brands that I have used in recent history and stuck to the UK sizing requirement.  The brand and model that I have been using for a couple of years seems to be no longer available so one pair is another model from the same brand.

Both pairs are too small.  Though labelled UK9 they are also labelled EU 43 or 43.5 and not EU 44 and one pair is even labelled US 9.5 and not US 10.

Now, I had been fooled into believing that shoe sizing had been more or less sorted.  Clearly not.

I now have to post these ruddy things back at my expense and wait no doubt for a month to get my money refunded. 

Feeling pissed off.  I was bracing myself to expect to return 1 pair but both: that's just taking the piss.

[ian]

All the shoes (and other clothes) I've bought online in recent years have come with a quick, free return mechanism (usually a ready-to-use return label). I've certainly not needed party heels recently.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I did wonder where they'd get to. It's a matter of time before they have an infinity blade. All the blades ever made and all the blades that will ever be made in one single shaving head.

Shimano, SRAM and Campag are scrambling right now.

[hellymedic]

Shoe sizing is always a f***ing nightmare.

I post my interpretations, cautions & grumbles all over yacf fairly frequently.

American shoe sizes aren't even the same length for any given shoe size so a women's 10 is not the same length as a men's 10.

Continental sizes are theoretically just 50% more than last length in cm so 28cm = Size 42 = UK 8.

That's a 10 for a US woman or an 8.5 for a US man

or something.

ETA  Looks like I didn't butt in quickly enough in the Classified board and there are some women's Size 5/38 shoes in need of a new home...

[CommuteTooFar]

I have small feet for a male.  I find that many makers make my UK size 6 1/2 but many shops do not make them.  I once complained to the Hi-Tec shop than they did not stock them although the website says they make them. They listened, now when I look size 6 1/2 is listed but always out of stock so there is probably a demand for them even if they are snapped up by teenagers.
 

[Bledlow]

I've come across this issue too, for various hardware vendors.
Drivers being removed from direct download.

MS seems to be encouraging manufacturers to provide drivers and related software only via Windows Update / Windows store.

They increasingly want you to be logged on with a MS account to get this stuff, I think.

Yeah, but that didn't work for my printer. Too old, I expect.