View from the Mountain

The Epson ET-3760, No More Inkjet Cartridges for Me

My deep dive into technology stretches back nearly thirty-nine years to August of 1982, when I got an Apple II+ computer and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. I am guessing the computer, printer and some software cost something over $3,000 US. That same $3,000 translates into about $8,400 in purchasing power today.

Printing and computing technology has gotten less costly instead of increasing expensive. Both technologies have also gotten much more capable. Today’s inkjet printer can print faster with much higher quality results than the Epson MX-80 of 1982. I had to have an Orange Micro Grappler + parallel interface card just to take advantage of the printer on the Apple II. Even so, some of the early word processing software required inserting control characters to get the printer to print bold or italics characters. On my first Apple II+ I installed a Videx keyboard enhancer just to be able to see upper and lower case letters on the monochrome monitor that I had.

The idea that one printer without a specialized card would work across a bunch of computers was as foreign an idea as having a printer that can scan and copy items plus print perfectly acceptable photos.

We are eons ahead of where we were in 1982, in computer technology, and but we have come even further in cross-platform printing abilities in the seventeen years since I wrote this article about the work required to print from my 2004 Linux computer. I bought my first All In One printer in 2006. At the time it was even a challenge getting it to print from my Macs. The HP AIO Photosmart C6180 never died on me, but I did replace it with a smaller Cannon TS9100 AIO printer a couple of years ago. I was having challenges using the C6180 on some computers.

This year just as I was getting ready to purchase my third set of ink for the Cannon it dawned on me that if I made that order for $40 of ink, I would be very close to paying as much for ink supplies as I had paid for the printer. While the only other complaint I had about the TS9100 was its flimsy paper tray, I decided that I would get off the inkjet-cartridge-addiction train. As Joanna Stern says in her WSJ article, The Best Printers for the Home—Say Goodbye to Ink Cartridges, “The only time an old-school, cheap cartridge inkjet makes sense is if you need to print a page here and there. Say, a return label once a month.” While I don’t print a whole lot and I  have a Dymo label printer, I print enough to think that 18 months of ink supplies should not cost more than my inkjet printer.

When it came to choosing a printer, I went with an Ethernet equipped Epson ET-3760. It was under $299 tax included, delivered to my doorstep by Costco. Filling the ink tanks was mess-free because of the special ink bottles. Like both of my previous AIOs, the printer manufacturer photo software is worthless. However, I use Lightroom so I am more picky than most people.

In order to get fully functionality (scanning and printing) with my main Mac OS and Windows 10 machines, I downloaded the software but there were no hitches or glitches. I have both M1 and I5 based based Macs running everything from Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6 to macOS Big Sur 11.2.3. For some reason the printer just worked from my 2010 iMac running High Sierra. We have three Windows machines running Windows 10. The oldest would be six years old. We also have a repurposed I5 Lenovo desktop from 2015 that runs Ubuntu Linux. In the surprise of surprises the Linux machine printed to the new Epson without me doing anything but selecting the Epson when I went to print. My wife and I both use Chromebooks for our evening browsing. My wife’s Lenovo Chromebook and my Asus Flip C434 both have had no problems printing to the new printer. On top of that my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone prints to it as does my new iPad Pro.

I have more operating systems and architectures printing without any problems to the Epson ET-3760 than I have ever had. I am actually amazed at how easy it was for the Epson to join our challenging group of hardware. Printing has never been this easy in my complex world of computers.

The scanning software also works well. I have printed a few 4X6 photos and the quality is fine though it is maybe not quite as easy to switch paper sizes as it was on the Canon.

This is a long way from the days when we used to flip dip switches on cards to get printers to work and sometimes even make custom cables. I still have a dedicated scanner and a black and white laser printer so I might not push the Epson ET-3760 as hard as someone who has no other printers, but I will try to report back on how long the original ink supply lasts. I will use it quite a bit for color printing since I have found it hard to get my color HP LaserJet CP1025nw to print using some of my computers.

Even ten years ago I doubt that I could have imagined that for $670 before taxes I could have both a very capable computer, my ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14” Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage ($390 -June Prime Day Special before taxes) and a terrific multi-funtional Epson ET-3760 inkjet printer with Ethernet ($280 before taxes).

Another in a long line of home offices

I have been lucky to work in home offices most of my professional career.  The office was also the dining room on our Tay Creek farm.  In Halifax it was a small, designed-for-an-office space just off the main entrance. My wife claimed it was a great place to see the back of my head.

