I hate that everything now is a subscription service instead of buying it and do whatever you want.
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Buy a brother printer instead. They may be a bit more expensive, but their easy mantainance and the amount of bootleg ink you can find online makes it worth the extra price.
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
I guess this sentence is already became the reality in some countries if you can’t even buy a god damn printer without it locking you out.
Maybe not the same, as its more of a service contract. At work, we have had a site which has been closed for 2 years. for 2 whole years, every week the vending machine company arrive, try to get in, can’t, ring us, and we say “that site is closed”.
Well we finally after 2 years got them to remove that site from their system?
Their response? to remove ALL food from ALL vending machines at all our sites, to remove the coffee machines, and to remove the water coolers. The water coolers are especially egregious, as they just sit there doing nothing. they are from tap water, so not even replacing bottles etc.
Sometimes subscriptions are useful. I wish the BBC TV licence in the UK was a subscription. I cannot justify spending £150 on a licence for an entire year, just to watch a month of shows. but other times it sucks. I just want Microsoft office. I don’t care if it will cost me £200. Right now my favourite game is subscription based, but i don’t think i can justify the £9.99 a month, or £50 for a whole year. £50 for lifetime access? maybe.
LibreOffice has more functionality and it’s actually free
With the current situation, no way you are getting a lifetime access. Companies have discovered that people actually pay for subscriptions even if they don’t add anything worthwhile to keep you renewing.
You are just renting and there is no option to buy.
You can still buy liscenses for office. I just bought a key off a shady vendor for $30 and have a fully activated, non subscription office 2022
…until Microsoft decides to disable this obviously hacked Office
Dont think they can, it’s a real key for the software, the distributor just gets them bulk and through “grey” channels. There’s a whole writup on it.
Regardless i used to full pirate the whole office suite and hadn’t had an issue for 20 years, I’ll just go back to that if they somehow decide this key is illegitimate
Homeowner-targeted inkjet printers are evil, especially from HP. NEVER buy one that works a subscription into the purchase. They are garbage, and can disable your cartridges if you cancel your subscription.
Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.
I’ve had my Brother printer for several years and never had an issue. I don’t have the color one, just black and white. Would buy again.
I have one of the complicated brother ones that scans and prints, including double sides, in colour, and it’s a tank. Works fine in Linux too. Connected or through the network.
It even does fax, which someone, somewhere probably finds useful.
Doctors offices and health insurance. It’s weird but technically fax machines are still considered “secure” communications for sending PHI. Sending it across the internet requires a lot of expensive hoops to jump through, or they could just buy a fax machine.
Funny thing is those faxes are going through internet anyway most of the time.
Where I live fax are considered a legal proof contrary to emails.
So for important contracts it is considered safer than mails.
And honestly it kinda is since an email can totally end up never being recieved without any kind of error or warning. A fax you should know immediately that it wasn’t received on the other end.
I still wish fax would disappear soon but an email is not a good replacement.
Emails are now considered the defacto standard for businesses but they suck and are absolutely not reliable.
Send signed email. Done.
Bunch of weirdos, that’s what they are.
I treat my Brother laser like a rented uhaul truck and it just keeps going.
That was because of a misunderstanding. Brother started a subscription service and people assumed that meant you had to pay a monthly fee to use the printers like with HP. Instead, it’s a toner subscription like Dollar Shave Club or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save where they auto-send a new toner at your requested interval.
I use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser
I heard they stopped allowing that recently.
Mine still allows it. There might be a model or two that doesn’t but I’d be surprised.
Up to date firmware?
I treat that thing like a rented uhaul, of course the firmware hasn’t been updated
Saw some people posting recently they sold out also
I also heard a rumor about something somewhere, that maybe something might have happened. But I’m not sure. /S
I just installed a Brother printer for my dad, absolutely zero bullshit.
Yes, some of their firmware updates started breaking aftermarket toner cartridges and support said “that sucks” like it was very intentional. It seems constrained to a few of the MFC color models more than anything tho I’ve never had any issues other than bad wifi modules in the b&w home office lasers. Which if you’re using wifi on a printer that’s your own damn fault lol
Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.
On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).
I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.
Can you avoid firmware updates? Are there domains that need to be blocked to prevent them?
Yes the firmware updates are only voluntary. The driver will sure nag you to do them but you can choose when and what version easily.
Yeah I’m not sure whether this is shenanigans or an actual problem Brother is managing here. The post does mention there are problems with incorrect response to temperature management with the unoriginal cartridge, which again could theoretically cause harm.
