Plain words, uncommon sense
Anyone got PictBridge working on their Brother printer?
I keep getting the Needs More Memory error when I connect directly to the printer with a cable or with my USB card reader.
Any tips?
Anyone try printing on photo paper? How did it work?
Printing on paper is ok but there’s a screen (dot pattern that is visible)
Anyone get the wireless working? Is there some trick?
Brother Canada has a new line of colour laser printers and I am a lucky guinea pig who is testing the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer.
#1 Tip: Word of Mouth marketing works if you have a product name that is easy to remember and easy to share.
HL-4070CDW.
Oh well, I can’t change the name. I can tell you about the experience.
According to Brother Canada, the HL-4070CDW is a colour laser printer for business use.
True. The HL-4070CDW is a good business printer.
It’s perfect at what it does:
* Prints documents quickly
* Prints in colour beautifully
* Prints double sided
This is definitely a business printer. If you have a home office and do a lot of printing, this is the printer for you.
It’s quite a bit larger than a standard personal printer, but it’s much smaller than a standard business printer. (Here it is next to my HP psc 1200 series inkjet printer.)
Is it the HL-4070CDW a good printer for me?
* This is a big printer. It’s heavy and takes up a fair share of desk space (like half the desk, it needs its own table)
* You need to install the driver, this is not plug and play, it’s plug, read the instructions, try once, read the instructions more carefully, try again.
What’s the promise of the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer?
This is what the Brother Canada website says (I’ll bold the key features):
Quote: The fast, compact and Wi-Fi certified HL-4070CDW is designed for outstanding business performance. It produces brilliant business colour documents at up to 21 pages per minute. With up to 2400×600 dpi print quality, you can produce bold, eye-catching reports, brochures, and presentations right from your desktop. The HL-4070CDW naturally makes your work more effective. Its automatic two-sided printing saves paper and reduces costs. A USB direct interface allows direct PictBridge and USB flash memory drive printing. A unique front-loading consumable system makes replacing consumables a breeze. Powerful, user-friendly software and connectivity including USB, parallel, Ethernet (cables not included) and an 802.11 b/g wireless connection provide a seamless printing experience for your business.
$629.99
For $629.99, this is a great printer.
* It’s fast.
* It does colour.
* It prints nicely.
* It’s quiet.
So one more time, is it a good printer for me? I have a home office and I run my own company out of shared office space. I need to do high-quality printing on occasion. I print agendas for clients, I print project reports for people I need to impress, I print presentation handouts, I like printing photos. I work in a wireless environment. I work on a Mac. I hate reading instructions, I want things to be intuitive.
These were my pitfalls:
* I couldn’t get the wireless working and that was a big selling feature for me.
* The printer is cumbersome.
* Unpacking this printer took much longer than I hoped. Lots of packaging, lots of tabs to pull and set-up steps that seemed stupid. I had to pull out all these little tabs and pieces of paper–why were they there in the first place?
* The setup was no “Mac” experience–the packaging is not sexy, the set up required carefully reading of the manual. On a positive note, there were instructions for Mac and for PC. THANK YOU!
* The USB connection works great, but I would have been pissed if I didn’t have the appropriate cables already. This is a batteries-not-included experience.
* It only prints.
* It’s not clear how many prints you get on the toner cartridges. Toner cartridges cost $74.99 to $159.99.
Again, this is a business printer. In retrospect, I need a printer, fax, scanner, and copier so this printer might not be the perfect choice for me. Thankfully Brother also offers Multi-function Centres, multi-function printer, scanner, copiers.
Overall, good experience. Thank you Brother Canada.
SNAP CONTEMPORARY ART and Arsenal Pulp Press are celebrating the book launch of
FAME US
Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame
by Brian Howell
** It’s tonight **
Thursday, November 29
From 6-11 pm
Snap Contemporary Art will exhibit 21 of Brian Howell’s limited edition photos and Arsenal Pulp Press will sell signed copies of the book.
I’ll be there enjoying the music, cocktails and surprise celebrity guests. Maybe I’ll get some autographs.
SNAP
190 West 3rd Ave. (near Columbia St. and 3rd Ave–close to Cambie St. bridge)
604-897-7627
http://www.snapart.ca
JK Rowling is 41 years old and worth $1 billion.
She’s the only woman and author on Forbes ‘U.K.’s Billionaires’ list.
This seems like an extraordinary amount of money.
On the one hand it’s fantastic that a book author has such fame. It’s sad that she’s the only woman. What’s with all the rich dudes?
On the other hand there appears to be weird human nature that takes over when someone gets that rich.
I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell has written about the tipping point for wealth and fandom support? Is there a point where fans start to negatively react to the wealth they’ve amassed for someone else? Is this what happened to Microsoft?
I just discovered Leah Ingram’s blog, The Lean Green Family (formerly Suddenly Frugal). Leah’s profile is great, she says “Most mothers teach their kids to cook and clean. Mine taught me to compost. These days we’re trying to live a green and frugal lifestyle while I write books and magazine articles.”
The post I came across was on planning for a green Christmas.
I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas reports the findings of the 2007 Cone Holiday Environmental Study, in particular that 55% of the Americans surveyed say they proactively seek opportunities to buy green gifts and products around the holidays.
Are you doing anything green this Christmas?
Anyone making their own wrapping paper?
Got an energy-efficient gift idea?
Here’s the Green Guide Toy Report.
Want to know if your tree should be fake, cut, plastic? Check out Earth 911.
Soucouyant is a novel about memory by Vancouver author David Chariandy. Soucouyant is Chariandy’s first novel, but I suspect that it’s his first published novel. I imagine he has a trunk full of manuscripts and journals chock full of notations about characters.