Our Columbia home had another tiny office just off the entrance.  When we moved to Roanoke in 1989, I got to use a huge space in our newly finished basement.  I takes three pictures to get a good view of it, picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3. It might seem overly large but for over a decade I ran Apple sales teams from there including the last few years when I was director of federal sales and had a national sales team.  I did everything from generate bids for colleges to house equipment that had no other home.

The Apple office made a great place for kids to play some of the first networked games. It also served as a second home for many projects from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School. There were always students borrowing the demo color laser printer that Apple was afraid to ship around and consequently dropped from the product line.  The Roanoke office was where I first got on the Internet.  We went from modems of varying speeds to line of sight antennae to DSL and finally to a cable modem.  I spent a lot of time on the modem dialing into Apple's IBM mainframe and downloading sales reports.

In 2006 after I had left Apple and was president of sales at WebMail.us, we had a water leak that meant the office got a remodeling and I had to start over.  I wrote this post, The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair, just as I was starting up once again.  Sometimes it is good to start over because you get to clean up the cables which have a tendency to become like a ball of snakes after a decade or so.

The fact is that starting over is easier and easier. I have written about the instant economy that allows businesses to get what they need to start up in hours instead of months.  It is also very easy for a home office to get everything that it needs.  Sometimes all it takes is an afternoon trip to Best Buy or Staples.

Eleven years ago when I wrote about setting up my home office on the Crystal Coast in the post, The not so reluctant home system engineer, I had worked through a number of challenges getting things running smoothly.  Things have gotten a lot easier when it comes to networking and printers.  Because I have a son with even greater geek tendencies than me, I now have a NAS (Network Attached Store) with multiple terabytes of storage.  After thirty-five years in the technology world, I also have a pretty good idea of what works well.  With that in mind I had Cat 5 Ethernet run from my old office to my new office. 

I was a little surprised when our electrician did not know how to install the Ethernet jacks since I had seen our system engineers at Apple do it plenty of times.  I ordered from Amazon the needed punch down tool and punch down block with the right jacks and did it myself.  This being my first time at putting ends on Ethernet cables, I wondered if it would all work.  I hauled a laser printer upstairs to the new office and connected it to the wall jack. Then I ran an Ethernet cable from my current Ethernet switch to the new wall jack in my old office.  I sat down at my Mac and printed a document to the printer upstairs in the new office.  It worked.  Now I can gradually move things from the old office to the new one and never lose connectivity.  I am very happy that laser printers are a lot lighter than they used to be back in the eighties.

It is amazing how much technology has changed. My first blog post on View from the Mountain was almost thirteen years ago and I was wrestling with my first Windows/Linux machine.  My desktop has changed a lot since then. Windows occupies a much great part of it but I still have some vintage Macs chugging along in addition to my Windows computers and now Linux runs on my Mac instead of my Windows computer. My photo work is now all done on Windows but I think iMac from 2010 which got rescued by a repair will have a place in the new office for a while.

Some things do not change. I am still using an IKEA table as a first desk as I build my new office just like I did back in 2006. This is the first post written from my nice new office. It is a great spot to write.

Sticking to the Shadows

It is human nature to want some praise for the work that you do but sometimes you accomplish more by staying in the shadows than stepping into the spotlight. While it is not written in my rules for a good life, it is there between the lines.

One rule that is in my list is leaving any organization or place where you have been better for your having been there. On the surface you might think it is easiest to do that as a leader standing in the spotlight with a title.  Sometimes it is actually far more effective to labor anonymously in the shadows.

As nice as it is to have someone publicly thank you for your efforts, you can actually get an abundance of satisfaction by just doing your job well.  There is plenty of pleasure in doing something that needs doing and no one figuring out that that you did it.

One example comes to mind easily. When I was first running Apple's federal team, we were so far under the radar, that I made up my own business cards.  We also were not a threat to anyone.  We were able to work with a lot of people in Cupertino who bought into our vision of making OS X an alternative operating system for the federal government.  We got an amazing amount of things done that made it easier to sell to the federal government and our sales were amazing.  However, we were a stealth organization.  I was in an executive briefing with Steve Jobs and he was talking to customers and turned to me and asked if we had an office in the Washington area.  Of course we did, that was where my team was based.