I honestly wasn’t aware unoriginal cartridges were a thing for Brother printers, since the originals tend to be quite reasonable.
But to continue using the unoriginal cartridges he can as the answer states, use BRAdmin to downgrade the firmware.
So it’s not like Brother is attempting to take control of your printer like HP likes to do.
I’m sure HP didn’t ramp up their bullshit from 0 to 11 overnight, the question now is how much we can trust Brother not to be walking the same path and mandating more and more restrictive firmwares in the future. I think them opensourcing drivers and firmwares would help mitigate that, and if their business model is really to be that sole good guy and antagonize the likes of HP/Epson/… they don’t have anything to lose and a lot to win (or as a minimum, myself as a customer).
HP has done the ink cartridge shenanigans for more than 30 years now. They just recently found a new trick. Apart from that nothing has really changed.
I am not aware Brother ever did similar things to basically trick or cheat their customers. Most other vendors are somewhere in between. AFAIK none are as bad as HP.
My dad is running his Brother HL-1212W printer on the open source Linux driver, works perfectly fine, and I was actually surprised about the high quality of his prints for such a cheap printer.
AFAIK Brother is among the best regarding opensource drivers too.
All this printer talk almost makes me want to buy a new printer. My current printer is a 14 year old Samsung color laser, and the print quality is not that stellar anymore. ;) The Samsung open source driver kind of suck for this printer. There isn’t even a driver for this specific model CLP-325W, so I have to choose another Samsung printer that is (mostly) compatible.
The Brother printer was completely plug and play. The system recognized the printer, and installed the correct open source driver, no hassle at all.
I’ve had the same brother inkjet printer for 14 years now, and it still works great.
Other than the recent nonsense, this is why I cancelled Netflix and went back to pirating. Content leaves unexpectedly? Not on my Nas.
Old school pirating or new school? Last time I remember pirates was like… Napster, Limewire, Kazaa… Then went to TPB before it got raided like 8 times… What’s the current? Is it still torrenting with proxies?
Word on the street is that reddit’s arr slash piracy has a pretty good guide to it in their wiki, including lists of generally trustworthy torrent sources. I of course don’t torrent, because I’m terrified of legal consequences–I just browse shady but technically legal websites to stream my anime
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Oh, the high seas are very, very busy these days. Still a bit difficult for the non technical user, but there is buried treasure out there.
Non technical users can just use Stremio and a debrid service. Couldn’t be simpler.
I’ve been pirating since Napster and you’re right, it’s changed a lot. These days, I usually just stream from third party sites. Takes less room on your PC and is faster than downloading a torrent. Dopebox is where it’s at for most stuff. 9anime if you like anime, it’s better than the paid alternatives like Crunchy roll or Funamation.
If you want to stick to torrents I’ve found 1337x to be the best since TPB died.
I just got my automated pirating machine set up!
Here’s the wiki for the *arr apps!
- Radarr for movies
- Sonarr for TV shows
- Prowlarr for index management
- Optional Doplarr Discord Bot for requests
Set up your profiles for Radarr/Sonarr to pick the quality of release you want (1080p, min/max file size, etc)
Feed Radarr/Sonarr your qbittorrent info, nzbget & Usenet info
They will automatically search the indexes (I use 1337x for torrents & nzbgeek for Usenet) for the files that fit your parameters, download it, and organize it.
All you have to do is point Plex at the output folders and BAM, automated pirating.
I even took it a step further and set up Doplarr - a Discord bot that handles requests. Now friends/family can ping the bot with their movie/show requests and it’ll sync up to Radarr/Sonarr and add their requests!
New skool is to use automation tools to grab and manage your media. You can still use torrenting but IMO using usenet is more reliable and doesn’t flag your ISP. I highly recommend anyone pirating to use 'arrs https://wiki.servarr.com/
Yes but with usenet you need to pay a monthly fee for a provider (generally) and a then the same for an index to find the content.
Also the selection is a lot smaller. IMHO a better solution is using realdebrid if you’re okay with paying already.
Yeah I can’t argue with the usenet fees but all three of my index sites I’ve had no issues with their free version so long as you do go wild and download ten terabytes in a night. I’ve actually had better luck with the selection compared to torrenting, pretty much is there in all of the popular resolutions. The only thing I have finding is some of the obscure adult swim shows but I can’t find them on my private trackers either.
Torrents are still around, lots of sites out there for them.
I’ve taken to de-DRMing any e-books I bought from Amazon for that reason.
Also, the “You can only view this book on 3 devices” – yeah … fuck off.
