Open Thread - Thurs 23 Oct 2025 - Print What?
Print What?
Here's something I encountered a few days ago which made me happy and sad at the same time.
I was reading Cory Doctorow's new book, Enshittification (yes, he made up the word, and yes, it's now part of the modern vocabulary, I think 
). I will probably go into a full review of the book once I'm finished with it. In a short part of the book Doctorow writes about the enshittification of HP inkjet printers; no surprise there - HP wants to force you to buy their ink, for like 30 times more than other companies' ink products. Anyway, one of the things inkjet printers can do now, with the right kind of ink, is print electrically conductive circuits! That is so cool, from a geek point of view!
A circuit printed on paper in silver ink from this instructables.com article
Immediately after I read that section of the book, I thought, 'I gotta tell my Dad about this, he'd be so happy'. But then, of course, the knowledge that my father died half a year ago or so came into my mind right after. So, I was happy and sad at the same time.
Years ago, when I was about 10 or a bit after, Dad would bring home punch cards which had computer programs and data on them. Remember that? Computer programs and data stored via punch cards? He'd be going over the programs, looking for errors, but I was so fascinated by the cards that he started giving me the cards that contained bad code, etc. And then he took me to his work to show me the cards being used in the big machines to make circuits! A couple years after, the punch cards weren't needed. Reading about this newer way of using inkjets to print out circuits on paper and in 3-D somehow made me think of the transition from punch cards to electronic storage. Ohh, how things change and yet don't change!
Ok, Enough computer memories! Here's the open thread! What's up, whatcha doing? Reading? Thinking? Listening to? Remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!
Comments
Happy Thursday!
Hope it's a great day for everyone. We might get some rain tomorrow, maybe even a real storm. I'm not keen about the storm, but the rain is good, very good. Finally got all the peppers and tomatoes harvested and frozen or canned. Gonna be some good eating throughout fall, winter and spring. Now, to preserve the basil! And the garlic!
So, what's up with everyone? Whatcha learning and doing?
If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so
Howdy
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Last time I ran out of ink on the HP, found it cheaper to replace
the printer. Went with a Canon all-in-one. They are much more
forgiving with second party cartridges (like LD Products).
Remember reading manufacturers charge about $3000/gal.
for ink. That is just pure greed. Nothing is simple anymore.
Thanks for the OT!
Zionism is a social disease
Doctorow's book --
reminds me of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine -- except of course that Doctorow is trying to explain to his readers why their consumer products and social media aren't what they wanted, and Klein was trying to show how whole countries were being ripped off by and through global financiers. The phenomenon of Klein's book, the great global ripoff, is still going on now, if Due Dissidence is to be believed:
Once upon a time I stumbled upon this author Andrew Kliman, who argued that the current phenomenon of "late capitalism" was explainable through the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, courtesy of the memory of Karl Marx, specifically of Volume 3 of Capital. Now, Marx, if the biographers are to be believed, was a serious perfectionist, refusing to release anything unless it was in his opinion just right. And, so, when he was alive, Marx's readers only got to see Volume 1 of Capital; volumes 2 and 3 were compiled by Engels from Marx's notes after Marx himself died in 1883. So Kliman is, then, spinning all sorts of theories of -- for instance -- why the 2008-2009 downturn occurred, based on something Marx didn't himself release to the public. I suppose it's interesting. It certainly shows dedication.
At any rate, the capitalists' "solution" to the problem of the declining rate of profit appears to be as follows: we'll turn business into a Mafia operation! So here in America we're a bunch of compliant rubes, and we elect kingpins like Biden or Trump, our equivalent of the character of "Junior" in The Sopranos. Every syndicate, after all, needs an old front-man.
"'Cause everything in the world we're living in is all made up and we can make it up different" -- Carsie Blanton
Good morning Sima, et. al. Somewhat appropriate topic(s).
I run multiple browssers because each has weird idiosyncrasies and issues with specific sites and such. Meanwhile I make massive use of something called Evernote which reminds me a bit of a package I used to run in WARP ages age - it is a do anything package, database, note taking, record keeping, planning, calendar management, web clipper, etc. and yada yada yada. I do all mty OTs in it and more and generally live there. It doesn't work in ubuntu, so I use the web version. Chrome and Chromium aren't happy with it, so if I don't use it in them they crash far less often meaning that I run it in Brave and Sometimes Firefox. Yesterday, when I got up, Brave was down, and firefox had been taken over by Yahoo, literally. When I tried to load evernote in each, they wouldn't let me, closing the log-in tab as soon as I opened it. Long story short, about noon or so, they both suddenly came alive and reloaded all the tabs I had open when I knocked off the night before - mystery, no explanations of anything like that, just poof, gone, and, poof, back..
The last tine I needed Ink-jet crtridges they were much more costly than the nearby display model of an Epson ET 2850 "EcoTank" all in one cartridge free printer with a strter set of ink bottles, so I got the Epson, which uses bottled ink that you pour into reservoirs, works just fine and a set of ink bottles is pretty cheap , though I haven't had to replace any yet.
Iam familiar with the term "enshittification", but never read Doctorow's book. However, it is, imho, the natural outcome of corporate capitalism, just like the export of mature technology to the locales with the lowest all in production costs. These rules aren't part of the myth of the system, which is based on some idealized mythical society of small village life conjoined with instantaneous universal total knowledge of everything, something never really extant and certainly not today.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Are you saying the web is tangled?
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I never know if it is my op sys, mac lap or
whichever site I am on that is creating havoc.
Guess it doesn't matter. Know things are getting
a lot more flukey. Easy to blame it on AI.
Planned obsolescence of our brains. Perhaps
that is why so many people spend so much time
on their handy devices? Less thinking is better. HA!
Zionism is a social disease
Here's a great and timely discussion
of how tangled our personal little network-webs can be: RFI/EMC issues that make things behave flakily.
Whenever you encounter computer flakeys, consider this one- now that cellphones, WiFi, Bluetooth, high-res monitors, and microwave ovens are truly ubiquitous. Most people never consider how nastily our tools/toys interfere with one another, and they do so *all the time*.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1oc8b9p/i_just_solved_the_str...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Oh, goodie
tech has surpassed understanding!
At least in my field we have diagnostic
tools to figure out what the problem is.
Things within knowledge.
Listening to Hippie Soul Cafe
broadcasting out of St. John VI via Radio Garden.
Kinda cool tool. Can pick-up music the world over.
https://radio.garden/visit/saint-john/2iiDMABo
Zionism is a social disease