I find most of the articles on the net about ebooks vs. paper to be wrong-headed and mostly silly. Passionate paper people who claim that anyone using an e-reader to be woefully uninformed, of low culture, and possibly impotent vs. all digital, all the time people who claim anyone reading paper is clearly a Luddite. Personally, I don’t care the format. Paper, ink, e-ink, pixels, back of a napkin, side of a serial box, pamphlet, newspaper, ceiling of a dentist’s office…I’ll read anything anywhere anytime. And usually it doesn’t take much time before I disconnect from the physical format and immerse myself in the story. So when I saw yet another “I’m going to read paper” post, I just about blew past it with a yawn. However, I didn’t, I clicked, and I find Michael Hyatt’s take kind of interesting (Why I’m Putting Ebooks on the Shelf for 2016 – Michael Hyatt).
One thing he notes that for him, “e-books are out of sight and out of mind” whereas the paper books loom in front of him on the shelf waiting to be read, and reminding him to read. Kind of an interesting idea, I think, partly because I have found the same at times. I carry my e-reader with me, but if I don’t physically “see” it, I often grab my tablet or something else first. He also finds the physical stack comforting when he’s done reading them…I see his point, but the concern with a library overwhelming the house negates that pleasure pretty quick for me.
A second item I like is that he finds the bookmarking and taking of notes less effective for him, something he enjoys doing easily with physical books. I certainly find that for non-fiction, less concerned with it for fiction.
The third item that resonated with me was about how he doesn’t get the same sense of accomplishment when he finishes an e-book as a paper book. I have found that too…in paper, I close the book. I might literally feel a sense of closure, but it’s also a moment to reflect for a second or two on what I have read, to savour the ending, to digest the story arc. On my e-book reader, particularly if I’m reading a series, I will go on to the next one almost immediately and be well into Chapter 1 without taking the time to really savour the flavour of the previous meal. That’s not really about the e-book though, that’s about my personal reading style with e-books. Nothing would stop me from savouring it the way a closing of a book does.
Sure, he also argues that e-books don’t engage the senses, there’s lower retention and comprehension, etc., and most of the science around it is complete crap, so I’m ignoring those points. I also find no resonance with arguments about more easily distracted by e-mail or games on tablets, etc. — when I’m reading, I’m reading. Earthquakes don’t distract me. I don’t even pretend to understand his complaints about more difficulty navigating though.
Yet, as I said, I`m glad I clicked. Those three points were interesting and quite different from what most people write on the subject.
Let me start by telling my brother Mike, my friend Mike, and another friend Aliza, NO I WAS NOT TALKING ABOUT MY SEX LIFE! Okay, with that out of the way, let me tell you about my latest computer fun tonight.
For my home setup, we have three computers and three printers. The computers are (a) desktop for me, (b) desktop for Andrea, and (c) laptop mainly for me in the basement for TV. They are networked with wired connections to our modem/router.
Two of the printers are straightforward –a DYMO label printer about 10 years old and an HP Photosmart from about 7 years ago (just before the wedding, although it sat in a box for a year). Neither get heavy use, but they were relatively cheap and are for niche uses.
The real printer is an HP LaserJet 4L. I bought it in 1995 when I left DFAIT the first time and thought I was going to be a full-time consultant. It cost me almost $600 (on sale from $800), and it was a step above what I probably could afford at the time. But if I was going to be doing professional consulting, I needed a decent laser printer, and I couldn’t afford the real workhorses they had in government. This machine has been a beast. It’s not the fastest, 5 or 6 ppm, but I’ve had it repaired twice at a cost of about $100 once and $125 another, yet 20 years later, the thing just keeps chugging along.
My consulting career was somewhat short-lived, or at least it changed direction and form about then and I felt that it had been a bit of a wasted expense, but the printer has handled just about everything I have thrown at it over the last 20 years. Okay, I confess, it cannot handle detailed i.e. large photos, but most other things are fine. My masters work, now Andrea’s masters work. Plans for the wedding, updates for doctors, everything.
But here’s the kicker. It’s 20 years old. It connects not through a USB port like the other two printers, but through a, wait for it, parallel printer port. Yep, they still make them. I had them put one in my latest computer a couple of years ago and the tech wasn’t even sure the motherboard and port would connect properly. But a few tweaks in my setup and it was fine (it’s basically a separate card, and should work with everything, but there were some potential compatibility issues with some other configs).
