Category: Tech

I’ve Changed My Mind

Bluehost has really pissed me off. If they don’t make me happy, I won’t wait until Trump is out office to shut down this site. I’ll do it before my plan renews at the beginning of next year.

What did Bluehost do to make me so mad? Here are a couple of comments I left for them on LinkedIn.

I am a 16-year customer, on a Bluehost chat right now, and I am not pleased. All of sudden, without prior notice, I need to buy a security certificate, just to log onto my email accounts with Thunderbird?! This is unacceptable!

SIXTEEN YEARS a customer, and out of nowhere you clobber my email client access without prior notification. Less marketing and more management, please! Send me a promo code for a Wildcard DV SSL to make me happy.

Follow-up: The LinkedIn complaint got a response. Cloudflare being the only change I have made in the past day, I put it on the table as a possible cause of the problem. Initially it seemed to be unrelated, because it should only affect website access, but now we aren’t so sure. Cloudflare is in the process of being deactivated. It remains to be seen if, assuming the process completes and Cloudflare is decoupled from my domain, e-mail client authentication works again. As I used to say at work, “Let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.”

Further Follow-up: Mail client access is working again for both sending and receiving messages. I’m waiting to hear what was broken and what fixed it.

Follow-follow-up: Bluehost doesn’t know. They’ve offered a suggestion as a workaround in case the problem returns, but that’s all it is. For the moment, it seems that Cloudflare, that should only touch WWW access, is mucking with MX access on my domain.

There is also the fact that whoever I was initially chatting with, AI or human, they guessed wrong and pointed me to a rabbit hole that would have caused me to buy an extra service that I don’t need. Major support points lost on that one.

The site is back to a “D” performance grade on Pingdom. 🙁 I will take reliability over performance every time.

Got My Flare On

I was busy watching silly cartoons today, rather than posting silly stuff here. I did, however, make a change to the site, by adding Cloudflare integration. It’s been enabled before, but there were some resulting issues that I didn’t feel like figuring out, so I disabled it.

Response time lately has been rather sluggish, and sometimes slower than merely “rather.” So, I’m giving Cloudflare another try, to see if it can speed things up.

If Pingdom is a valid test, the site’s speed rating has gone from “D” to “A”.

A day later, something went terribly wrong. Don’t know if Cloudflare was the cause, but it’s at least a possibility.

I’ve Changed My Mind

Exciting All EPSON Blog Post!

I continue to obsessively play experiment with the new Epson ET-2985 printer/scanner. Thanks to the low cost of ink tanks vs. ink cartridges, I’m not afraid to do some printing for fun.

This is a high-resolution image that I thought would be good for a printer test. (Enlarge everything here, of course.)

Painting by Norman Saunders based on a drawing by Bob Powell

The top print was made on regular copier paper. The bottom is on matte photo paper/card stock. You can see the better quality paper is a superior white.

Photo taken with Google Pixel 8a

This test was very interesting. When I went downstairs to check on the printout that specified matte photo paper, it hadn’t yet printed. The tiny display screen was asking for confirmation that the special paper was installed. Very impressive. After confirming, it started printing.

The most obvious difference between the two prints is the color shift in Robin’s cape and, especially, his vest. The regular paper on the left is a better match for the original image, but I prefer the way it looks on the thicker paper.

Now I will turn my attention to the Epson EF12 mini-cube projector I bought a few years ago for $700. That’s the cost of two replacement lamps for the vastly superior JVC projector I bought in 2013. (It was delivered on “Shelter in Place Friday,” after the Marathon Monday bombings!)

The JVC lamps last up to 2000 hours, while the Epson has a laser that lasts up to 20000 hours. Considering the JVC has 6000 total hours of use on it after thirteen years, I’ll undoubtedly be dead before the Epson’s laser wears out. Technology marches on.

I finally have a copy of the complete 1966 Marvel Super Heroes cartoons that’s worth keeping. I’ve been playing them on the EF12 from a USB stick.

Given the superior quality compared to previous bootleg collections taken from VHS copies, the cartoons must have been ripped from a UK DVD set, which is the only official DVD release the series has ever had.

Animation frame adapted from a drawing by Jack Kirby and Chic Stone

Not every cartoon looks that good, but even the lesser quality prints are good enough for me to no longer wish for an official release from Disney. The cartoons have excellent voice work and music, and I enjoy the very limited animation that’s based on stats from the comic books.

There are, however, some embarrassingly bad scenes with original animation, not taken from the comics. I must agree with Denro, who said, “You may have identified why the series hasn’t been released in hi-definition in the US.”

Drawing by … Roy Lichtenstein? 😉

P.S. I forgot to mention the projector screen is also from Epson. The ES3000 cost $200 when I bought one in 2013 to go with the JVC projector. The screen is still available today, but it now costs $330.

Nothing Up My Sleeve

For my final trick this week, I’ll give network printing a try. I’m on the porch, and I want a direct network connection from my Snapdragon/Windows 11 laptop to the Epson ET-2985 downstairs in the office. Without it being a shared device within the Windows laptop that has a USB connection to the printer.

That seemed to work. Is the printer available within the free imaging software I like to use?

Yes it is! Now I’ll scurry down to the office and see if the picture printed.

It did. Success!

Drawing by Reed Crandall

Scan-dalous!

I could never deny being an obsessive fiddler with settings. I’m playing with every possible way of adjusting the Epson scanner. The automatic setting does some things almost as well as the Canon did.

The processing on this scan is bright and de-screened, while effectively reducing the yellowing of the paper. The problem is a sharpening filter was added, and I really dislike that.

Enlarge this image and you can see there are ridges around everything, including the lettering. If I could disable that, I’d be pleased with this quality. Yeah, I know. Picky, picky, picky.

This is how it looks with only de-screening.