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.
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.
Why I went to DVDs. There is libre software to rip them and depending on country it’s legal, so basically you get a DRM-free legal copy with ability to archive or lend to a friend.
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.
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.
It’s really good quality. In my opinion low resolution only matters in static images or when video is paused, I’ll take high bitrate and superior sound every day instead of today’s streaming.
Sure you can just download, super convinient and gives best results. But sometimes it’s good to do things the way that can scale in society or just actually own something you like :).
I have 4k TV and 5.1 studio speakers and noone in my house can see the difference from modern streaming besides a little grain on still images. Always buy newer, at least two-layered disks, they are much better.
Of course that’s nothing compared to 4K/DTS/DA/HDR Blu-Ray rip, but it’s not that the movie is not watchable. DVD is the basic experience, 2010s cinema like, where Blu-Ray is just a crispy fresh layer added.
Comparing to max quality >10-30GB torrent is not fair. You need to compare it to other DRM-free legal options, oh, there’s none. Side to side with Blu-Ray, really bad. But Blu-Ray is many times more expensive and less freedom friendly. Side to side with Netlix-like streaming, assuming you don’t use some high-end service, DVD is just better in real watching and not pausing and glaring at pixels.
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.
Plain VLC can do it. You may need to at least install libdvdcss and libdvdread packages, they are 100% open source and easy to obtain, but you need to read the guide for specific OS because some system distribution repositories does not ship them by default for legal reasons in a few countries.
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.
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?
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.
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 wiki.servarr.com
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
To be fair, this person could be using a business printer. Large multifunction printers offices use can cost $10k+ and require A LOT of work so small companies and firms that can’t outright afford the upkeep usually lease the printer and that lease comes with warranties and maintenance covered by the company its leased from.
And here's someone making excuses for a billion dollar company based on nothing but imagination. HP isn't your friend, they're only driven to seek profit.
What's more likely, that there's a legitimate reason the printer needs a subscription or that the printer company is just trying to nickle and dime the end user again to squeeze every penny out of them without providing additional value?
BTW when one of our offices large multifunction printer has issues we call the vendor that maintains it, NOT the company that manufactured it.
HP has something called an “instant ink” subscription plan
If you sign up for the plan, you cannot use ink official hp ink which is purchased in a store, you must use the ink hp ship’s you when you get low. If your payment is declined, the printer is disabled until you go through their hateful cancellation progress, or you fix your payment and let them ship you new cartridges.
Basically users Apple account gets flagged for “fraudulent problems”. User loses access to all “bought”/rented content associated with Apple account. CS is useless. CS manager useless as well.
It’s a well documented story with any content platform. This is far from being an isolated issue.
Personally, piracy and ripping Blu-rays is back on the table for me and using a media server only accessible via VPN.
apple used to be my go to but decided to deplatform from them. All of the iTunes music, videos, and tv shows I bought over the years have been pirated or ripped to my media server.
All personal files and media is backed up on my personal cloud/server with redundant backups to another server that I own.
They offer it in the EU. They don’t force you to choose the subscription, you can also just choose to buy the cartridges at the store outright if you want to. I don’t really understand the big hoopla about being offered that choice.
The big hoopla is that in some cases they disable your printer so you can’t buy your ink independently. That’s the part I suspect is illegal in EU. Obviously subscriptions aren’t illegal.
Just freecycled an almost new HP printer/scanner because of their ridiculous software locked cartridges that print like 20 pages total. I specified in the listing that the ink was expensive and that it would be best for someone who printed almost never and just wanted a scanner.
Incredibly annoying. Especially with all these apps that want to charge you monthly. Fucking nuts thinking I’m gonna pay 30 a year for the rest of my life to look at radar.
I just bought a Brother laser printer for my dad, because he needed help changing the ink cartridges, after having printed maybe 8 pages in ½ a year. It’s just too stupid to use ink printers today, no matter if you print a little or a lot.
I’m guessing the laser cartridge will last my dad a decade. lol
Good points on the ink jet. I’m not sure laser printers are really toxic. Yes 30-40 years ago there were problems with ozone for heavy printing environments, or if you sat right next to the printer. But AFAIK the ozone levels have been reduced, and for small printers it’s not a problem. While ozone is toxic, it is also naturally occurring, and we can tolerate low levels of it.
Regarding chemicals in the toner, it was a problem way way back, because in high volume environments that shit sometimes would be all over the place. Because containers weren’t tight enough. I don’t recall seeing toner in or around laser printers for home office for the past 2 decades. I’m guessing production environments have improved similarly too, but I haven’t been much in contact with those lately.
There are clear work environment regulations in most (western) countries, that date back to the early 80’s and even earlier. As a minimum those regulations must be met. So yes there are actually health and safety laws around laser printers. And AFAIK they are completely safe unless you are doing something illegal or incredibly stupid.
Aaand that’s me. I love to feel superior to rich, disgusting people, during the 60 min. media time in my 9-5 job that barely pays the bills (except Kardashians).
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