The fun comes when we do our home network. That printer is directly connected to my PC — it has to be. It needs a parallel port. The others are not wireless, although future ones would be, or at least run off the network hubs, but they at least are relatively full plug and play USB devices. Since it is directly connected to my machine, that means my machine has to be on all the time if we’re going to randomly print, but I run my machine that way anyway. The 4L printer though requires special manual drivers to be downloaded and installed, which I have done for Win95, 98, XP, 7, and 8.
Two months ago, I went ahead with the update for Windows 10. I wanted the latest and greatest version of MS Office 365, and so went ahead and bit the bullet. I also did the laptop, but left Andrea’s computer as Win 7. The update went fine. I only had one real issue, which you can guess — the legacy printer.
The printer driver for the HP LaserJet 4L was not auto-migrated successfully — it was there, but wouldn’t print. No biggie, did a quick search to find out what to do, ran a separate driver install, added it as if it was a “new” printer with latest driver, called it the HP 4L (copy), got it going, no real issues. The laptop and Andrea’s computers couldn’t print at first, and then realized two things. When I installed the new driver and called it “copy”, their setup no longer matched; equally, I hadn’t updated the homegroups so that we were actually able to see each other again. Simple fixes, more or less.
The two hours of frustration bit
Two days ago, my computer ran some sort of auto-update on me, which I know I specifically disabled, and it wouldn’t close out without rebooting and running the update. It looked like the regular run of the mill update, so I said sure, and then waited. And waited. And waited. And finally went away. It took as long as the full upgrade had taken two months ago. It was not a simple update, this was major.
Everything seemed fine, no worries. Andrea says to me today, “By the way, I can’t print for some reason”. I thought it was likely just a reboot issue, i.e. she hadn’t rebooted since my PC was updated, so didn’t have the right permissions, but should have been simple enough. Nope, she couldn’t print from MY computer either. Wait, what? She wasn’t in a giant rush, so she didn’t dump it to the colour printer which would have handled it okay for the small doc she had, but just after the cub went to bed tonight, I started working on the print problem.
By now, she had rebooted, tried a couple of things, no go. I thought, “Okay, well, it probably needs the same update again”, so I searched and the instructions were not as simple this time for some reason — whether I searched better last time, or I was being too specific this time, it didn’t seem quite as obvious. Four methods to choose from, none of them were working.
I tried blowing off the printer entirely, rebooting, reinstalling, tweaking, updating, all the configurations I could think of, but no joy in Mudville. All of the methods looked fine right up until I told the software to print a test page, and then it would give me an error and bail.
So I would then run the troubleshooter program. Some people think that this program is some sort of wizard, but it is exactly what it is called — a program. It can’t magically figure out the problem, it runs through a list of common issues and sees if they are happening. Printer not responding. Printer offline. No printer at the port. No port. Out of paper. Another doc stuck in the queue. A long list of big and small things that could be causing problems trying to print. Each time, the printer would say “Hey, I can’t print, but by the way, I checked everything I know to check, and it’s all good.” I felt like it was the classic joke about the computer-programmer-turned-sharpshooter missing a target, getting in trouble from his sergeant, putting his hand in front of the gun, pulling the trigger and blowing off some fingers, and saying, “it works on this end, the problem must be at the target end”. Everything works, except well, it doesn’t. Oops, sorry.
Two hours of pain in the patootie frustration.
Ten seconds of satisfaction
So I’m scouring tons of posts and forums online seeing if ANYONE has the same problem. Sure, lots did. Six months ago. But all those old techniques which worked before were NOT working anymore. It just wouldn’t print.
I saw an old solution for someone who was using a special cable, basically, one where they had a parallel-to-USB converter cable and instead of saying “LPT1” which they had been doing, or even USB 1, they now had an option for a “virtual USB port” and they made that small change, and people were In Like Flynn. I was happy for them, but I have a direct parallel port connected, no “virtual” option for me.
So I went on to the Microsoft forum to type a plea for help, and I wrote three paragraphs of what I had done and tried with no luck. I started into the fourth paragraph where I was talking about the virtual port when something deliciously devious occurred to me.
