#hp printer number

[munchboxart]

I hate HP, they released a subscription plan where you can "rent a printer" for like what, $7 a month but you can only print 20 pages per month, and you can get fined for over more than the printer cost from what I heard.

HP is the type of company where they would remove double sided printing and lock it behind a paid DLC I hate this company. Hell I heard you can't even use some of the stuff with other printers (like scanning) if it either: ran out of ink OR no internet connection (I could be wrong on this one, or it could be both, I wouldn't be surprised)

[dordey]

concept: a printer that plugs into your computer & prints things

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge

Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.

All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:

https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/

But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.

For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.

Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.

They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."

HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.

Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.

Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.

DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.

Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.

In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.

HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.

Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.

But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.

Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.

This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."

In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/

Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.

It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

[greenhorn-art]

Keep Your Head Up to the Sky (As Your Day Unfolds) by alphera [Twitter]

Illustrated by Shirou_UOHS @shirou-oh-sakura

Fandom: 全职高手 | The King's Avatar

Rating: General Audiences

Category: M/M

Words: 9 270

Time is rarely kind, and impossible to escape. At the ripe old age of 30, Han Wenqing retires from the Glory Professional Alliance and moves forward the only way he knows how: fearlessly and without hesitation.

About the Book

FONTS: Coelacanth, Segoe UI Emoji

IMAGES: Illustrations by Shirou; pastel sky ID: 7007221 from Rawpixel; dark blue sky ID: 7044483 from Rawpixel; Han Wenqing & Desert Dust image from The King's Avatar Wikia; Ye Xiu & Lord Grim image also from TKA Wikia; Glory card png also made by Shirou via Discord

MATERIALS: regular ol' printer paper (8.5"x11", 20lb, 96 bright); ~1.5mm chipboard; Neenah cardstock (8.5"x11", 65lb, bright white); Iris bookcloth (Madeira colour); paper from Gilded Ink paper pad by Recollections; waxed linen thread (30/3 size, white); wheat paste (1:4 flour:water)

PROGRAMS USED: typeset in Affinity Publisher 2; endpapers designed with Affinity Designer 2 and Affinity Photo 2; imposed with Renegade's Community Imposer (settings: Quarto, snug against binding edge, signatures of 2 sheets).

Text & QR codes printed with colour laser printer (duplex, flip long edge), images printed with inkjet printer (HP Envy 5055; one sheet at a time, single sided, place facedown in tray)

BINDING: quarto (quarter-letter) size, sewn board binding with french link stitch and breakaway spine.

.

Absolutely LOVED this story! I've reread this one a number of times, and keep going back for more. Alphera's writing is so good! Ye Xiu is the series protagonist so things usually follow him, which makes it refreshing to see a story through Han Wenqing's eyes. And the author does it SO WELL! AHHH!

It's been a while since my first read-through, but I'm pretty sure this was the first TKA fic that I actually downloaded and started typesetting. Absolutely chuffed to have it finished! (Love me some growth-- the typeset looks a LOT better than my earlier attempts!)

RAMBLES

Another sewn board binding and breakaway spine! Since this isn't my first go at it, the construction of the book was considerably faster and smoother than my last one. It's just as well, because I ran into a speed bump that stretched out how long it took to typeset and print.

The culprit: (very pretty) illustrations. My laser's colour printing capabilities are shot to hell, so I used my inkjet for the artwork. This involved creating 3 copies of my typeset: 1) the completed typeset; 2) just the text, images hidden; 3) just the images, text hidden/white. Then I ran them through the imposer and printed the text version. The real issue was figuring out how to feed the sheets through my inkjet printer to print the images where I want them. Had to go one page at a time, single-sided. (Just need to place sheet facedown in the tray. So flip along vertical axis.) It took a while, but I got there in the end. And the results were SO worth it! 😊

For the scene breaks I left them as written. I had tried inserting images of the Glory Logo and account card, or using crossed swords emojis ⚔️, but nothing I tried worked as well as what the author did. (It's really neat! Different characters were used to indicate the direction of the timeskip: >>>> for a jump forward in time; <<<< for a flash into the past; and ==== for regular scene breaks, a 'next' rather than 'before' or 'later/after'.)

The cover and endpapers were based off of Shirou's fantastic cover illustration of HQW and YX walking hand-in-hand down a beach at sunset. The art itself is phenomenal so I had it stand alone as a frontispiece and didn't do anything fancy with the title page. For the covers, I looked through my decorative paper stash for something red or black to represent HWQ or Team Tyranny. What I found was paper with pinks, oranges, and purples similar to that illustration -- and that was that. I liked how the colours matched the art, and the gold splashed across it. (Gold for victory, gold for wedding rings and a happy golden future together.)

