In keeping with a philosophy of standardizing on as few brands as possible, I’ve used and recommended Hewlett Packard printers for 15 years or so. I’ve recommended the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars of HP printers, mostly laser printers in the $750-$2000 range that are sometimes known as small workgroup printers. Because people ask, I’ve also recommended HP for ink-jet color printers, usually as an adjunct to a laser printer in an office, or as a stand-alone printer for a single computer at home. However, I have recently had the following problems:

• Two “all-in-one” injket printers/scanner/faxes that were dead on arrival
  

• Two 18 month-old color deskjet professional printers that broke because of flimsy parts. The problem with these printers is that they perpetually are saying that they are out of ink for one cartridge, (usually blue or magenta). The user caught on when they hadn’t printed any color pages for weeks…just black and white, and they began to wonder why were they running out of magenta ink when they weren’t using any.
  

• A low-end laser that was shipped with software that was deemed “useless” by HP technical support, which required me to download and install new software after spending an hour or more attempting to install it with the software provided with the unit.
  

Note that each failure results in the loss of tens if not hundreds of working hours. The affected users are frustrated with all of the futzing around. Not to mention the buying of all the extra ink jet cartridges.

So, today, I’m in Staples, looking for a replacement for one of the color printers. I see there are no less than 12 different models of HP ink jet printers, costing from about $89.95 to $495.00. And I decided I had enough with the throw-away printers, and the ridiculous costs per page, and the dozens of different cartridges, the rotten software, the multiple hours of installation, testing, downloading drivers and all the ink-jet crap. I bought a low-end Brother monochrome laser printer. We’ll see how this works out.

BLAT is a command-line eMailer. I use it within a script or command file to send a notification eMail.

With BLAT you can do things like:



C:> BLAT myfile.txt -to someone@someaddress.com



The above command sends the contents of the file “myfile.txt” to the eMail address someone@someaddress.com.

BLAT stores some parameters in the Windows registry, or in a text file. BLAT needs to know a legal eMail POP account which is used as the “from” address, and a legal SMTP mail account to use to actually send the message.

You can run BLAT interactively, or run it as part of a command file.

Prepare your backup media. Assuming you are using tapes:

1. Buy six tapes, with a capacity to backup all of your working files on a single tape.

For example we’re using 4mm data cartridges with a native capacity of 4 gigabytes. Some tape drives can also compress the data to double the capacity. In our case, the same tape might hold 8 gigabytes. But the 4 is more than enough for our purposes.

2. Buy a cleaning cartridge to fit your drive. These are good for about 50 cleanings. They include a little sticker with 50 boxes; you can check off a box after each cleaning. If your tape drive has been balky, clean it six times or so, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.

3. The tapes will be used in rotation Monday through Friday. There are two Friday tapes, Friday #1 and Friday #2.

3. Label all of the tapes and their cases with the appropriate day.

4. Before leaving the office for the day, insert today’s tape in the tape drive, and start the backup program if needed. If it is a Friday, alternate the Friday #1 tape with the Friday #2 tape, and put the unused Friday tape in your fireproof vault or safety-deposit box.

The upshot is you have a full daily backup of your data. You store a weekly backup off-site, so that if the building burns down, you have data current to last week.

Practice restoring from tape once a month. I use personal word-processing files for this purpose. This keeps me in practice, but more importantly, gives me confidence that the tape drive and media are working.

This site has a discussion of eBase, an open source fundraising application which runs under FileMaker Pro. There is a feature comparison of eBase, compared with Donor Perfect, Exceed, Convio, eTapestry and Raiser’s Edge.

Another comparison article is located at TechSoup. This review is compares fundraising applications available in 2002, so it is somewhat dated.

“…the more I learn about change, the more I am coming to believe that politics and law are much less effective levers for change than innovation, social activism or community-based enterprise formation. Political activism is an uphill battle against the status quo and against entrenched wealth and power. Social activism and community-based enterprises, by contrast, work peer-to-peer, citizen-to-citizen and consumer-to-consumer and, thanks to the power of modern communications, can spread virally very quickly, undermining the political and economic establishment by working beneath their radar, until, starved of its grass-roots citizen and consumer support, this establishment simply crumbles, no longer needed.”

David Pollard, “How to Save the World”

By the way, the list of links cited in the previous post was created by Onfolio….a nifty addon for Internet Explorer. For organizing web-based research it is almost indispensible. It passes the five minute test for new software.

I’ve created an archive of the links used for researching a paper, A Low Density VoIP/PSTN Gateway. The paper describes setting up a “personal PBX” using Asterisk, an open source software program which runs under Linux. With domestic long-distance rates coming down, internet calls themselves may not be as interesting from an economic standpoint. But, using the Asterisk program and an old PC anyone can create an inbound or outbound call center, IVR (interactive Voice Response) system, or branch and headquarters phone system.

Predicting Climate Change

www.climateprediction.net

I’ve been running the SETI-at-Home project for a couple years on several computers and accumulated over 325 hours of computer time for it. I think the climate problem is more local, and was interested to see this climate change project. From their home page:

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a ‘large ensemble’) we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations – slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

This is an example of a distributed computing project, where users download a small piece of a larger calculation, process the results and then send them back to the host computer. There are several other similar projects, such as genome-seqencing, and cancer research.

In the news just this morning I saw that L.L. Bean is sueing some outfit which pops up unrelated ads anytime the user navigates to the LL Bean web site.

There are two little programs that will help prevent this from happening again. AdAware, and SpyBot.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ for AdAware

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download for SpyBot 1.3

These are scanners that you have to run every so often, and they will find rogue programs that have been inadvertently downloaded to your machine.

In our area, many of us are farther away than the 18,000 feet limit to the central phone office so we can’t use DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) for internet access. Unfortunately, in many cases the same people cannot obtain cable service for internet either. Here are a couple alternatives to think about:

Integrated Systems Digital Network ISDN

This is delivered over a conventional home phone line. A single ISDN contains two channels, each is 56KB. Runs something like $40.00 per month, plus $25.00 usage charge per channel (capped at $25.00) per channel. Worst case, then would be $90.00 per month. I think I’d start with single channel and see how it goes. While it is “dial-up” it

connects almost instantaneously. Since it isn’t “always on” it is more secure than a fixed internet connection. . It can be shared with multiple computes and users. Although the rated speed for a single channel sounds similar to a single modem, the fact that it connects quickly, and that it is a digital service, (there is no digital/analog conversion) increases the effective speed.

ISDN can also be used for multiple phone lines. If you get ISDN, you’ll get one or two additional phone numbers which can be used for pretty much anything, including voice or fax or teleconferencing. You can talk on one channel while surfing on the other. Very versatile, even though the phone co. doesn’t want to admit it.

ISDN is available from the local phone company, and may be available from competitors as well.

iDSL = synthetic DSL provisioned over an ISDN line.

This uses a using a dedicated “nailed up” ISDN connection which is always connected. turned on. I recently ran into a small business that uses this and pays $125.00 per month for 2 inbound phone numbers plus an 800 number assigned to one number, plus his internet access. Again, speed would be either 56KB or 128KB.

Fixed Wireless.

This is a high-speed terrestrial (as opposed to satellite) wireless link.

Like satellite, it can be susceptible to environmental problems (leaves on trees).

Frame Relay

56KB digital. $114.00 per month.

Another service that is not subject to the 18,000 foot distance limitation. This is a digital service, available in various speed increments.