What if the problem WASN’T my printer, but my port? What if it wasn’t the printer driver but the PORT driver? Maybe because it was an old thing — parallel printer ports for LPT1: — the setup messed something up in the ports? Didn’t make a lot of sense, but worth checking out. I said, “Hmm” out loud to Andrea, and said, “One small thing I can check.”
I opened the CONTROL PANEL;
I did a quick search for “DEVICE MANAGER” (it’s not as easy to get to as it was under Windows 7 and before) and opened it; and,
I went to PORTS and clicked on LPT1:.
There in the driver setup for LPT1:, I found this little tiny checkbox labelled “Enable Legacy Plug and Play” which sounded good.
Literally, I clicked the checkbox, and my last test print in the queue started to print.
Son of a fig newton. 2 hours of other options, plus 4 paragraphs to type a plea for help, I have a small but completely off the wall brain wave, and 10 seconds later it was fixed.
Which is why I’m blogging about it. Just in case anyone out there goes searching for it and has the same problem. It’s already on the MS forum, I finished the post and changed it from Question to Discussion, and left it there for posterity.
I was ready to give up on the printer and start looking into a new one, something I fully expect to do the next time it dies. But for now, the beast lives.
Over the last five blog posts, I’ve detailed my changes as I cut the cord. Here is the list of changes, and you’ll quickly see what prompted the commitment to make drastic alterations to my setup, mostly triggered by conversations with a few key friends and family members who got me thinking about alternatives, even though many of them haven’t done this yet themselves!
The other posts give you the details, blow by blow, etc. This just shows the bottomline. How much did I save?
Internet: From Rogers to TekSavvy, same basic setup, slightly less than “unlimited” but faster speeds, $80 a month to $55 a month, $200 in hardware, $100 saved in first year, $300 saved ongoing;
TV: From Rogers to Kodi, streaming through internet instead of cable box, much more manual, $85 a month to $0 per month, $300 in hardware the first year, $700 saved the first year, $1000 saved ongoing;
Home phone: From Rogers to Ooma, VOIP instead of landline, slightly reduced quality, $40 a month to only $4 a month, $125 for hardware, $325 saved this year, $450 saved ongoing;
Cellular: Stayed with Rogers, tweaked package, better service, no change in cost; and,
Internet hosting: From Netfirms to GreenGeeks, same or better service, $15 a month to $5 a month, no hardware costs, saved $120 per year ongoing.
Where does that leave me? I saved $25+$85+$36+10 = $156 per month. Which equates to $1872 a year. This first year, I spent another $625 in hardware so I’m only saving $1250 the first year, but that’s not chicken scratch. I’ll take either number. And, more importantly, most of the services are only slight downgrades from the previous option, or actual improvements in service.
I honestly had no idea I could save that much without sacrificing the farm to do it. The TV part was the major part for me, more so than for the family, but the replacement options work just fine. Particularly when it costs me $1800 less per year.
When people cut the cord, most just look at TV, internet and home phone. Some add in cellular. For me, there was a fifth area — internet hosting of my websites. Yes, you read that correctly. Plural.
After a redesign about two years ago, I had PolyWogg.ca set up as my “personal” site. ThePolyBlog.ca was my more “professional” site, writing and musings about more formal topics. I also host AstroPontiac.ca for a board I sit on. And within polywogg.ca, I also had sub-sites for photos, calendars, to do lists, etc. Most of the sites were fully integrated with my photo site cross-linked to my personal and professional sites so that I can post my media there without duplicating it in WordPress. I’ve messed around with my site design going back to 1998, seventeen years of tweaking etc. The latest tweak was creating a new subsite for astrophotography blogging and pics.
I have had various hosts over the years. One big one I had was a small company in the Prairies that a friend was using. Small, decent support for tweaks, not a lot of bells and whistles but definitely personal support. I mentioned in an earlier post that I considered running my own server, partly because of the cheap hosting costs and partly to have my own private cloud available to me easily. In the end, I decided not to run my own server, but I was ambitious with my web design and the small company wasn’t going to meet my long-term storage needs. I went big.
