Standard Mischief

I have mixed feelings about linking to this. If genuine, this is a graphic video of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. It appears to have been made by a cell phone or other small camera.

My feeling is that the US presence in Iraq has a certain facade that they try to keep up. The US may have had the guarding duties for Saddam throughout his imprisonment, but actual, official custody was, at least on paper, with the legitimate government that was elected by the people of Iraq. Likewise with the trial, although put on trial by Iraqi judges, I have no illusion about who was pulling the strings from the background.

So Saddam was to be hanged, and custom and the facade that we try to uphold is that he gets hung by the Iraqi people, and respect for human decency causes us to release video proof to the press, but only edited before and after pictures.

Then, a low quality, jittery clip is released – “leaked” – to teh seedy underside of the tubes of internet for PR purposes.

So here’s the actual link. Go forth and create buzz. Pretend that some sneaky witness wholly unconnected to the US presence pulled a fast one over everyone.

If you want to see more examples of this kind of viral marketing (which, up to now seemed to be primarily to consumer advertising), I’d like to direct you to:

• The SportKa decapitating a cat video that was (*cough*) “accidentally released” somehow to the public [Snopes page]

YouTube – Decapitated Kitty 0:29 min.
View video in a pop-up window | Direct link

• The video clips released by Josh Wheaton to help create buzz for the release of the movie Serenity
• A fake, computer generated cat gets flung around by a ceiling fan to promote Nokia brand mobile phones [Snopes page]

YouTube – cat Vs Fan 0:40 min.
View video in a pop-up window | Direct link

I’ve gone quite a long time without a proper printer at home, and it’s been a minor inconvenience but I’ve managed pretty well. I could always copy traffic directions or Googled up food recipes over to my PDA, and the 25 or so yearly hard copy pages (most of which were needed around April 15, oddly enough), could always be farmed out. If printing out those pages weren’t feasible at work, well, the library does ‘em for fifteen cents a page and the office supply store will do color copies at a buck each. In an emergency, a Kinkos nearby will rent you a PC by the minute, 24/7, although b/w pages were a steep 50 cents each.

Still, it’s nice to have a printer, and I’d have bit the bullet long ago for an inexpensive ink jet, but I’ve been extremely unhappy about the standard mischief the printer manufacture play nowadays, such as:

The whole razor and blades business model

Including ink cartridges that were only partly full

The use-it-or-lose-it limitations on the ink technology itself, (let the cartridges sit idle too long and it self-destructs as the ink dries and clogs the nozzles.)

DMCA lawsuits to prevent refilling the cartridges or offering generic cartridges that would fit and work in the name brand printer.

Chips embedded in the cartridges, used to “expire” a cartridge after a date, even if there is plenty of ink still remaining.

Inkjets that won’t print, unless there’s a color cartridge in place, even if you’re only printing using black ink

So anyway, enough bellyaching, here’s what I bought myself:

It’s a $40 used HP laserjet 5m. It came with an ethernet port, a partly used toner cartridge, and a letter size paper tray. I brought some blank paper to the used computer place and powered up the printer using a standard PC cord. I then used the menu keys to execute a self-test, and found that the pickup rollers for the paper tray worked fine and the printer printed OK.

Taking it home, I found that all the manuals were available still from HP on their website, which was good, because it didn’t automatically grab a IP address via DHCP. It uses an older system known as BOOTP, which is suppose to be backwards compatible, but didn’t seem to work. I assigned it a static address of 10.10.10.10.

Cost breakdown: Printer itself $40. Average quality 20# paper is about $3 for 500 sheets, with the really cheap stuff being about a buck less. Setting the printer to idle down after 15 minutes, I found via my Kill-A-Watt that the printer used about 19 watts when sleeping. Total usage for 241 hours (~10 days) of straight use was 5.10 KWH, which works out to about a half of a kilowatt-hour a day (~ 7 cents) if I just keep it on all the time. However, since it’s right near my desk, and it’s attached through the network, I just power up and down the printer from the switch as needed.

HP brand name EX cartridges run about $105 and claim to last 8800 sheets. A realistic guess would be 7000 impressions which works out to about a penny and a half a each. The paper I’m using is about a half a cent a sheet.

The best part is that the Canon EX cartridge used in this printer seems to be designed to be refilled up to 3 times by [PDF, page 34] merely removing a cap and pouring in new toner. While there’s a thousand people selling toner, it just makes sense to find a reputable supplier, rather than to ruin a EX cartridge on el-cheapo toner.

I know on the older SX type cartridges, refillers use to drill a hole, and then dump the new toner in. If the refillers were not careful, the plastic chips leftover from the drilled hole would ruin the cartridge. You are suppose to vacuum out all the old toner (and any stray plastic chips) with a special vac before dumping in a new batch of toner. HP was likely a different company ten years ago when one of these babies cost over a kilobuck each new. Instead of putting in computer chips solely designed to shorten the life of the cartridge or pensioning Congress to pass laws protecting their business model they seem to improve the design of the printer itself.