Calibre + DeDRM plugin + KFX plugin. Perfectly legal too, as long as you aren’t distributing them.
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This is the way.
Btw, did you know of Weightless Books and Smashwords?
They may not have as many ebooks as Amazon, but they do offer DRM free ebooks, and may be worth keeping in mind to check before going straight to Amazon.
Thanks. I had a collection from several years ago of Amazon books, though these days it’s my absolute last choice for anything.
Except when I accidentally rm -rf the media folder but shhhhhhhh
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I’ve been looking at going back to physical media as well. I’ve about had it with this nonsense.
I’ve been buying preowned DVDs off ebay every few weeks or so for the last year. I don’t even bother looking to see if they are available to stream anymore.
Probably cheaper too
But then it’s in DVD quality. Why not just pirate a full quality version?
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The video quality is shit and it’s extremely obvious in my opinion. Even the sound is inferior to a good torrent with Dolby TrueHD/DTS HD sound.
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Why isn’t it fair? No reason you can’t just torrent a 10GB Blu-Ray rip of the movie. It’s free, easy and probably takes less time than going out and buying a DVD.
I would say that side-to-side the quality of Netflix-like streaming is A LOT better, at least when it comes to video. Audio is probably comparable since both DVD’s and streaming services usually use Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus.
DVD isn’t very good quality. I don’t really care and I have a tiny TV, and DVDs still don’t look very good on it.
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Blurays exist and they’re pretty cheap from thrift stores (often just $3)
Ya but Blu-ray is a PITA to rip sometimes.
Piracy is free though
This. My only media expense monthly is my VPN at $10. Everything is pirated.
Even that though - I just download only my favorites for the collection. Everything else is available on stand alone websites these days (multiple) so if you’re paying for a streaming service or really even using bittorrent then you’re living in the past as far as movies go.
What should I be using instead of (q)bittorrent?
QBitTorrent is fine. BitTorrent and its children are not.
I don’t think I we’ve used any of those actually.
What software would that happen to be, supposing it’s not MakeMKV?
I’m pretty sure handbrake can rip as well as re-encode.
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Thanks! I’ve read that VLC can do it before, but I’ll look into giving it another shot sometime. The guides I found weren’t exactly the best, but with the mentioned packages I should be able to better narrow the searches to better guides, I think.
Content leaving isn’t a problem. If they give up some things they have more money to get the rights to other content, and usually by the time it leaves I’ve either watched it or don’t want to. If it’s one of the rare things I want to watch several times, I can just buy it. But cracking down on password sharing is ridiculous. They’ve been functioning fine with people sharing passwords. I bet the current pricing accounts for password sharing. But now people in college can’t be on the family netflix? Pure greed.
This is incredibly annoying for series. Crunchyroll dropped Bleach, a series with over 350 episodes, when I was at episode ~100. A few years ago I started to manually keep track of the episodes I watched, since you lose your progress when they drop it (true for crunchyroll, prime and netflix)
Content leaving is totally a problem. I’ve lost track of the number of times my spouse and I say, “Oh hey, what about we finally watch xyz that’s been in our queue for ages? Yeah that seems like a good one for Friday pizza night! …oh, it’s vanished from our queue, hooray.”
It’s not my full time job to keep tabs on what’s coming and going from the damn entertainment service that I hope to use in my ever dwindling reserves of free time. Especially when there’s alternative means available that are not too difficult to use.
debit card on file had expired
How do you input your credit card into the printer? Or is this some printer-lease-contract situation?
Meanwhile my laser Kyocera prints full color full duplex and doesn’t try any funny business.
Except for the original deskjet they had back in the early 90s, I haven’t touched HP, on purpose anyways, since then. I hate their printers, their computers, and their software. Nothing about their stuff works properly and has been garbage for me.
Mine has been collecting dust for a few years now, I stopped buying ink cartridges because I’d buy them and print just a few things once in awhile until that shit would just dry up even tho I didn’t use it all so fuck them.
I just read an article the other day that said LG is about to start charging subscription fees for washing machines 🙄
I will go old school and start washing my clothes against a rock in the river before I’ll pay a fucking subscription to use my own washing machine
what is the difference between a subscription and a never ending loan
A loan usually comes with full support and warranty service for the duration of the loan. With a subscription I bet you get to pay without receiving these benefits in return.
Well any manufacturer warranty would apply to the machine regardless of how you pay for it
With a loan you actually receive money at the start.
That is crazy.
Like a damn laundromat. So is LG gonna supply water and power too? Wtf are the charging for? The right to buy their product? Lmao. Fuck off.