Mostly the company here in Ottawa worked well for me for a long time. I was paying for a business account to give me more email addresses, more storage, etc. and a LOT of room to grow, but mostly to get the higher level of support if and when something went wrong. When they were bought by Netfirms in the U.S., and everything was merged, there were definite growing pains. It took a lot of work and some complete redesign in the end to get me where I wanted to be, with multiple subsites running and everything separate by function. It worked, but the overhead to keep it all up to date was killing me. Too many updates, plugins, etc. The separated design helped immensely though to figure out what one set of subdesigns would look like, and then the other. In the end, they were similar but just slightly different enough that previous single-site solutions had been confused. Then disaster struck. Kind of.
Netfirms had a DNS attack, and it took down a bunch of their servers. My site has some plugins that monitor the site being “up” or “down” through regular monitoring from the plugin’s websites, and my inbox filled up with notifications. Site A is down. Site B is down. Site C is down. Site D is down. Site A is up again. Site B is up again. Site A is down again, etc. 36 hours of notifications of sites being up and down. Then I got the message from Netfirms that was the all-clear signal. Everything had been resolved, all was working. Except my sites weren’t back up yet. They were still down. I contacted support who assured me everything was fixed; I assured them it wasn’t since I couldn’t log in to my site. They refused to help, basically arguing with me that the problem was fixed. When I finally convinced them, no, it was still not fixed, they said, “Oh, yeah, they’re still working on it.” Really? That’s what I’m getting for business level support? $180 a year to host all my sites, minimal load on their servers, and outright lies. “It’s fixed” and then “they’re working on it” when the first lie didn’t take. I escalated to Tier 2 and got the same run around. I waited a day, still not fixed, tried again, same run around. First they told me it was completely fixed, and then when I showed them my site was down, they said the technicians were still working on it. Really? Again with two completely opposite stories? Sorry, I called it quits right then and there. I needed a new webhost, and why not look for one a bit cheaper while I was at it.
There are lists out there of the top five webhosts and some of the deals are awesome. But I liked the personal side of the first host, not thrilled about being the little number in the big cog again. I canvassed some friends, and one of them suggested GreenGeeks.com. I fell in love with them just from the name. Ignore the fact that I called them GreenGreeks about a dozen times when I was accessing their site, I checked the specs and price. I basically need unlimited subdomains and full domain hosting. Not really, probably 10 would suffice, but more than most small companies offering 1-2. This often runs into a problem not with the subdomains but with the number of databases it will let you create — some stop at 5-8, and if you count 1 for PolyWogg, 1 for ThePolyBlog, 1 for astropontiac, 1 for a calendar, 3 for separate to do lists, 1 for a photo site, 1 for a cloud/file manager, etc., I’m at 9 and I’m not even maxing out my plans yet. I can get by without a lot of upload/download bandwidth for the sites (I don’t get a lot of traffic), but I like having lots of storage space to have an easy-to-access personal cloud. Mail servers are a must, but almost everyone has those. A few other bells and whistles, and I’d be good to go. What did I get?
GreenGeeks gives me unlimited storage. Sweet. Unlimited bandwidth. Double sweet. Three different choices for email server. I’m in love. Simple user interface for the control panel, personalized support that is decent, subdomains, addon domains, DNS management and registration (which I don’t need, but nice to know it’s there), some SEO and marketing tools (not as extensive as Netfirms, but decent), access to my logs (what? really? would have had to ask at some other sites), and perhaps most important, the Softaculous Apps Installer as their default install program (not the only way to do it, just the default). I’ve installed another app that does ToDo lists well, had to do it manually as not available in Softaculous, and it was a relative breeze. The help files could be a little more up to date, but I got it to work first time, just a little tweaking of the instructions.
So Netfirms was charging me $180 for the year. GreenGeeks? Also $180. For three years. $5 a month instead of $15. For better support, more options, and a personalized experience. Tailored more to my needs. An easy trigger to pull.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Moving my old site over has been a pain in the patootie. WordPress went relatively easily, but I ended up with a config issue the first time and even though they fixed it, I wasn’t 100% confident it would stay “patched” and not self-destruct later on. Kind of a background hack that solved the immediate problem, but I wasn’t sure it didn’t have others lurking in the shadows. So I blew everything off and reinstalled manually from scratch. Then imported as much as I could of the existing base.