(Sidenote: I love how the beginning of the end of HWQ's career as an e-sports player "starts with a tingle in his ring finger", leading him and YX to taking the next steps in their relationship and eventually getting married 💍🖐)

I went with a red bookcloth for the spine because it's a common team colour for Tyranny, Excellent Era, and Happy. It also represents good fortune, courage, passion, and love -- things that come to mind when I think about YX, HWQ, and HanYe. The particular shade of red I used is Madeira. It's darker than Ruby Red and leans a little cooler, which suits the decorative paper more.

The endpapers use two background images (overlayed, adjusted, using multiple blending modes) and some images of HWQ and YX from The King's Avatar Wikia.

The background images are from Rawpixel -- I was just minding my own business looking for images of clouds and maybe some mountains to represent overcoming challenges/glory/looking up to the sky, when I found some clouds with the same sunset colours of Shirou's art. Figured it was too perfect, and if I'm going to lean into that design-wise, I might as well go whole hog and full-ass it. Then I found a starry night sky to add some darker blues and stars to it to match. After that it was a matter of overlapping them and positioning them to fit. I also grabbed some images of HWQ and YX from the King's Avatar Wikia and added them to it because HanYe. (After removing the backgrounds).

[spockandawe]

Hello! I've been thinking about binding some danmei novels in my native language, but I don't know where to start. I found your blog recently and find it very inspiring! I was wondering if maybe you could share with me what tools and materials would be good to get started with?

Sure!!!! So, I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand, but if you go back through my bookbinding tag, there are other replies I've got about the materials for making a book specifically. The renegade publishing blog also has resource documents that walk through the bookbinding process and include links to educational materials, etc. So for here, I'll focus on the danmei side of things!

So, a fun feature about these books is that they tend to run LONG. I've seen a number of people try to take up bookbinding in google docs, and honestly, it's doing things on hard mode. For many danmei, it's basically impossible. I think my EARLIEST earliest attempt at svsss began in gdocs, and that's not a super long novel, but gdocs was choking on it. A word processor on your desktop is going to be your best bet. Personally, i invested in a microsoft office license, because it was familiar and i could afford it. But the free parallel to that will be libre office, which does basically everything word can do, with just minor differences.

On the fancy end of bookbinding software, affinity, indesign, and microsoft publisher are also names you may hear tossed around. These can do fancier, more artistic layouts, but also come with a heavier price tag. And because i had webnovels on my radar from the start, i wanted something ROBUST. I wanted to be able to dump all of the husky and his white cat shizun into a single file and work from it. And i did eventually do that! Being able to typeset a single file rather than repeat each step across several is great, especially since i tend to tweak design choices as i go.

For danmei, you're also going to want a robust printer. I have a color laser that's been an absolute beast of a machine, but a black and white laser can get you a long ways, and monochrome designs can be very elegant. You don't want an HP brand printer, their toner subscription practices are downright predatory, but Brother and Canon are names I've seen recommended highly. You probably don't want an inkjet printer, because long books take a LOT of ink. The one exception would be if you can find an affordable ink tank printer.

And the last major thing i can think of is that if your main computer is a laptop, consider typesetting with an external mouse and keyboard! Danmei novels are split into lots of short chapters, frequently split across just as many web pages, with lots of footnotes to format, and laptops are convenient but not ergonomic. Doing too much on there is just asking for a repetitive strain injury. I've done it, but often paid for my sins in pain! And your laptop keyboard may start complaining too, I'm almost certain my first typeset of mdzs was the nail in the coffin for my last laptop's keyboard, haha

I hope that helps! Best of luck to you! Ive found binding cnovels to be EXTREMELY rewarding, even though my original reason was because these things would NEVER be licensed in english 😂 I'm delighted to see people experimenting with it for other translations in other languages, I really hope it goes well for you!!!!

[honted]

i will jailbreak this printer or i will throw it in the trash. either way. HP your days are fucking numbered counting how many pages i print. die for that.

[chronic-and-stressed]

Stats

5.4 million people living in Palestine in 2023.

The median age in Palestine is 19.6.

47.3% of Palestine is under 18.

Israel has killed over 12k people in Gaza (the second largest city in Palestine) since October 7.

Regardless of what side you think is "right", there is no justification for the deaths of so many people when Israel has received at least 3 billion dollars in 2023 and is requesting an additional 14k, all from America. The Israeli forces could easily afford to train and equip a special forces team to go in and handle only Hamas with minimal casualties if that was what they were after.

