Sporkers Helping Sporkers

Finally ordered a Brother Printer MFC7860DW. Gave up color for the simplicity of a single toner cartridge and reduced price. Thanks for the advice, guys.

Crap.

Now it had better live up to the hype or my reputation is ruined.

Heh. Seriously, though, you'll be happy with everything except for the page yield of the toner cartridge that comes with it. Mine just started giving the "Low Toner" warning this weekend. I'm rolling the dice and trying a 3rd party toner cartridge for it. We'll see how that goes since it's less than 1/3 the cost of the official Brother cartridge.

Yeah, I bought a Brother cartridge with it. The "Starter" cartridges always suck.

I just checked the page counter on mine. It says 307 pages so far. That means it's set to trigger the warning after 300 pages with the starter cartridge. Discussions online suggest that you can get much more than that if you fiddle with some button combo or something... sort of the printer equivalent of the Konami Code, I guess.

I've had good luck with Brother. their wireless works fairly well and their Bonjour stuff is pretty easy. I always go with a static IP to be safe. HP is not bad, but I think their wireless is not as easy to setup. Haven't tried the new model yet. If you don't need wireless, I like to recommend the Xerox WorkCentre series. I've found the models very reliable and have had good paper handling.

Quote
John Willoughby
Logic board swap fixed the issue. I am getting one of the new MBP's, if they ever come out and have >= 750 GB of internal storage, but I wanted the old MBP to be in good shape for my wife, or kids, or Alan Lehman, or whoever inherits it. After all, the repair was free under Apple Care.

I'm all ears. I just bid on a Mac Pro today but I'd take the right Macbook Pro too. I mean, why spoil a good thing?

I'll let you know if/when we have it free. It's a mid-2009 model, though, so it might not be all you'd want of a laptop.

Quote
John Willoughby
I'll let you know if/when we have it free. It's a mid-2009 model, though, so it might not be all you'd want of a laptop.

I'm still using your 1GHz G4 at home (a loyal Mac if ever there was one). Trust me, your '09 would be a step up.

Quote
Alan Lehman

Quote
John Willoughby
I'll let you know if/when we have it free. It's a mid-2009 model, though, so it might not be all you'd want of a laptop.

I'm still using your 1GHz G4 at home (a loyal Mac if ever there was one). Trust me, your '09 would be a step up.

Alan, my wife is claiming the 2009 MBP for her own. And she's keeping her old MBP. She has a weird idea that one will be her media hub, the other her daily use computer. I don't get it, but I don't argue. So no MBP's crossing the mountains to your domicile any time soon. Sorry.

I live in Nevada. We are allegedly an important state in the 2012 elections. Perhaps this is why we get 2,012 political pollsters calling every day. As well as a couple of hundred calls from charities begging for money. (I've resolved never to give a charity money on the phone again. Aside from not knowing how the money will be spent without doing web research, even the deserving charities seem to put me on a "sucker" list and call me several times a month after that. I just give to the Red Cross now, because they don't hassle me on the phone.)

What I want is a phone system that implements the audio equivalent of a captcha. I want, WITHOUT an audible ring being heard in the house, the phone to ask the caller to perform a simple mathematical operation within a short time limit (so that the audio dead space that a robo-call begins with will automatically fail). Something like "Your call to the Willoughbys (Willoughbies? Willoughbai?) will be completed when you press on your phone the button answering the question, 'What is five minus three?'" If they answer correctly within a few seconds, then the phone rings. We either answer or the answering machine can record their message if we don't pick up. If the caller doesn't answer correctly, the call is politely terminated without our phone ringing at all.

Anything like this out there? Otherwise I might need to get some patents filed.

That sounds like something that should be able to be cobbled together using Asterisk... the "extension" would be the answer and the extension would periodically change to match the question.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2012 10:00AM by porruka.

I'll look for that, thanks.

Yeah, there are some fantastic scripts for Asterisk to deal with telemarketers, et al.

It certainly looks like Asterisk has the power to do what I want, but it also looks like it would take me weeks to figure it out. I was hoping for something more turnkey. (Lazy; busy; uninterested in nuts-and-bolts of Linux, POTS, and Asterisk; soon new MBP to play with.) I'll keep browsing through the Asterisk site and try to accumulate knowledge. Thanks for the pointer, Porruka and CS.

Yeah, it's definitely not a solution for your home phone situation without some serious effort. Pulling your land-line into an Asterisk box is a clumsy process at best unless you port your service to an actual VoIP provider.

As an alternative, you could use Google Voice which has a call screening feature. It's not exactly a CAPTCHA but it can be set up to require unknown callers to respond to the voice prompts before it rings your phones... and then it let's you choose whether you want to actually accept the call or send it to voicemail... and it will let you listen to the voicemail in real-time while they're leaving the message and break into the call if you want to, sort of like an answering machine.

I have not liked the long-term support of Brother for my laser all-in-ones. (had three I think)
The drivers were not as good as I would have hoped.
I like Canon's support, though very well. Samsung isn't bad.
HATE EPSON....
just my opinion

Would be cool if an VOIP phone like Ooma had apps to let you roll your own such things. It might still do something for you out-of-box.
http://www.ooma.com/products/ooma-telo/features

Looking for a cheaper version of this. Apparently, not still manufactured, but still floating around.

I have a Samsung Color Laser that would be fine if they had anybody there who knew how to write proper drivers. The only way I can get it to print anything decent from a Mac is by using an open source driver set called SpliX.

I have one on the wall that is similar.
This is the one I have. I can't tell how much it worked as we don't get many calls. A couple a year.
http://www.familysafemedia.com/telemarketing_call_screener.html
$35 is decent price
Oh, it says discontinued. Big help I am.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2012 02:48PM by El Jeffe.