There is one thing missing from GreenGeeks but it was missing from Netfirms too. None of the sites will let you stream video directly. They make you upload and store it at Youtube or its clones. Video just kills them and like most hosts, they just don’t support it without a lot more cash outlay. My videos are only personal videos and I was crossposting with DailyMotion. But the wife wasn’t happy with the ads that went with DailyMotion, so I’ve moved the video files over to Google Drive. Which necessitated re-adding the links to the photo site, but that wasn’t about cutting the cord, or the new host, just something that happened coincidentally at the same time as I made the other change. I only mention it as it is a factor for a lot of people when they make a change — the cost and structure change, but how complicated do you make it to take advantage of the window of opportunity to implement other changes at the same time? As an aside, I had to threaten Netfirms with legal action to get a partial refund of the remaining year’s worth of prepaid service (I basically asked for a refund because they had not provided the contracted service). It’s only $30 back, but better than nothing.
Overall, I love the new host. At a third of the price and better service, what’s not to love?
I’ve already covered my efforts to cut the cord for internet (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), TV, and home phone. Next on the list is cellular service. As with the first internet one, this isn’t about eliminating cell service completely, it’s about reviewing your packages and finding ways to get more service for the same price or, more often than not, the same service for less money.
In the cell market in Canada, you have the two biggies — Rogers and Bell. They fight it out, they gouge everyone, the CRTC slaps them, they reset, they duke it out some more. Generally speaking, our cell costs are much higher than anywhere else in the world. According to an OECD report based on comparable 2013 data across 34 countries, we’re the most expensive for data only plans and top ten for data and phone. Not surprisingly, that puts us dead last for number of wireless subscriptions per capita. Is it all infrastructure costs that are driving the difference? Nope — it’s profit margins –> Canadian carriers are third on the list of “revenue per user” in the G8 and fourth across all the countries. We get gouged, no question about it. The CRTC knows this, and has put the screws to the telecom companies on things like extortionary three-year cell packages and transparency in price-gouging, but not much to reduce overall costs.
Cost differentials are left to the secondary tier of cellular companies to drive down costs through competition — Telus, Wind, Koodo, Virgin, Fido, a bunch of others. You might think that was a decent range of competitors. But the branding hides some basic facts.
Rogers and Fido are basically the same company, just different branding;
Telus and Koodo? The same;
Bell and Virgin? The same;
Wind is one of the few that is separate and not simply affiliated with a regional carrier (like SaskTel in Saskatchewan). Which means Fido, Koodo and Virgin are just special plans of the other three big ones (often discount plans for narrow markets). They often too have much more limited variety in packages, phones, data plan options. In the end, you’re often left with a choice of Rogers, Bell or Telus. Back in 2013, Telus and Bell had just under 30% of the cell market each, with Rogers just above 20, and the rest divvying up the remaining 20%. I don’t have the recent data, but I think the other 20% has shrunk to about 15% and the big three have gobbled up some more.
Does it matter which of the three or four you choose? Well, that depends on what you’re doing and where. If you are in a big urban centre, coverage is pretty much the same for all of them. The larger the urban centre, the increased likelihood of small gaps in the city, particularly if you want LTE service on your latest-and-greatest smartphone. If you are doing a lot of data usage (i.e. smartphone internet use), those dead zones could kill you if you’re with the wrong carrier. Most of the dead zones are starting to disappear as networks expand their LTE coverage more uniformly, but could be an issue. Some people also note that it depends on how much you use your phone at home without wifi vs. working in an office building made of signal-blocking concrete, as some carriers work better indoors more based on the distance to the local cell tower than the technology. The technology probably won’t affect you much though for most urban centres.
If you are in a rural area, there can be a huge difference in service. I have a Rogers cellphone, and I get lousy reception in some parts of central Ontario (north of cottage country, like Algonquin Park, Bancroft, even along Highway 7). Out by Luskville in Quebec? Nada. A friend has a Telus SIM card for when he’s roaming in Quebec (including around Luskville) and it works like a charm. Fortunately there are coverage maps that you can search that show which service is best for what area (like a rural community, cottage area, etc.).
Devices? The big three all support the big smartphones like iPhones, some will have slightly different deals for cost over the long-term, etc., but not significant enough to warrant a change against the other factors.
