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our printers are all crap
Friday, May 2 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
This morning Gretchen was complaining about her Brother laser printer, which now needs to be powered off and on before every use and sometimes can't be made to work at all. So I gave it a look, ultimately, going through its terrible one-line LCD-based user interface to reconnect it to a WiFi hotspot. About the best I can hope for after that is that it will work for a few weeks before falling back into the loop of needing to be powered off before every use. And that's with a Brother, perhaps the least-shittified of printer brands.
Gretchen said that in her desperation to print something out, she'd tried my printer, a bulky Ricoh color laser printer up in the laboratory. But of course it has its own problems, and Gretchen found it had lain a ghostly halo of colors around each letter, a consequence of the colors being misaligned with respect to each other, a problem my printer has had since I reset it to factory settings in an effort to keep it from complaining about something I didn't care about. (Why the printer insists on printing with all the colors when just printing black is a mystery, but it probably has something to do with Ricoh being a fairly enshittified printer brand and using all the colors ensures I run out of toner faster.) If I remember to print just black and white when I print, this problem does not happen. But that is never the default, and it's hard to remember. So I thought this morning I'd buckle down and try to fix the problem. What followed was at least two hours of hell, with me using ChatGPT to find possible solutions and finding that none of them worked. Doing "color registration" is supposed to fix the problem automatically, but apparently after I'd wiped the configuration back to factory settings, the colors were (according to ChatGPT) too misaligned to fix with auto color registration. And there was no manual color registration. It's still possible I can do something by tweaking values reachable in a hidden screen via a special sequence of button pushes (it involves the number 1703), but I was gun-shy after doing something in there had it putting up the message "WRONG MODEL" on the screen until yet another factory reset. So I shelved the project of fixing color registration for the time being and started my workday feeling defeated.
Another issue today was my ongoing argument with Gretchen about facilitated communication. It's a stupid thing to argue about, but somehow it has become the biggest problem in our marriage. I'm happy to let the matter die, but Gretchen keeps bringing it up. Today at one point I flew into a rage when she tried yet again to bully me into accepting her views on the matter. I raised my voice and said I would never believe in facilitated communication, no matter what she told me, and that I actually consider it, facilitated communication, abuse. (I didn't say why, but the reason is that it robs an autistic person of her actual communication by hijacking her persona and making her into a puppet used for the communication of ideas coming from the facilitator.) Gretchen backed down after that, but she still found ways to bring it up.
After work, I decided to drive to the Adirondack cabin for the weekend. Gretchen wouldn't be coming because, she said, she needed some alone time. But we'd been bickering all day, so it was probably for the best. Just before I left, we had one last argument about facilitated communication in which I called her "crazy," which she didn't like. But then I loaded up the dogs and began my drive. I stopped at the Hannaford in Cairo (as I usually do) for the usual supplies, including road beer. But I'd cracked open a brewski early in the drive (just north of the Kingston traffic circle), so I made myself wait until I crossed the Mohawk to crack open another one. (I have completely ritualized my open container behaviors so as to avoid ever driving while genuinely intoxicated.)
Temperatures were fairly warm at the cabin, so there was no reason to start a fire in the woodstove. After unloading the car and noodling around briefly on my laptop, I took the dogs for a walk. We headed down to the lake via the Mossy Rock Trail, and we found it calm and glassy, bathed in the warm hues of the setting sun (it was around 7:00pm). From there, we hiked out to the lake's outflow, where the beavers have been adding to the newer second dam, the one just above the causeway across the outflow creek. The dogs wanted to cross to the creek's other side, which we did. But I didn't want to go on a big elaborate walk, so I crossed back over and hiked back to the cabin via the well-marked trail that snakes up through the cliffs. I ended up mostly drinking booze and watching true crime YouTube videos.
Woodworth Lake in the golden light of the setting sun this evening. Click to enlarge.
Neville walks onto the dock. Click to enlarge.
Big fiddleheads near Woodworth Lake's lower outflow beaver dam. Click to enlarge.
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