How we can help-

Boycott (Do not purchase, support, or use) Bolded ones are the most commonly used

HP (printers etc)

Siemens (Chevron gas)

AXA (insurance)

Puma (sports brand)

SodaStream (carbonated water machine)

Ahava (minerals)

Sabra (hummus)

Starbucks** (coffee)

Dominos (pizza)

Pizza Hut (pizza)

Papa Johns (pizza)

McDonalds (fast food)

Burger King (fast food)

Wix (website builder)

Carrefore (wholesale)

Re/Max (real estate)

CAT (construction)

Elbit Systems (international defense systems)

Hyundai (cars)

Volvo (cars)

CAF (real estate)

Barclays (bank- move your money to a different one, or even better a credit union)

TKH Security (home security)

HIK Vision (AI)

Pressure (write letters, send emails, make calls)

YOUR GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES (any government official who is not in support of a ceasefire. the president, your governor, mayor, house reps, senate, congress, etc)

White House Phone Number- 202-456-1414

Amazon (retailer)

AirBnb (rent a house)

Booking.com (travel reservations)

Expedia (travel reservations)

Disney (media- also being boycotted)

Google (search engine- also being boycotted)

It's so overwhelming what's going on, but let's all collectively do all we can.

sources- Worldometer, CNN, Axois, The BNC, The BDS

**Not officially recommended by the BDS but has been happening and making an impact

[medfetabdl]

I’ve got the new monitor customized just the way I like it. This thing is packed full of so many features.

I have 3 different profiles setup, profiles are basically quick selects for all the different settings. I have sleep which doesn’t beep with each beat of the heart and the alarms are set to the minimum volume. Screen is the same for a 3, ECG at the top, Pleth (SPO2) in the middle, respirations on the bottom, and at the very bottom is blood pressure. I also have some small things setup on the right of the screen. At the top is pulse from the pulse oximeter. PVC is arrhythmia detection, ST-II has something to do with the ecg leads. Pulse in red is pulse from the BP cuff. Clock and timers. I also have heart rate tend setup on the bottom although it’s very easy to see trends for all measurements.

The other 2 profiles are masturbation and monitoring which have slightly different alarm settings.

The bottom row is all user defined keys which I setup for the ones I use most.

My old monitor you can define a number, an age profile (adult, pediatric, or neonatal) and a gender. This one you can setup a patients, first, last, and middle name, medical record number, height, weight, gender, 2 notes fields and whether the patient is being paced or not.

I’ve ordered a few more accessories for my monitor to fully kit it out. I ordered a battery for it it, paper for the onboard thermal printer, and a 5 lead ecg cable. The monitor can do 12 lead ecg but the cables for it are ridiculously expensive so I’ll probably just end up making my own. Funny enough, the breakout cables that came with the 3 lead ecg cable are branded HP and that’s due to the fact that the Philips Intelivue line of patient monitors is backwards compatible with the Hewlett-Packard/ Agilent technologies Viridia line of patient monitors.

On a side note my grandfather recently passed away and in his will he gave me his entire machine shop, and there’s an entire drawer of previously confidential engineering drawings for Agilent and HP products so let me know if you want me to go digging for engineering plans for medical equipment.

[cyberdragoninfinity]

18, 24, and 29 for mr. zane marufusedale?

MY FAVORITE OLD DESKTOP COMPUTER OF A GUY

18. How do you think they were as a kid? (Like, were they shy, noisy, wild, etc)

Polite, quiet, and wonderfully, massively autistic. I have a headcanon his special interest when he was a little kid was printers. Kid who brought an HP ink cartridge for show and tell. Kid who knows a bunch of printer serial numbers. Kid who will sit and watch a printer work for hours and hours. 🖨✨

I also really like the hc that he and Syrus were very close as kids and only started drifting apart once Zane went off to the Cyber dojo. I just know they were playing insane Siblings Games when they were little.

24. What do you think is a secret they have that they never told anyone?

I definitely think there's some shit that happened to him during his Hell Kaiser Underground Dueling Stint that's going with him to his grave (or at the very least going to rot inside him for a decade or two before he brings it up to a therapist.)

29. How do you think they would be as a parent? (and if they are a parent, how do you think they would be if they weren’t?)