For me, I was with Rogers partly because I offset at one point with my wife’s phone (back when we were dating). She had a Bell phone, so I went Rogers to extend our coverage map (one or the other would work). Eventually, we switched most things to Rogers, she got a smartphone (iPhone 4) and it was just easier to just put her on my account with the new phone. We’ve upgraded a couple of times between us, and my contract was set to expire December 31st of this year. I bought my phone on a 2 year contract, her latest one (in August), we bought straight outright. So after December? No more commitment, just month to month.
Most big networks will let you switch your phones for an unlock fee and SIM-card switch. Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes they give you a big hassle. But since the big three often only offer you much in the way of deals for completely new activations (often limiting you even on transfers), the savings can be more theoretical than real.
I have unlimited text and talk in Canada. I don’t use it, I don’t need it outside Ottawa, really. Except when we travel to Peterborough, mainly so I don’t get hit with a roaming fee. Way under what they offer me for a basic package. Which is why they can offer such a large basic package — many people don’t use it, so it doesn’t cost them that much. Standard voicemail, basic caller ID (numbers, not names), 911 access, blah blah blah. Unlimited video texting too. You pay for international roaming, international calls, and if you exceed your data plan.
I used to have a sweet 6GB data plan. I thought it was awesome. You know how much I actually used? Less than 1 GB per month. I thought my regular usage would climb, but most of the time I’m doing surfing and data munching, I’m on wifi somewhere, not wireless. My wife had a separate 500MB plan on hers. Eventually, we merged them, but my plan was a special offering, so with the merger, I had to give up 6GB and settle for 2. With me less than 1 GB, and her less than 1 GB, seemed like a no brainer. Once in awhile we go over it, often when our phone settings aren’t taking advantage of wifi hotspots enough. But each time I go over, I get a $15 overcharge (used to be $25).
I wanted another GB of data, but wasn’t really looking to go with Bell or Telus right now. We love our current phones, no setup issues, everything works, just not enough data. So, partly inspired by the whole blog writing thing, and the other cutting the cord attempts, I did a minimally invasive tweak to my current package.
I was paying $80 a month for my phone package with 2GB data. My wife was added to my plan and her package was $35. Everything shared. Since my contract was coming to a close, I could pay off the remaining balance ($35 — which was cute since I had a $40 credit sitting on the account after a full credit for this months’ charges anyway), and modify the plan to a simple “Share Everything” month-to-month plan. My plan? Dropped $5. Her plan? Upped $5. Even Steven. Why would I bother? Because they gave me 5GB of shared data. We can go crazy, no more worries about reaching our limit. If we do, our phones REALLY have the wrong settings. Unless I start streaming a lot of music or videos that I’m not doing now, I suppose. I do have a bunch of course videos I want to watch, but most of those will be through wifi, not wireless. Nice to have the option though. Heck, I may even let my son stream a video on Kodi if we’re stuck in a waiting line somewhere. 5GB is more than double what we have now, and we barely exceed 2 now. For the same cost, no commitment, and no overage charges of $15. Oh, and just for fun, they throw in free Shomi, Spotify or NextIssue. I might give Spotify a try.
If I was still bundled with Rogers for everything else, they’d knock 10-15% off that bill. I’m not getting anything “special” with that deal, it’s a good package and a regular price. Still way above what I would pay in Japan or Europe, and marginally above the U.S.
Can you get better deals? Sure.
Telus has a deal for bring-your-own-device, $60 per month, 4GB of data. If you want to add another user, you basically pay for their voice plan. Probably about $100 in total when finished. Or about $20 cheaper than what I’m paying. Bell would likely charge me $90 for the first plan plus thirty for the second, giving me the same price as Rogers i.e. $120. Wind, by contrast, with their smaller market options, different configs and access to the other networks, would be about $40-$45 per phone setup, or about $80-$90 in total. Save about $30-40 for less reliable network. One that has been rumoured to go bankrupt regularly since it started.
So I’m paying a bit more for the Rogers network, partly as it has slightly different coverage than Telus or Bell or Wind, and it costs me a little more. But not as much as yesterday where I would regularly blow my data limit. Instead, same cost, more service. When I need to upgrade my phone or my wife’s phone or maybe add one for my son, I’ll see what deals are available then. For now, I can live with my (newly-tweaked) package.
