Apply here to become EXTREMELY FRUSTRATED

Last week I realised I needed to update the address on my driving licence after moving house. Since I had this realisation at work, and knew full well that I would forget again as soon as I got home and became distracted by the plethora of deliberately mind-numbing activities available, I decided the best course of action would be to do it during lunchtime at work.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that since my last house move, the DVLA had entered the late 20th century and made the application available to complete (mostly) online, supposedly saving me the time of hunting down a copy of the official form and filling it in.

Unfortunately, that’s where the pleasantries ended.

Xerox are ripping me off

You may recall my post last year about how much toner appeared to be left in a Xerox 6125 toner cartridge that the printer was reporting as ‘empty’. Though much delayed, I have now quantified the leftovers, and the results are startling.

Xerox are ripping me off. Big time.

I weighed a yellow cartridge (P/N 106R01333) when it was full, fitted it and ran it until the printer spat it out as empty, then weighed it again to determine how much mass it had lost through toner being used. I then emptied as much remaining toner as I could without breaking into the cartridge, and weighed the cartridge a third time. (I also weighed the extracted leftover toner to double check).

Here’s what I found:

Full cartridge	83.3 g
‘Empty’ cartridge	75.3 g
Actual empty cartridge	71.0 g
Toner used	8.0 g
Toner remaining	4.3 g
Total toner	12.3 g

That’s right: this crooked printer is reporting the cartridge as empty when there is still an entire third of the toner remaining inside the cartridge!

Promethean unboxing… of DOOM

Years ago, before I went to university, I worked in a small retail store that specialised in small business services. A major part of the business was acting as a shipping agent, providing professional packing services to small businesses and consumers, and shipping them via premium couriers that the average Joe would not normally have easy access to.

The store owner, a Californian ex-pat who had married into the country, taught me some important rules about packaging:

1. Never ship anything by Parcel Farce,
2. ‘Fragile’ means ‘Throw Me Harder’ in baggage handler dialect, and, most importantly,
3. The best shipping insurance is good packaging.

#3 on that list is why shipments from Dabs always come in a box that seems twice as big as it needs to be; the void space is to create a buffer zone between your goods and the thorough kicking the box will suffer at the hands of the carrier they are forced to use in order to satiate your lust for cheap P&P. It’s a rule that Promethean no doubt had in mind when they shipped me this box:

“But it’s free…”

If I had a tenner for every time someone wanted me to install some ‘free’ software on a school computer, I wouldn’t bother playing the lottery.

Now, ‘free’ software differs from free software because, in the circumstances, it’s not. What I’m talking about here is software that is free for personal use, but not any other use – and that includes use in schools.

The two most common ones I hear about at the moment are Microsoft Security Essentials and Spotify. The former is the capable and well-reviewed anti-virus software that Microsoft released last year. I use it on my personal systems, and have no complaints. Similar experiences seem to drive the urges of a different school IT technician every month to proclaim over on Edugeek that they are about to install it on all the school systems, oblivious to the fact that it’s not free for anything but home and “home-based small business” use. I’ve checked and double-checked this, even getting an official answer. It’s not free to use in a school. Miserly? Perhaps (though I personally don’t think so). Fact? Definitely.

Spotify is a common request from teachers in my school in particular, their brains addled by the promise of ‘free’ music without having to download MP3s from peer-to-peer any more. I’ve not been helped by the fact that the previous network manager allowed it, also having never read the licence terms. Spotify is licensed only for personal use, even if you have a paid subscription. Using it on a school computer to have background music in your lessons does not count. Fact.

The proliferation of good quality free software is a great thing, and that people realise there are good alternatives to paying money is better. However, it would be better still if some of these people could use their brains and realise that many of the people behind this software have to make their money somewhere, and that somewhere is often through business use. The MP3 and BitTorrent generation take too bloody much for granted in my opinion, to the point that most people I know don’t even consider they’ve done anything wrong by amassing their pirated MP3 collection. Wake up, and stop being so bloody greedy. It’s immoral, and it’s illegal. It is NOT free. Fact.

Rose tinted distortion

We bought a couple of Canon PowerShot A480 cameras this week for the students to use. As soon as they arrived, I set about testing them. Popped some fresh batteries and a memory card into the first one, turned it on, and then…

…found it was bloody broken.

How on earth does something make its way out of the factory like that?

I don’t hate Apple products

I don’t hate Apple products. Many of their products are excellent, if expensive, and I can see why people like them.

What I do hate is the smug, pretentious, superior attitude of both Apple’s marketing department and the people who blithely parrot the fallacies they perpetuate. We’ll almost certainly be reading a lot along those lines from both camps today.

You may not like it, but Microsoft technology IS some of the best going

I recently happened upon a Computerworld blog article asking “Is Apple morphing into the Microsoft of smartphones?“, highlighting their use with the iPhone of the same sort of anti-competitive practices that Microsoft got in so much trouble for in the past with some of their products. The article immediately attracted the ire of a legion of Apple apologists in the comments, but it was one of the least inflammatory parts of the article that struck a chord with me:

“The irony of it all hit me yesterday as I was deciding how to move music from my PC to my Pre, given that iTunes syncing has been turned off. And my first stop was Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, which does indeed sync natively with Palm’s Pre.

That’s right. I was turning to Microsoft to solve a problem with a proprietary, closed data exchange format.”

I found this interesting because I recently encountered something similar myself. After finishing the deployment of my new Exchange 2010 server at work, I invited the Deputy Head to test the Exchange ActiveSync synchronisation with his iPhone. “I’ve tried,” came the response, “but as I already have an account running through Exchange it won’t let me add another.”

Help users over the phone with Unsolicited Remote Assistance

For years I’ve used UltraVNC as my remote control system of choice when helping out users over the phone. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen out of love with it since adopting Windows Vista and Windows 7, as performance is sometimes pretty poor and several features just don’t work properly. You get what you pay for, I suppose (UltraVNC is free). It’s also a bit of a pain to deploy via GPO Software Installation, which makes it a headache when you have hundreds of workstations. In particular the mirror driver, which aids performance, is pretty much impossible to deploy in this way.

When deploying my first Windows 7 clients I resolved to find another way, and it turned out to be something I could have used all along: Unsolicited Remote Assistance, which is built-in functionality on Domain-joined workstations.

Stickers

I HATE these stickers.

Not just the Windows ones; Intel, AMD, Creative; any sticker that advertises the innards of a machine is an offence not only to me but to the person who designed the computer in the first place.

"IT'S NOT EVEN STUCK ON STRAIGHT!"

There is not a product designer in existence who leant back in his chair one day and said to himself, “You know what would make this computer case PERFECT? A postage stamp-sized advertisement, clumsily stuck on by a ham-fisted moron who wouldn’t know straight if you beat him with a spirit level.”

There is simply no faster way to cheapen the look of a computer than to bung one of these on it. The first thing I do when I get a new computer is rip the damn things off. Often before even turning it on. LadiesMan and Overshare will probably have fond memories of me lambasting them if ever they forgot to do the same. That’s CHARACTER BUILDING, my friends. DISCIPLINE. RESPECT for the hard work of that designer, even if he does design cases for RM. He did not go through 4 years of university just to have a wonky advert slapped onto his painstaking design.

One day, you’ll thank me.

Silence

I ask you: who in their right mind would implement a ‘Silent’ setting on a mobile phone that has the vibrate function DISABLED by default?

Answer: Nokia, that’s who.

Now I know why I’ve been missing calls when my phone is on silent for, ooh… I don’t know, the last YEAR. Here I was thinking my upper thigh was just going numb.