OHH THIS IS A TOUGH ONE FOR HIM I think he would be hesitant and maybe even a bit nervous with trying to approach certain things re: parenting, but there would be so much love there and everything he did would be out of wanting his child to grow up confident and full of love for the things they get into. I don't know if he'd be a perfect dad but I think he could be a pretty good one, after all he's been through

[ghostoftheyear]

I guess the scammers are getting smarter, or I’m getting dumber. Maybe both.

So I’ve been looking for a job, which means putting my resume (with contact info) up on LinkedIn and applying with it. I’ve gotten a couple of texts from random numbers asking if I’m interested in X job, but when I replied, there was no response. Fine, whatever, there are a millon other people looking for similar remote work so I’m not really surprised.

So another text didn’t really surprise me, but the fact that they were offering $29/hr for remote data entry work was a surprise. What has followed has been problematic at best.

It all sounded fine, the company (Transcenta) is legit, and I got an email offer with all the paperwork that one usually fills out on being hired, including a W-4. It was weird that they didn’t have fillable PDFs and they wanted me to print it all, fill it out, scan it and return it, but I was able to do that and I did. $10 at Staples to have it printed out on good paper, but whatever.

But then they couriered me a check for $4,950.00. For their special equipment (an HP copier/fax machine/printer/scanner that costs that much? Really?). And then the weird money shit started today. This person whom I’ve been in touch with on MS Teams has me sending things via Zelle. To their “vendor”. Oh, you can’t send more than $500? OK, send another $500 to this address. Use Apple Pay? It’s not working? All right, let’s use Paypal. You used the wrong thing with Paypal, it needed to be friends & family, we have to have it today. Why are you worried? We want you onboard and working ASAP. OK, now I want you to drive to the bank, withdraw the money and deposit it at a bitcoin ATM. (I’m actually surprised he didn’t start asking me about iTunes gift cards.)

I finally, far too late, went “No, I’m not doing this. I’m done.” I can’t believe it took me as long as it did (although my hackles were up during all of this, today is where it all went too far). Unfortunately it being Saturday, I can’t get in touch with a person at the bank to help me, nor can I call SSA, until Monday. I sent an email requesting that my personal information be deleted and destroyed, and I’m going to try and move things forward on Monday. I blocked the guy on MS Teams and I’m going to contact the police if I have to.

Just. Be wary, folks. I don’t even know if I’m safe yet, or if I will be. I can only hope I stopped it all in time. (Edited to add the FTC’s information page about it.)

[rockmiyabideusexmachina]

Hey there Miyabi! How do you get such high-res, beautiful, and professional scan quality? What's your process?

Thank you! I certainly don't think I do anything that professional, so glad you have been decieved into thinking that about them! LOL I started doing this scan of the day stuff just to bring better quality to a lot of the older contributions of mine floating around the web. Looking at them on here, the Megaman wikia and other places, they just felt small and dirty. Especially as basic technology had gotten better over the decade or so since I first scanned them. I have 2 different scanners, one of which is a fancier Epson that I bought specifically to scan film slides a year or so ago. Still use it for basic scans from time to time. But honestly, for the settei, I'm still just using my general home HP Envy printer/scanner combo. I always scan at 600 DPI. After that part is done and the bitmap image is scanned to my computer, it's really just doing some heavy touchup. As I have alluded to in some recent posts, some of these sheets will take me an hour to an hour and a half just to clean up, because they have so many artifacts and dotty garbage on them. Settei at auction are mostly just scanned copies themselves after all, so there's a bit of residue to clean up. Ever wonder why sometimes I don't post these at a regular time of day? That's why, I'm still working on touchup before I post (and probably off from work, so I'm not prepping the night before, like when I post at a scheduled time).

Let's use this recent Gauss sheet as an example.

The original scan was pretty messy. Probably can't see it as well in tumblr resize scale, so here's the original scan. But it is dotted all over the place, there's like a smudge line which goes through the whole bottom of the sheet, where the "Final Draft" stamp, character/episode number marking is, and through some of Gauss' headshots as well. You can also probably see some black on the edges, where the sheet comes to an end within my scanner.

The first bit of touchup I usually do is within my image viewer. I use FastStone Image Viewer to help organize and view everything. In there, I will adjust the brightness, contrast, and sometimes the gamma, to get the sheet background a bit lighter and the lines darker.

I just like the number 14. Is it always 14? No. But that's usually my baseline starting point. After that's saved, into the photo editing program of choice we go. I match my brush color to the background white and just paint over all those ugly dots and wipe those black edges away.

