That Tech Blog

Computer and technology products continue to improve, and color printers are no different. If you liked the printer your friend bought last week, just wait. You’ll be able to get one better and cheaper next week.

So, if you’re in the market for a new home or small office printer what should you get, ink-jet or laser? My short answer - laser. Let me explain.

When black ink-jet printers first came out you had to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. You could get a replacement ink cartridge for 20 bucks and you’re good to go. Or, you could buy an ink refill kit and refill your cartridge for a fraction of the cost of a new cartridge. Well, those days are long gone. Now you pay twenty bucks for the printer and $500 for the ink! Well, not quite, but it seems that way.

I’ve worked on printers with a single color cartridge and with one cartridge for each of the three standard colors and either way, you end up paying a lot for ink. So what do a lot of people do to save money on ink? They use their printer as little as possible. While this may seem like a reasonable solution it creates another problem; the ink dries up. Then when you go to print it’s all streaky because the ink has dried up and clogged the microscopic jets. So what to do now? You run your printer through the cleaning process, which, unfortunately, USES A TON OF INK!

Here’s the answer, buy ink cartridges on sale and stock up. Oops, wrong answer. Ink cartridges have an expiration date and usually don’t work after that date.

How about refilling? Most cartridges today use some kind of “smart” technology that knows when it’s empty and won’t work when refilled - plus it can be a real mess.

The reason most ink-jet printers are so inexpensive today is that printer manufactures use the same business model as cell phone companies, that is, give away the phone (printer) and make the profit by regularly selling minutes (cartridges). Add to that the natural trend of computer products getting cheaper and the fact that today’s printers are really cheaply made (notice I didn’t say “inexpensive,” I said “cheap”) and you’ll see $29 ink-jet printers all the time.

But don’t think you can just buy a new printer whenever your ink runs out, because most printers are sold with “starter” cartridges which are less than 50% full.

So, what about color laser printers? Color laser printers have been around for quite a few years now, costing about ten grand and weighing 100 pounds when the first came out. Now you can get one for under $300 that weighs less than 40 pounds. So obviously it costs more to purchase a laser printer than an ink-jet printer, BUT, the cost per page is much less with laser and the hassle is greatly reduced as well.

So, for routine small office and home use these days, I recommend color laser printers. To get you started you can look at this Samsung printer or other color laser printers at Amazon.com.

Passwords are everywhere these days. You need a PIN for your ATM card, a password for your cell phone voice mail - I even have to have a password to call my mom (just kidding). And that doesn’t even begin to take into account all the computer and online Internet passwords.

I’m going to give you a few tips on how to create a secure password, but one that’s not too difficult to remember.

The first thing you need to avoid is any word that can be found in the dictionary. Let’s take, for example, the name of my website, ThatTechBlog.com. A bad password would be “that” or “tech” or “blog” but a better password would be “thattechblog” since thattechblog is not a word in the dictionary.

But what’s an easy way to make the password thattechblog even more secure without making it too hard to remember? Well, one way is to use some capital letters since most passwords are case sensitive. An easy way would be ThatTechBlog. That’s a little too easy for someone else to guess, however, so a better option would be to capitalize the last letter of each word, like this: thaTtecHbloG.

Now, let’s get a little more sophisticated. What I’ll do now is show you how to replace some of the letters with numbers, but still make it fairly easy to remember. Since a capital E looks like the mirror image of 3 we’ll make that change so now we have thatt3chblog as the more secure password. Other number for letter replacements would make your password look like this: thatt3chb10g. As you can see I’ve replaced the E with 3, the L with 1, and the o with 0 (zero).

To make a password even stronger you may want to insert symbols to replace letters, giving you a password like this: th@ttechb!og.

These examples are all fairly easy to remember and are much more secure than a dictionary word. Here’s another password that is fairly easy to remember, however it is kind of hard to type: rglrrwxgvkif. At this point you may be asking, “How can that password be easy to remember?!” Stop reading right now and take a look at your keyboard and see if you can discover the system.

Did you see what I did? I took each letter from thattechblog and moved one letter to the left on the keyboard. T became R, H became G, etc. Since the A is all the way on the left side you replace it with L, just like you would replace Q with P or Z with M.

Now, if you really want to make a strong password you can combine the above methods and turn thattechblog into rg@Rrwxgv1if. That may be a little complicated just to check your Yahoo email, but for online banking I’d recommend getting a little creative and use one or more of the methods and not just using a password like “money” or something.

It looks like passwords are here to stay, so be creative, have a little fun, and make your online activities more secure. If you want more information about creating passwords, take a look at the book Perfect Passwords at Amazon.com.