As our team grew exponentially and I got promoted to director, things got a little more dicey.  The second year that we were the best enterprise sales team in the world, Apple sales management decided that the best way to handle our success was to cancel the annual award for best enterprise sales team.  We had become a threat to some people who believed that Apple's best course was to be a consumer oriented computer company. 

My new title actually got me involved in a training course with senior executives.  A video presentation of mine which had customers begging for Apple and Microsoft to cooperate more became one those corporate risks that can unhinge a career.  Tim Cook loved the idea, but Avie Tevanian hated it.  Had we just kept doing it without telling people at the top, we could likely have continued on the path.

I like to tell folks that I flew too close to the sun in Cupertino and my wax wings melted.

There are lots of times in life when you sit around the table and you can accomplish unbelievable things by just being a doer without a title.  There are times when the leaders around the table will give you the latitude to do something without most people knowing what is happening until it is done.  I have never been one to do things behind folks backs but sometimes change is easier if presented as a done deal.  Getting something done which has to be done is far better than having a group paralyzed because not enough people understand what needs to be done.  I can attest to the results of that.

The best possible situation is that people trust you enough to tell you to fix the problem and call if you run into a bump in the road.  That also works great in the reverse.  One night I was having a late night email exchange with Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO. At the time he was COO and vice president of sales.  He asked me why I had not been able to get Apple federal online store up and running.  I told him exactly why.  The total exchange between the two of us was less than ten lines.  The next day I got a call and by the end of the week we had a federal online store.  It sold $12M in product the next year even though we were forbidden to advertise that it existed.

Doing a job well is its own reward. I learned that from my mother and I live by it.  Whether it is scrubbing mold off a boardwalk, taking a picture or putting the finishing touches on a big proposal, if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well even if you remain in the shadows.

I got a nice note from our company's CEO today.  No one saw it but my wife.  I will take that private note to walking across the stage at Apple and getting an award.  In today's world there is no sense in making yourself a target.

As a side note, this is post number 1400 from me on View from the Mountain. I have been writing posts here for eleven years. While I write more at my Crystal Coast Life blog, last month was probably the only time in those years that I have missed posting here.

Technology limits us more than ice

An ice storm visited us here on the Crystal Coast the last week in January 2014.  Our normally open waters have temporarily frozen and we got enough sleet to keep us home for a few days.

The nice thing about the ice is that mother nature and the warm sunshine will make it disappear pretty quickly as you can see from the picture.  Most of us had enough sense to stay home which is more than I can say for some other folks in the South.

We all have a bigger problem and it is not as easy to fix.  It is technology.  We have grown dependent on it, and maybe some of our high tech devices are getting beyond what is good for us.  I have been worried about this a long time.  I wrote this article about our wonderful Volvo being destroyed by a clueless dealer back in 2005.

I have seen advancements in technology tools, but some like supposed improvements in Apple's iPhoto software have caused me to jump ship or pull the plug on products.  Our Harmony remote which was a bear to set up in 2006 recently died.  We went back to the standard remote which Time-Warner provided.  About two months later, the "guide function" on it stopped working.  I am not looking forward to getting a new one of those working much less thinking about the possibility of a new Harmony remote and trying to make it work with our "old" 2006 gear. 

Some of this seems to be intentional and comes from the tech companies.  It gets harder and harder to use the old stuff so you have to throw it all away and get new things.  Apple has been accused of doing this with iOS and their iPhones. I do not have one so it is hard for me to verify.

I am much more comfortable with orderly transitions.  I have had a series of Sony video recorders. Whenever I bought a new one after several years, it would come with adapters that let me move movies from the old one.  What a nice a concept for a tech company to push.

Apple is not all  bad.  I love how easy it is to move data and applications when you buy a new Mac, but what I really don't like is how hard it is to fix or repair the latest generations of Apple's products like the iMacs.

I am going to be thinking about this subject a lot more.  I can remember changing the spark plugs in my vehicles.  I can even remember checking and setting the points.  I do not want to go back to old stuff that has been replaced by better gear, but if sure would be nice it serviceability, upgradeability, and usability got a lot more attention.

 

An Obsession With Numbers

Raymond's Gut, October 19, 2013

For many of my years at Apple it was common to hear the complaint that the bean counters had taken over the company.  It might even be fair to say that an over focus on numbers almost killed Apple in the nineties.  

Trying to maximize short term profits turned a company founded on selling the future into a company making so many competing products that it had no idea what the future looked like.  Steve Jobs came back and turned the company around by creating a future that few people including the numbers guys believed to be possible.