1. Bid only on items from sellers that are located in your own country.

2. Know the items value. How much is it worth if you bought it through normal retail channels?

3. Only bid on items where the shipping cost is clearly indicated, and deduct that cost from your top bid.

4. Seek out sellers that aren’t pros. They are more likely to undervalue the cost of their own labor.

5. Be careful about bidding on high value items. Usually I find it worth the extra expense to deal with a local merchant, just in case there’s a need to return the item.

6. Paypal sux. It is, however mighty handy for small payments. Don’t get “verified”, don’t associate your Paypal account with any bank account. Fund your Paypal purchases via credit card.

7. Check the seller’s terms to be sure that they are willing to take your unverified Paypal payment. If not, see if they will take a money order or bank check. If it’s a low value item, however, it may not be worth the special trip it takes to get a money order. Buy elsewhere.

8. Use Ebay’s saved serches email or RSS feeds and save yourself some searching.

9. Realize that Ebay will rat you out to the feds merely on their request, no warrant needed. If you buy a CO2 regulator, hydroponic gear and a HID grow light, don’t be surprised if that’s enough evidence for some rubber stamp judge to issue a no-knock warrant for the ninja-fied police to inspect your indoor basil plants and your kegerator.

10. Seek out the misspelled auctions. If you are looking for a good used PanaVise, make sure you search for panavice and ?pana vise? and ?pana vice? too. If no one else finds/bids the auction, you can frequently get stuff dirt cheap.

11. USPS shipment tracking sux. Expect your purchase to be in “Electronic Shipping Info Received” limbo until the item is actually in your mailbox.

12. Expect a few idiots. I’d generally report them but be wary of burning up too much time over a low value purchase. Cut your losses. (That’s the plan at least, I’ve never been cheated. Even Tuan refunded my payment, eventually.)

13. Always leave appropriate positive feedback, but only after you have the item in your hand and you are satisfied. Think twice about leaving negative feedback.

14. Snipe everything. Expect your successful purchase ratio to increase. Expect to win those auctions frequently for less than your top dollar all the time too.

Actually, it’s always the sniping season on Ebay. Since I’m busy gathering materials for a future blog post, I’m reminded again about how useful a program called JbidWatcher really is.

“Sniping” or bidding at the last moment on Ebay has a bad reputation, but I’m not entirely sure why. It’s allowed by Ebay rules. It offers protection from confederates, and it neatly sidesteps all those idiots that get “auction fever”.

Many people who might bid on the same auctions as you won’t bid on anything unless there’s already a bid on the auction. I suppose that’s some sense of herd mentality. Other people see your bid as a challenge, and are willing to bid the auction up, a dollar at a time, to find your high bid. Also, do I need to remind anyone that on the Internet, nobody knows you are a confederate? Confederates are people who act as agents for the seller by placing unscrupulous bids on items to drive up the price. That’s against Ebay rules, but intent is hard to prove unless you can show a pattern.

To sidestep these pitfalls, I just place my bid on the item during the last few moments of the auction. That bid represents exactly my top dollar that I’m willing to pay, and because it’s placed so late no other bidder has time to react to my bid. If course I don’t wait around for the auction to end, I have computers to do boring repetitive tasks like that.

Enter JbidWatcher. It’s a Java based program that will run on almost any platform. It was originally written with the intent of scraping Ebay and monitoring the progress of a seller’s auctions. I believe that “sniping” feature is a requested option, and not within the scope of the original purpose. No matter, it works well, and you can’t beat the price.

Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not that I don’t want to wish everybody a Merry Christmas, (because I do, and also the very best wishes for a happy and successful new year), It’s just that I’m under no illusions that your holiday season would somehow be incomplete without my well wishing.

If you happen to get a few moments to scan your regular reading this season. I’m pretty sure you’ll be working you way through the throughly seasonal season’s greetings, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m probably guessing that you might want to read some actual content.

Seeing as plopping a bunch of reading down on this particular day without any explanation might project a different impression than I was trying to convey, I’ve decided to program my robotic minion over at the server that I rent to issue this post during the very first minute of the morning of Christmas. The problem is that I generally write when the mood hits me and since I’m writing this early, (I actually plan to be stuffing a turkey, or stuffing myself with turkey, or ‘rassling with the rascals, or chatting with my siblings and their wonderful spouses that love and care for those rascals), and I don’t know for sure if I’m going to have any content to serve up.

So if I do, I’ll stick it in so that it appears shortly after this post, and if you don’t manage to get caught up with your reading until the new year, well I suppose it’s not likely to be timely, so it will be there when you wish to read it. I’m not planning on going anywhere.

In any event, please let me express my warmest wishes for Freedom this Season, with a side order of Peace-on-Earth for everybody. And here’s always hoping there’s going to be a slice of love or mutual respect for all the nations and cultures and peoples of this earth left to go around for each and every one of you, too.