Zoom in at 100% to try not to miss those artifacts you don't notice zoomed out. Look at Gauss' speckled fingers. Ugh, cleaning that stuff up is hell. But I do it, so you all can see clean-ish looking art. Do I get everything? No. But I try to at least get the major issues out of the way.

Some things I take liberties on. The shading on his jacket goes outside the lineart. Should I leave it as is for authenticity? Probably. But if I'm cleaning it, I'm gonna clean it all. So you'll see in the finished version I posted, those shading lines are all inside the lineart only.

Some people are jerks and could easily resell these settei just by printing scans and claiming them as original. Another way I try to have a way to differentiate my edits without slapping a watermark on is my editing of the text boxes. See the top left and bottom right of it above Netto? There's almost always some overhang on the originals. I have usually taken the liberty of editing that overlap line off, so that the text box is a clean rectangle where the line stops at each corner, as close as I can take it. It's a dumb, but simple way for me to tell if it's my edit.

Otherwise, that's really it. Just a lot of added effort in touchup, honestly.

Cel scans are a little different, because most of them are too big for either scanner. Especially cels with backgrounds. So many of those involve 2-4 scans and then stitching them all together. Much less touchup that I do to them, but otherwise it's mostly the same. 600 DPI, and some brightness/contrast or slight color saturation adjustments to them, if needed.

And now you know!

[snek-panini]

Printing another book and I have never had a project fight me as hard as this one has today. There's been just one roadblock after another here. I'm putting it under a cut because it got long and I just want to rant, lol.

Yesterday, go to print. Printer runs out of ink about 1/3 of the way through the job. I don't have any at home and have to go buy it.

Today, get in small accident in parking lot after buying ink. Everyone's ok, the cars just have small cosmetic dents in them now.

Replace ink. Delete pages that have already been printed from the document so I don't get duplicates. Printer prints three more signatures. I find out later that some of the pages here are blurry.

Printer has a mysterious error. Pauses, restarts job from the beginning. Cancel print job. I never found the source of this error.

Discover blurry pages. Fight with HP app till it lets me realign the printer. Delete more text in the original document. Print the remaining signatures.

Try to format blurry pages for reprinting without reprinting entire book. Word's book fold has no option to do this.

Paste offending pages into their own document. Can now print only these pages but the page numbers are wrong. Cannot fix this with any of Word's page number functions, including screenshots of the correct numbers pasted into the document. Nothing works.

Reformat to PDF because it has a was to print only select pages.

PDF does not support custom paper sizes, which this book uses.

Delete PDF in fit of rage. Exit original document without saving so the text I removed earlier isn't lost. Quit for a while. Contemplate all life choices that have led to this place.

Come back later to try one last thing.

Wifi (it's a wireless printer) is not working on only my computer. Other devices have no issues. Restart required.

Massive computer update that takes 20-30 minutes.

Get back into document, delete more text and blank out earlier pages so even if it prints those before I can cancel them I won't waste much ink.

Delete wrong pages, leading to Word reformatting the signature page counts on its own, because it feels left out and wants to help.

Cancel job, add more blanks to the end so it can't do that again. Printer sucks in two pages instead of one, prints on them sandwiched together, so while it did technically print on both sides, it has also in reality printed on only one side.

Cancel job. Yell at sky. Open print tray and shuffle all the pages to make sure they are not stuck together.

Finally print the godforsaken pages.

I do not think I will touch this text block again for a couple of days. I usually don't have much waste paper on projects, but I have enough from this one to have made a whole other book from it. This is the most I have ever fought with any craft project, software, or printer. Including that time in college when my home printer just went on strike for three or four days when I had a paper due. This was worse.

[bestflatsvillas]

https://spy-co.mn.co/posts/53177067

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada’s ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with an permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto-mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto-parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then types an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

Image: JeffJ (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--

Jorge Franganillo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duga_radar_system-_wreckage_of_electronic_devices_(37885984654).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[classicintp]

It should be ILLEGAL to sell PRINTERS that REQUIRE an internet connection and registered online account to PRINT. Any HP printer whose model number ends in 'e' (e.g. LaserJet M140we) is an HP+ printer, a device that will print a finite amount of times before it is required to connect to wifi and communicate with HP's servers. It will state this on the box in very small text and is not apparently displayed otherwise other than the + that blends into the background next to the HP logo.

It should be illegal to require that any device or software connect to the internet just to run. I shouldn't need to log in with microsoft to open any of their programs on my local computer. All games should be playable without access to an online server. All media you pay for should be downloadable to local disk as a raw file and if they don't like that because they know you'll share it and upload it, tough shit. They took your money already, they'll live.