Soucouyant was shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General”s Literary Award and longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Award nominations don’t normally impress me but to have two nominations for the top Canadian prizes and to be a first-time author–that’s impressive.
There’s good reason for the nominations. The novel is a twisting plot of memory fragments. Adele is suffering from dementia, she is near the end of her life and her son has returned home to care for her. The fragments of memory that tell the story are those of Adele’s childhood in Trinidad during the Second World War, of the son’s childhood in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, and of both characters’ present day experiences.
The memories that comprise the whole are about discord, displacement and distance. The discord appears in stories of racism and classism that the characters suffer. The displacement is the us vs. them, the plight of immigrants, the settling in that never quite happens for this family. And the distance is that which they create between themselves. The mother’s dementia distances her mentally from the present, the father dies, which pulls the family slightly apart, the oldest son leaves home to become a poet, the youngest also flees but later returns, only to distance himself again by being emotionally guarded.
Quill and Quire did not give the book a great review, although the reviewer Dory Cerny certainly agreed that it was worth reading.
The Tyee does a much better job of getting in touch with the plotlines Chariandy is experimenting with. I highly recommend checking out what The Tyee has to say on this one. It’s a great interview with David Chariandy.
Soucoyant by David Chariandy is published by Arsenal Pulp Press, a great Vancouver publisher. If you want more about David, check out CBC Words at Large.
And, I thought the book was great. It would be an interesting book club pick because the writing is strong and the story provides ample topics to discuss. It reminded me a little bit of At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand.
Author Michael Ondaatje won the Governor General’s Literary Award today for his novel Divisadero.
CBC has a brief report on the award and Ondaatje’s previous wins and nominations.
In June, I reviewed Divisadero by Michael Ondattje. I liked the book, but I was more enthralled by the second half of the story than the first. The first is a modern-day love story and the second is a historical love story. The historical one is written with the same magic that he brought to The English Patient. My full review is here.
And if you want sound instead of text, publisher McClelland & Stewart has a podcast of Ondaatje on BookLounge.ca.
The full list of the Governor General’s award winners for all 14 categories are available on the Canada Council website but I have a short call out to Iain Lawrence of Gabriola Island, BC, who won the English-language children’s literature award for his book Gemini Summer. A local hat’s off.
Remember that Sony Book Reader that was supposed to be all the rage and never actually appeared in the Canadian market?
Well, forget about it.
Amazon launched Kindle, a wireless, portable reading device with access to 90,000 titles.
Hmmm, is this how publishers’ Search Inside the Book files are now being used? I bet it is.
Kindle looks ugly but sounds lovely.
* wireless, no internet needed, it uses cell phone networks
* no monthly plan, no software to install, nothing but go
* electronic paper
* can receive emails from you of Word documents and pictures for “easy on-the-go viewing”
* 10 ounces
What’s wrong with it?
* Did I mention ugly?
* How about that it only holds 200 titles and is $400 USD.
* 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 4-level gray scale. GRAY! Can we have some colour please. Why is that so hard?
Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch the Kindle Drop Test. It’s rather soothing, slow-mo.
UPDATE:
John Gruber of Daring Fireball is mentioned by Paschal in the comments of this post. It’s a good post on why Kindle will/should fail. Here are a couple of quotes that resonate with me.
Quote: What it comes down to is that when you purchase books in Kindle’s e-book format, they’re wrapped in DRM and are in a format that no other software can read. There are no provisions for sharing books even with other Kindle owners, let alone with everyone.
And,
Quote: So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader , and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.
Totally agree.
Canadian author.
Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Mourner’s Dance, has published a new book with Knopf Canada, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.
As a cautionary sort with germs, I’ve often reflected on the origins of my cleanliness. It’s the fault of my mother and uncle. As a school kid, I came home for lunch. My mother, like all good mothers, would tell me to wash my hands. I’d run upstairs, turn the tap on, play with my hair, turn the tap off and run downstairs for my lunch. Notice there was no hand washing.
My uncle was a regular lunchtime guest. He was studying science at the university and one day brought along some books for me inspect. Science books. Science books, full of microscope photos of germs. Germs on your hands. Germs in your snot. Germs on school tables and door knobs.
I was a princessy girly-girl. I barely liked fuzzy caterpillars.
From then on I scoured my hands raw.
Did I mention that I was a child of extremes?
Katherine Ashenburg can relate to my experience. In the introduction of The Dirt on Clean, she talks about standards of hygiene reaching absurd levels in the late 50s and early 60s.
Quote: The idea of a body ready to betray me at any turn filled the magazine ads I pored over in Seventeen and in Mademoiselle … A long-running series of cartoon-style ads for Kotex sanitary napkins alerted me to the impressive horrors of menstrual blood, which apparently could announce its presence to an entire high school.
Oh, the hysteria. Imagine smelling offensive and not even knowing!
The Dirt on Clean is a history of cleanliness from a Western perspective, and what I like is Katherine’s writing style. She’s chatty yet thorough, gossipy yet respectful. She shares, for example, without naming names, some of the stories people confess about their own overly enthusiastic cleaning rituals or, more frequently, their avoidance of soap and water.
In the closing paragraph of the introduction, Katherine refers to Benjamin Franklin, who said that to understand the people of a country, he needed only to visit its graveyards.
Katherine says, “show me a people’s bathhouses and bathrooms, and I will show you what they desire, what they ignore, sometimes what they fear–and a significant part of who they are.”
So what smell are you? Mango, vanilla, smoke and sweat?
What would Katherine find in your bathroom that would betray your true colours (or smells).
How old?
Sara says I’m thirty-wahoo.
That bunny was my favourite toy. A puppet.
Bernidy the Bunny. He was always getting me into trouble. Stupid bunny.
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