Is It Worth Keeping An Old Laser Printer?
I don’t print much these days and if I want something in colour, I have an expensive HP Laser I could connect to my network.
For general printing I’ve used an HP 3390 mono laser printer, that has worked well in the past few years, but it died on Monday. I obviously won’t fix it and it’ll go in a skip.
Checking prices for a new mono printer, that I can have in my living room, I found a wi-fi driven HP for £99.99 in Currys. So in other words, I bought one printer for the price of two 3390 catridges. Admittedly the new printer doesn’t copy, but the big colour one does that!
Soon they’ll give you a new printer for just walking in the shop and smiling nicely! Well not quite! But you get my drift.
A Series of Strange E-Mails
I have received several e-mails like this today.
A quick one time public service announcement about Lung cancer (no further emails will be sent).
Lung cancer is the cancer responsible for the most deaths in both men and women. Over 85% of lung cancers are related to smoking. More than half of the people who are newly diagnosed with lung cancer are former smokers.
Women are also affected greatly by breast and colorectal cancers. Reduce your risk of cancers by not smoking, eating a healthy diet, using sunscreen and getting regular cancer screenings. Take care.
This one had a title of “Info concerning maintaining fitness”.
They don’t appear to be promoting a web site, selling anything or even have any links to other sites. And even the information is sensible.
But why?
All I can think of is that someone is testing some new e-mail software.
Student Finance Agreement
I’ve just recieved an e-mail with the above heading and this message.
Dear Student,
Student Finance Application Year 2011/12-Information RequiredTo assess your application, your student finance agreement needs to be signed and returned back to us . This can be done through “MY ACCOUNT” session of your online account .
Failure to sign and return this to us would mean your next student loan payment and maintenance grant will be delayed.
Thanks for your co-operation.SIGN ON HERE
Yours sincerely,
Student Loan Finance England.
As it points to a web site in the United States with no contact address, it’s a scam. It also came to one of my trap e-mails, which seem to be passed around by spammers.
The Facebook Two
Two men have been given substantial prison sentences for trying to organise a riot in Chester by using Facebook. as the BBC reports here. But they must have been two of worst riot organisers in history as no-one turned up.
Perhaps, the good people of Cheshire, have more morals, than these two have common sense.
You don’t send people to prison for this type of crime, especially when it would appear that nothing got damaged and no-one got hurt.
What they need is some form of creative community punishment. Perhaps, there is a derelict site that could be converted into a garden! Or some coal that needs painting white!
One is certainly appealing, and I’ll be very surprised if the sentence stands.
Bye-Bye Virgin
I’ve now been without my landline for a couple of weeks now. Although, I didn’t realise it for some days, as I was away and also because most of my friends phone me on my mobile number.
So on Friday, I did what I should have done when I moved in; I signed up with BT.
Today after a very long phone call, I cancelled Virgin. I did eventually get someone sensible, but as I had to ring on my mobile and I phoned them for perhaps twenty minutes, I suspect it wasn’t cheap.
It did however cost me over seventy pounds to get rid of them.
Hackney council today wrote to me saying that I could get rid of five heavy items a year by just giving them a call. If disposing of Virgin and their useless service were so easy.
Incidentally, all of their cabinets round here have had their doors stolen.
A Typical Virgin Cabinet in Hackney
In my experience, electrical equipment doesn’t like working in exposed conditions.
I shall now be using BT for phone and broadband, Freeview for television and the pub for watching football on Sky.
How Not To Contact Your Phone, Broadband, Energy or Media Supplier
My Virgin Media service is terrible, so I want to cancel. As an example, I haven’t had a landline for about 10 days now. Every time I try to get through to service, I end up on hold listening to terrible music. It’s probably cost me several pounds on my mobile. In one case they tried to see me more services. If I want more crap, there are many much better places to buy it, where I get some service.
As an aside here, could my terrible Virgin service, be due to the fact that their connection cabinets round here have no doors and are open to the elements.
I didn’t have the phone number to hand, so I did the obvious and typed “Virgin Media Phone Number” into Google.
After the adverts trying to sell me more Virgin services, there are some helpful companies that can connect you. I obvious don’t want more crap, so I ignored the adverts and as the helpful companies looked a bit dubious, I read about them first.
They are call referral services with expensive numbers and cost 10p a minute from a BT Landline and considerably more from a mobile. As I’ve only got my trusty Nokia 6310i, I didn’t even think about ringing them.
Virgin Media were the fifth in the list and there were about 10 of these call referral services.
By the way the number to ring for Virgin Media is 0845 454 1111.
The Police Don’t Like It!
Surprise! Surprise!
The police don’t like the fact that David Cameron is calling in Bill Bratton.
I’ve met a few high ranking policemen and with one glorious exception, they were not a bunch I warmed to.
They generally want to do things their way and just be given the funding to make their own successes and failures.
I once heard a comment from someone who was selling technology to a particular Police Force. The Chief Constable said that he wanted the best system that money could buy, but he didn’t want the company to sell it to any other Force.
Surely, with Police technology and equipment, it should all be standardised, so that each force uses the same equipment, vehicles and computers for the same jobs. Some have said that the dreadful Soham murders happened because two Police Force computer systems were incompatible and couldn’t talk to each other.
Imagine what would happen if the computer systems at Barclays couldn’t talk to those at Lloyds and HSBC.
Chief Constables are always harping on about their links to the local communities and that every Force has different needs. If you believe some of the stories in the reputable Press, some of them have been behaving in the manner of rather poor dictators, led much more by the rules of the Data Protection Act and the Health and Safety Executive.
They must accept that they don’t have a monopoly of knowledge on policing in the UK.
China’s Fake Apple Stores
It would appear Apple has a problem.
The Anonymous Widower 