I’ve reduced 99% of tech calls from elderly family(60s-80s) by moving them to either ChromeOS/Android or MacOS/IOS and all printers to Brother lasers. If they spend money on phones I lean toward Apple ecosystem. If they penny pinch - Google is king with all second hand Samsung galaxy/books, Dell enterprise chromebooks, or chromeboxes - making sure to verify years of support. It also makes it significantly easier to not mix ecosystems. I then set updates to automatic and make ublockorigin default in the browser. The last 7 years nearly every issue was resolved with a restart.
The popular "just buy this printer" Verge article recommends the Brother HL-L2305W. But Brother appears to have gone the subscription route and replaced that model with the HL-L2405W, which is "Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready" and whose product description says "Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments."
The older model is no longer available new from Amazon.
Is Brother still a good recommendation? This subscription pivot gives the company all the wrong incentives.
I'm looking at the Best Buy page for the printer, and I can see where it would be confusing.
> Choose Brother Genuine TN830 Standard or TN830XL High Yield replacement cartridges. And with Refresh EZ Print Subscription Service, you’ll never worry about running out of toner again and you’ll enjoy savings up to 50%. (3) Get started today with a Free Trial. (4)
> (4) Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments. Unused pages roll over, limitations apply. Additional page set charges and taxes apply during trial.
It's just saying that the free trial of their subscription requires enrolling in the subscription. The subscription isn't required to use the printer.
Just ditched my HP for a Brother a couple months back, after having continual issues with individual colors running out and eventually it refused to recognize a single color cartridge slot, I never used color anyway. So went to a Brother monochrome. Been smooth since.
another vouch for brother printers. not optimum but i just plopped one connected to wifi only and it can print with minimal config and also scanning through mac's image capture app.
Reading this article and the comments is frustrating given everything about these infotainment systems has been the same for 10+ years with very little improvements. Its embarrassing an iPad from 2012 can out perform these multi-thousand dollar car systems in both UX and speed. I was hoping the tesla experience would light a fire in traditional car companies making it more a priority but here we are basically just using the system as a screen to project our phones “car mode”. If it were possible I would rather buy a car with a floating usb-c mount for a tablet than pay 5k for an expensive system that I “basically” only use the display to mirror my phone.
My PoR: I use ford sync 3.x daily and recently used several popular models of Subaru, Hyundai, Dodge, and Porsche.
It's not getting better because people keep buying them.
Shitty UX for the infotainment console doesn't stop people buying something that starts and drives from A to B (so long as it has bluetooth audio reception).
The screen people use while driving is the one that lets them scroll Instagram.
My problem with the get your own domain and DNS is its far more likely I become incapacitated and become unable to pay or manage it than getting locked out of gmail or outlook mailboxes.
Is it? You can register for 10 years at a time and then keep that topped up, as well as setup autopay pointed at a bank account with as many years of funds as you'd like. At some point the likely limiting factors shift to other things. Even the most reliable longest lasting registrars could in principle go out of business or get bought, but then again Google could decide to radically alter or discontinue services at some point too (as they indeed frequently have), or get broken up or who knows. 10 years is quite a while. And while nothing about business dealings is completely certain, someone paying for a domain a revenue generator with potential for more, so even if a registrar was acquired they'd have strong incentive to try to roll over existing accounts barring active objection.
I don't know your personal circumstances of course, different people may very reasonably make different calculations. But I have more trust in a quality registrar and my bank then in Google under the most likely scenarios where I'd still care (long comas aren't impossible to come out of, even multi-year, but chances of just partial recovery plummet after even a month or two let alone full recovery). I think Google being capricious or making a mistake is a bigger concern, if only because there is almost zero chance of recovering from it (basically have to know a well placed Googler or manage to go viral or be a big enough presence to get their attention). Domains and finance in contrast are both full of competition and portability.
Most of the responses here do a really great job at pointing out the flaws of this project. My biggest gripe is it currently has no plans to be integrated by default. So just like all the other package management tools for windows the tool itself is a prereq requiring another hoop. If I have to deal with more configuration management to install this from the app store I’d rather use chocolaty at least that can be installed reliably.
