No, you shouldn’t buy an Epson printer

Posted by: on Dec 4, 2011 | No Comments

Been true for years, but always surprised more don’t know this:

HP, Canon, and Lexmark all put print-heads inside their ink cartridges. Each time you swap an ink cartridge (which costs 50% of the printers’ price, I know), you get a nice shiny new print head. If the old one were clogged, it’s thrown out and you go on about your day.

Epson’s ink-jet heads are included with the printer. They clog. A lot. And they’re very difficult to get clean. And the “clean print heads” cycle is an excellent way to make all your expensive ink disappear without unclogging the heads. This is one of those idiotic design decisions that Epson has married itself to because it’s “distinguishing,” but it’s disguising in the sense that it’s awful, horrible and useless. And it’s been that way for years.

Higher-end Epsons fair better. I have a R1900 I’m quite fond of which doesn’t experience this problem. Take note: they could fix it, but you need to buy like 2 printers a year, right?

Already got an Epson? Set yourself a repeating calendar reminder to print something at least once a week — this should help at least stave off the inevitable perma-clog for a bit longer.

Good thing printers only cost like $50 these days.

Why is Comcast blocking access to the FBI?

Posted by: on Nov 10, 2011 | No Comments

Well, not blocking per se, but failing the DNS resolution of fbi.gov.

I was reading this article over at Ars today about how a botnet had managed to change the DNS lookup servers on millions of machines and make a fortune. Interesting, but you know, malware, rinse, repeat.

But then I tried to follow a link to some notice over at FBI.gov. It didn’t work.

So I went digging. DNS lookup was failing. (Sounded familiar after the article!)

Comcast gives me two DNS servers via DHCP: 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76. My co-consipator, also on Comcast but a lower-speed “plan” gets these DNS servers: 68.87.78.134 and 68.87.76.182. That’s 4 known Comcast DNS servers.

Three fail. Witness:

nslookup fbi.gov 75.75.75.75
Server:		75.75.75.75
Address:	75.75.75.75#53

** server can't find fbi.gov: SERVFAIL
nslookup fbi.gov 75.75.76.76
Server:		75.75.76.76
Address:	75.75.76.76#53

** server can't find fbi.gov: SERVFAIL
nslookup fbi.gov 68.87.78.134
Server:		68.87.78.134
Address:	68.87.78.134#53

** server can't find fbi.gov: SERVFAIL

One works. For whatever reason.

nslookup fbi.gov 68.87.76.182
Server:		68.87.76.182
Address:	68.87.76.182#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	fbi.gov
Address: 209.251.178.99

Here’s Google:

nslookup fbi.gov 8.8.8.8
Server:		8.8.8.8
Address:	8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	fbi.gov
Address: 209.251.178.99

dig, host, all yield similar.

Not the tin-foil hat type but this is bad. I don’t like fuckery in my DNS lookups.

WTF Comcast?