Today's Apple is being run by a numbers guy who is once again trying to maximize short term profit, but this article is not about Tim Cook whom I do credit with being one of the three people who helped to save Apple back in nineties.

I think an obsession with numbers and trying to quantity decisions only on numbers is an affliction that hurts our country in many ways.  Our country much like Apple in the nineties is so concerned with numbers that we cannot see the future.  One of the problems that Apple faced in the nineties was Steve Jobs would not sign off on a product until the very last minute. That often meant paying for air frieght to arrive in time for an already scheduled product launch instead of using much less expensive shipments by boat.  The cost of those last minute design decisions was impressive, but I believe they helped build Apple's reputation for innovative design.

If you look back at some of the great investments in the future like the Interstate Highway System, rural electrification, or the space race, at the time these causes were championed, it would have been hard to justify them on pure numbers.  Just like Apple's turnaround, the real key was vision and the belief that the best way to have control of your future is to build it yourself and not let others dictate your decisions.

Much of the policy focus in the United States has been on trying to come to deals which will shrink our deficit.  Yet the truth is that the deficit has been shrinking for a number of reasons, and if we really want to improve the lot of the majority of the middle class in the United States, we need to make more investments in our future not less.

What do you suppose would have happened to Apple if Steve Jobs had come back and looked at the product line and decided that there were already plenty of products and the company just needed to cut a few of those and focus on what the company already had instead of building new products for the future?  There is no doubt that Apple would have gone out of business without the iMac, OS X, and eventually the iPod.

This is obviously a problem at many levels of government.  However, there are plenty of people who believe government has no role in success of private enterprise and if you are one of those, I suggest you read this article, 'The Entrepreneurial State': Apple Didn't Build Your iPhone; Your Taxes Did.

I feel that even our local governments have a huge role to play in our future.  Many of us in technology believe that providing super-fast big broadband connections to attract new and innovative companies is key to building our future.  

Towns like Wilson, North Carolina, might well be showing us the way to the future. Wilson's Greenlight Internet service is bringing Google fiber like speeds to a town of under 50,000 people.  The super-fast connectivity is drawing new companies to Wilson much like nDanville brought a supercomputer to Danville, Virginia, which had been hard hit by the changing economy. While I do work for WideOpen Networks which was involved in the Danville project, I passionately believe that one of the ways to the future is big broadband.  Communities can try to create their own future or sit back and take what the future offers them.  I know which way Steve Jobs would pick.

I am troubled by North Carolina's legislature falling victim to intense lobbying by Time Warner and making it very hard for other towns to follow Wilson's lead.

The impact of an obsession with numbers goes far beyond government.  All you have to do is look at today's banks.  All they care about are the numbers.  Long gone are the days exemplified by Jimmy Stewart's, It's A Wonderful Life.  It is interesting that banks focus on earnings history and almost never on potential earnings unless you are a doctor.

I wonder how different our future might be if our banks and governments were truly willing to invest in the future and not let the past and its numbers hold them hostage?

Actually I am willing to bet we could have a very bright future.  If I had chosen to run my future just by the numbers, I would have probably turned down my original job offer from Apple which was for less money than I was making at the time.  Fortunately I believed that the future was going to be defined by more than just the immediate numbers that I could read in a job offer.

 

 

Time to look back over the years of posts

I found the Typepad platform nearly eight years ago in late November 2004.  My first post was entitled, My Welcome to Windows, and was done on November 23, 2004.  After leaving Apple in July of 2004, I wanted to get outside the reality distortion zone and taste the world of Windows.  Being the adventurous type, I decided to get Linux up and running at the same time.

Eight years later I'm still writing about technology and giving Apple advice like my recent post, Apple Finally Loses Its Mantra. The post seemed to be the natural result of a weekend where I figured out that things no longer just work on my Mac.

During my nearly twenty years at Apple, I loved techical challenges even after I became a manager in 1993.  System engineers loved to work for me because I usually understood what they were saying, and I tried my best to give them all the tools they needed to do their jobs.  My team was the only one that I ever heard of in Apple that had its own internal web site.  I built the website and used it to keep all of us accountable and informed.

Learning another operating system and using Windows XP was not that difficult, but I did have some adventures. The challenges of Windows gave me some very good perspective to launch into a battle with a local technology writer in December 2004 when he provided some inaccurate information about the Mac.  My article, The Computer Battle, was reasonable advice for computer shoppers at the time.

