{"id":1577,"date":"2013-07-24T12:23:47","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T12:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/variousbits.net\/?p=1577"},"modified":"2022-12-04T12:16:15","modified_gmt":"2022-12-04T12:16:15","slug":"printing-is-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/2013\/07\/24\/printing-is-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing is broken."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In fact, as the ever-spot-on Oatmeal says: <a href=\"http:\/\/theoatmeal.com\/comics\/printers\">Printers were sent from Hell to make us miserable<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I own a printer. I&#8217;d rather not, and I run a mostly paper-free life, but there are still occasions when I need to print stuff &#8211; end of year stuff, the odd invoice, a letter or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every single time I dust off my printer, these things happen:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><span style=\"line-height: 15px;\">The ink runs out. I go to Smiths, spend half an hour looking at a vast wall of different cartridges for printers with <em>slightly<\/em> different model numbers before realising that my exact model isn&#8217;t represented here and so I apparently need to order online instead<\/span><\/li><li>I go to Amazon and find an incredible array of possible inks &#8211; the official ones come in at about <strong>half the price<\/strong> of my printer. Let&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/visual.ly\/ink-costs-more-human-blood\">consider that again<\/a>: my printer costs \u00a345 new. The ink costs \u00a325. This is like filling up a \u00a35,000 car with \u00a32,500 of petrol every time you want to use it.<\/li><li>I inevitably choose a dodgy non-HP ink and then suffer a deeply irritating &#8220;non compatible HP ink will DESTROY YOUR LIFE&#8221; message until that ink runs out too (normally only about 3 minutes, I grant you, but hey)<\/li><li>The printer crunks 15 sheets of paper with every print<\/li><li>The printer requires a 100 Tb driver download every time I&#8217;m in a hurry<\/li><li>If something breaks, I have absolutely no option but to bin the printer. I believe as an individual I have owned at least 5 inkjet printers in the last 10 years.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>We all just accept this as the norm, and it&#8217;s obscene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I refuse to believe that printers are SO complicated they need official inks, or can&#8217;t have replacement parts. I refuse to believe that in this year of our lord 2013, we can&#8217;t build a device that&#8217;ll print out one page of text without performing complicated origami techniques on the next 14 pages in the tray. I refuse to believe that I absolutely MUST download that fucking printer application, edit suite, Chrome toolbar, desktop helper and new OS in order to PRINT A FUCKING LETTER.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;d much rather pay \u00a3100 upfront for a decent, open-sourced printer. One where I could buy spare parts and \u00a35 replacement cartridges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If it were on Kickstarter, I&#8217;d fund that shit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In fact, as the ever-spot-on Oatmeal says: Printers were sent from Hell to make us miserable. I own a printer. I&#8217;d rather not, and I run a mostly paper-free life, but there are still occasions when I need to print stuff &#8211; end of year stuff, the odd invoice, a letter or two. Every single &#8230; <a title=\"Printing is broken.\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/2013\/07\/24\/printing-is-broken\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Printing is broken.\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[363,308,362,361,364],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2361,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions\/2361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}