Print user sabotage

I spent the morning preparing an order of service for Monday's funeral and finishing my Sunday sermon. In the afternoon I received an email with photos of a hand-written eulogy for transcription and editing. In the meanwhile I found time to go to Lidl's for weekend shopping, and take a walk.

When I got around to printing everything off, the church office printer, a recent HP Envy wireless model, started announcing now and then that the print cartridge could not be authenticated as the correct one. By stopping and starting it, and rebooting the computer, I was able to print off what I needed to. Properly installed HP devices announce when printer ink is low and remind you to order new cartridges, but the message in question was on the small LED screen on the printer itself. 

This same printer was in use here this time last year, with no problems. I'm not even sure if it's had enough use to see a change of cartridges during the past twelve months. About six months ago, I read of this happening as a result of a software modification slipped in by HP when updating their devices to work with Windows 10 changes. Each 'authentic' ink cartridge carries a unique digital i/d to distinguish it from cloned bargain copies made in the far East. 

This has been so for some time for certain newer models, but the roll-out of the software modification that makes identification of the true from the fake has taken somewhat longer it seems. It's a printer ink equivalent to digital rights management for music and photos. Except. Except, that it doesn't work perfectly, universally, and I can imagine why this shouldn't be the case, number one reason being world wide inconsistency in connecting to the Big Data systems which harbour such tiny morsels of information, and handle billions of related enquiries daily.

I have no doubt that the office printer cartridge is authentic, and probably comes from the supplier which sold the printer. It's not even as if it's a new cartridge, but one in normal use, until a Windows update sequence a couple of weeks ago. If my memory serves me correctly, it's possible to roll back the most recent HP update to see off that error message preventing the machine from working. This takes time to figure out however. I am increasingly short of time, care and patience when it comes to Windows 10, and clever stunts like this pulled by giant money making corporations to protect their interests by placing their clients at a disadvantage. 

Past operating system updates have forced redundancy on older hardware, still working well. Great for profits, but it helps generate an ever bigger mountain of waste electronic hardware, much of which is not properly re-cycled. You think you own a system you bought, and are then informed you're no more than a leaseholder with limited rights over the software to drive your device Thank heavens for open source software alternatives, and the beginnings of open source hardware, both of which leave the owner in control of their assets.

Anyway, with a little messing around funeral texts and Sunday sermon got printed off. Then I began to wonder if I'd be able to get this sorted before I needed to print again, for next weekend. So, I set to, and produced a Remembrance Sunday sermon a week in advance, and printed it off despite the warning messages, just in case. Forewarned is forearmed!

Publication challenge

I went to St German's this morning and celebrated Mass quietly in the side chapel for a change, as the school is on holiday and no class was in attendance today. The OT reading for the day from the Book Ecclesiasticus extolled the practical dimensions of wisdom. It struck me that it applied to both electors and potential episcopal candidates. I wondered if the electoral college would be listening to the same readings in the Cathedral in their morning worship.

In the church hall after Mass, day centre manager Marisa appeared, all freshly suntanned after a holiday in Montego Bay. I found myself thinking about my study tour there back in 1982. She spoke about the sand being sharp, not just hot, and that sprung a memory from deep down. Some of those gold-to-white sandy beaches have, I believe, a high gypsum content. Its powdered crystals are more abrasive than common silica, and this you can feel, if your feet aren't hardened to it. 

The only time I felt this was when I walked barefoot on a beach in Jamaica on a fishing trip, helping to launch a large balsa wood longboat from the shore, in the company of a nephew of Charlie Smith my Jamaican curate in St Paul's Bristol. The island has undergone huge development due to the holiday industry since then, yet still widespread chronic poverty is never far away, as Marisa observed on her dream holiday, I'm pleased to say.

I came home with a little job to do. Peter wanted to create a template using an existing design of which he had a paper copy, as a frame for editable text for a publication he hoped to email out. He could cut and paste a copy to scan into a pdf by cut and paste, but the file was too big and refused to send. I started by telling him how to change the scan resolution settings, and end by taking the job home to see if I could produce what he wanted, and find out the easiest way to teach him how to achieve this for himself. Fortunately familiarity with a variety of tools for editing scanned images and using OCR made this not too hard a task. 

Nowadays I rarely use anything other than Libre Office, but realised I needed to produce an editable file to load into MS Word and not ruin the layout. I used MS Word on-line for testing as the computer I was using didn't have Word installed. But Microsoft's ODF file format isn't wholly compatible with the internationally recognised Open Source ODF format, and neither is their DOCX file format, so loading them obliges you to re-format work to be of any use. It's particularly onerous when working with text and graphics. Eventually, I switched to a machine which has MS Word installed, plus Libre Office, and confirmed the findings. Then I had an idea, and saved the Libre Office product as an old fashioned bog standard DOC file. To my delight, this loaded perfectly into MS Word. Libre Office has been able to create and to some extent edit PDFs for years. This has only appeared in recent version of MS Word. Previously an extra PDF plug-in was required for MS Word to match up to Libre Office, which is still evolving, getting slicker, more capable with each update thanks to collaboration within the global Open Source software programming community.

Several years ago the government administration of Munich converted to Linux desktop software and use of Libre Office. The majority of networks linking computers run Linux anyway, but this was a major step forward, destined to save tens of millions of euros. Since Microsoft decided to move one of its regional headquarters to Munich, the government has been debating the abandonment of this policy and is proposing to revert to MS Windows 10, at least optionally, no doubt supplied at a bargain discount. 

Major challenges to Microsoft's near monopoly of money making desktop software are bound to be met with moves of this kind. The competitive option, however, is to create free software which works at least as well as the paid version, and meets the actual needs of users rather trying to manipulate users into acquiring new needs, or even worse, forcing redundancy on to perfectly serviceable hardware by refusing to update drivers that are compatible with Windows upgrades. If it wasn't for open source software engineers writing or customising hardware drives Microsoft can't be bothered with any more, a lot more devices would fail to work, and the mound of electronic detritus would be even bigger.