Printers.

*deep breath*

*scream*

Fuck me, I just dreamed about printer problems...

Replacement ink: $28.
New printer with ink: $29.99.
Engineered obsolescence: Priceless.

Printers have always bothered me because I haven’t known how to troubleshoot them.
Today I changed that. I reconfigured my printer and fixed the printer connections on my home computers.

Still hate printers though.

There should be an open source, Linux based Printer operating system. Like OpenWRT for routers, also works with almost every device in the wild.

This would be such a relief for everyone. Come on, most printer firmwares are crap.

Remember Scannergate? Yep, the one about professional xerox scanners changing numbers in scanned document. Went unnoticed for 8 years and affected almost every workcenter even in the highest compression setting. Just because they wanted to save a few bytes by using pattern matching.

At work we've been having problems with printers... Like anyone that has to deal with printers.

They kept disappearing and reappearing for users on every log on.

We got a support contact with Microsoft because it was group policy doing it.

Their final solution (after weeks of remote sessions and long phone calls) is to install pstools on every machine, and run about 7 commands as the system user to delete and then re add registry keys.

ON EVERY LOG ON AND LOG OFF. WTF...

This is an educational institution where "computer hacking" is taught... It's not gonna take long before someone realises that pstools is installed...