Over the years I have written over 1,400 posts on View from the Mountain and  more than another 1,000 on other sites that I maintain.  Several of the posts have offered advice on buying computers like that early post. Some have poked fun at computers and politics. I have often written about why I continue to use the Mac and about some of the challenges that I have conquered.

A few have even been a glimpse of my own thinking as I tried to decide which computer to buy. This post, The Apple Value Proposition, was written in February of 2006 when I was vice president of sales and marketing for Webmail.us before Rackspace bought them up. 

I finally got most things working for my Mac in that career, but when I headed off to the coast of North Carolina and decided to sell real estate for a while, using a Mac became much more difficult though I remained very optimistic for much of the first year.  The MacBook that I bought in the summer of 2006 was a constant companion that first year in real estate.

By the fall of 2007, I made the decision to buy another Windows laptop since I had given my Dell laptop to my daughter as she finished her business degree.  By the spring of 2008, I was calling Vista a quagmire.  Still I hung with it for over two years, and surprisingly saw a great deal of improvement.

As January 2010 rolled around, my wife needed a new computer.  I was ready to replace her ancient 12" Aluminum Powerbook with a new Mac laptop.  However, I was determined that she not get a processor that was already out of date when it shipped.  Finally I got really frustrated with Apple delaying the introduction of systems with the new Intel processors.  I took advantage of a really good deal at Staples.  I got my wife an I5 HP laptop and myself an I7 HP laptop.  The total cost of the two Windows 7 machines was under $1,500.  They turned out to be great machines from the start and even a year later I was still pleased with them.

In the fall of 2010, I had a project that required a Mac so I ended up buying an I5 iMac.  I was a little irritated with Apple from the start because I had to get the 27" screen to get the I5.  The I5 iMac has turned out to be one of my least favorite Macs.  It suffered from "Slow Snow Leopard" and has never been a quick booting machine. The iMac has lost the ability to boot from its internal drive and is now running from an external Firewire 800 drive.  I haven't built up the energy to pull the LCD to replace the drive.  Every time I think of it, I want to strangle the Apple engineer who agreed to no drive access door on the back of the iMac.

As my MacBook got older and older, I kept waiting for Apple to come out with a price competitive laptop.  It didn't happen so as the white MacBook was dying a slow death in the spring of 2012, I bought a new Lenovo I7 laptop.  My HP laptop is now a backup machine, but it is not nearly as nice as the Lenovo.  The 15" Lenovo even with 8 gigs of RAM, the I7 processor, and a copy of Microsoft Office was less money than the least expensive Mac laptop.

As I write this, my 2004 Dual G5 which I bought in the winter of 2004 is still functional though the browser versions are mostly out of date and unsupported.  The Dell that I bought in the fall of 2004 is still happily running Linux.  I have moved over to Ubuntu and find it a delight compared to the early Linux versions.  We no longer have a functioning Mac laptop in the family for the first time in many years.

Unfortunately every time I look at Mac laptops the math just doesn't work for me.  I have watched as I have been priced out of both laptops and towers in the Apple world.   I'll likely spend around $1,200 in total for a new laptop and a new tower this fall.  I want something lighter than my Lenovo to carry on a trip when I need something more than my Kindle Fire.  I also need to replace my aging Dual G5.

I wouldn't mind stretching a little and spending a few hundred dollars more if I could get a Mac besides the mini and a laptop besides the MacBook Air.  The $999 version of the MacBook Air doesn't even have a SD slot.  Unfortunately it would cost me at least $1,800 or 50% over my budget to get the lowest end Macs that fit my relatively modest needs. And one of the them would have to be a Mac Mini.  Based on my recent experience, paying more when I am not necessarily getting more reliable hardware doesn't make a lot of sense even though I still love Macs.  Unfortunately I also am not overly enthralled with Mac OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud is worth exactly what I pay for it.

Sadly, I have to admit the Mac has gone from being the computer for the rest of us to the computer for the well-heeled among us.

My most recent advice on buying computers and technology can be found at this post, Technology Still Needs Humans.  It won't be long and it will be time to update that article.  I wonder what will be my next technology adventure- Windows 8? I am hoping that it is not a disaster as some are suggesting.

I am hoping that my Mac experience will improve, but it is hard to get excited about Apple stuff when you keep battling problems.  I have now reinstalled iPhoto three times on my iMac.