Go analog. Real analog. Sticks and stones baby.
The article said the subscription was for “software updates” which really seems like something they should provide for free anyway so you’re really just paying for the privilege to use their precious machine that you already paid for lol
Fucking software updates for a washing machine? If my washing machine needs a software update, that should be a fucking recall. A washing machine should be a fully embedded system imo.
It’s updates for the cybersecurity that exists strictly only because it is connected to the internet which in turn is something that exists strictly only because there’s software updates.
Megaman Battle Network was prophetic. Terrorist will flood your house using a phone.
Why would anyone connect a washing machine to the internet??? To play Skyrim?
I hope this is rage bait because I can’t think of any reason a washing machine would ever need a software update. Is it like a smart machine? If so then just let me disable it
Software updates for what? New ways to wash your clothes? I only use like two or three settings in mine
I think it’s for “smart” washing machines that you can control from your phone etc. So that’s likely what the “updates” would be related too…why you’d need to control your washing machine from afar is beyond me but some people love smart gadgets and will by anything that connects to their phone.
Huh. I do my best to avoid anything that connects to my phone.
There are cases for it, eg programming a wash to occur when energy demand is low.
In my opinion we should be pursuing technologies to do this that don’t require an internet connection. Even being able to program a schedule into the machine and it can detect if something is in there or not. That would be enough since energy usage follows a relatively consistent plot. These companies don’t give a shit about anything other than coming up with ways to make more money.
The cost of the laundry subscription is likely to vastly out cost the energy savings it may provide.
Ya it’s a shit idea to go subscription in any situation. You really do not need any kind of ongoing updates/subscription unless the product was built around a subscription model. If it can done mechanically on basic programmable outlets then it can be coded the same way. I would be fine buying a laundry machine, asking my utilities provider what time to run it, and then programming that into the machine manually.
I hate the make everything a smart appliance trend… Grills, washers and dryers, dishwashers, coffee machines… WHY? No one needs this shit.
Knowing LG it’s probably updates to make it play Jingle Bells at Christmas time or something lol
Sounds like paywalling security updates.
Those pesky hackers turning off my washing machine when I’m trying to do laundry!
Potentially more serious than that. A poorly protected washing machine (or any other IOT device) can serve as an attack vector into your local network.
Well, if your washing machine was connected to the internet you would also need security updates. Of course the only reason you’d connect your washing machine to the internet would be in order to get said security updates in the first place.
Great job creating a need by developing the fix for it in the first place.
man the world is so fucked up that I was more surprised that they weren’t already doing this
Yeah. I think I’d rather employ someone to wash my clothes for me than pay a subscription
Capitalism leads to innovation they say! This is an innovation in a way some may say !
HP Printers is definitely one of the worst printers right now; I hate you need a account to use your HP printers
Even worse, if you subscribe to the ink service with an HP printer, it will update the firmware. But if you decide to cancel the service, they don’t change the firmware so you now own a brick.
My dad seems to love their service. I don’t understand it. He pays per-page for a printer he bought and sits in his house. I challenged him on it and he stood is ground that it’s great. I just can’t wrap my head around that. Meanwhile he is against car companies making things like CarPlay a subscription.
If you print regularly, HP’s 6 cent per page, 100 pages per month plan is about the same price as a small black and white laser’s drum and toner.
But you can plan full page photos on photo paper with it for that 6 cent too, not just BW documents. I like it, a full year costs about the same as 1 set of XL OfficeJet ink and you never have to try to save money by going BW / draft mode. Just print whatever. Clean the head whenever needed. It’s all included.
Yes it is a subscription, but this one is actually useful. And it gets cheaper the more you print, up to small office volumes. We have it at multiple offices on a 300/700 pages plan.
Wait, 6 cents? That’s three times what I paid to print stuff at uni.
Okay that was a decade ago, but still, I don’t pay 3x for other office services.
I guess I don’t print enough to see the value. A toner cartridge will last be for years and years in my printer. I don’t think I’ve ever replaced one in my home printer.
Maybe I’m weird, but if I knew I was getting charged per-page, I’d question every single print I made. I was making a custom card for someone a while back and printed a sheet with some BS on it just to see what I need to put where, for planning. I know 6 cents is basically nothing, but if I was paying per page I would have tried to spend time reasoning it out, remembering past prints and trying to fold it up in my head. I even questioned the paper usage for what I ended up doing, and used the justification that I could use the paper for some other things afterward, it wasn’t instantly trash. I’ve always been the type that likes spending a lot 1 time rather than a little a lot of times.
