After some emotion with my first order from DirectCanada, the story was too good to stop so early. The second episode from that sequel is on shipping.

So - of course - free shipping can't be perfect. You don't select the transporter and you get the cheapest - Purolator. And as it's free, you can't really add a few dollars to get Canada Post. You'd have to pay a full normal shipping fee for that, which kind of beats the purpose of ordering from DirectCanada. So DirectCanada ships via Purolator, I'm not home when the shipments arrive, Purolator brings the shipments back to the other end of the town, and we have the setting for this great sequel.

The story begins 3 business days after my order when I receive a mail claiming that "[my] Order has been shipped". As I took care to select only items in stock, that's not what DirectCanada's "Fast delivery" slogan would evoke, but the real story starts in that mail's content. The mail refers to 2 shipments, Shipment #1 (marked as shipped), and Shipment 2, marked as Pending.

The next day, DirectCanada says my order was shipped again... OK, so when DirectCanada says your order was shipped, what they really mean is that part of your order was shipped.

But which part? That's the question; the mail indicates the products you ordered - but not those shipped. Nothing tells you.
In my case, the second mail referred to a pending "Shipment #3". Purolator attempted to deliver shipments 1 and 2 quickly after, while I wondered what would be in shipment 3. Later that week, Purolator started to nag me so I would come collect my shipments (even though I didn't know their contents). Reluctant to spend an hour just to collect some of the shipments and having to go back just after, I waited until Friday evening. At that point, all I knew was that part of my order was shipped and part of it was still missing (the website suggested the CPU might be missing, but that turned out to be me being misled by some kind of bug). I decided to call DirectCanada to be told that there was no Shipment #3. Shipments 1 and 2 were it. Something had been wrong with my order's status (something which persists 2 weeks later), and I had been waiting for a shipment which wouldn't come

Now, to be fair to DirectCanada, shipments 1 and 2 indeed contained all of my order's products, and these worked perfectly (except for 1 or 2 glitches). And, although I called in the last hour of DirectCanada's business week, my call was answered after 2 minutes.
For these reasons, I'm not going to discourage you from shopping there. DirectCanada is a good choice if you're looking for an amateur reseller.

Over 2 years after the last article in my Windows Firewall insanity series, it was time for the next chapter. So Microsoft pushed Windows 10 1809, which, like all prior Windows 10 updates, will start warning again about walls which aren't on fire.

But there's a new twist this time. On one of my Windows 10 installs, I can't disable notifications anymore. Now, instead of "Turn off messages about network firewall", the Security and Maintenance center merely links to Windows Security, which has many things, but obviously not the one thing which would keep administrators safe from mental insanity. If you see "Turn on messages about network firewall", you may think enabling and disabling again will do the trick, but Windows won't let you disable anymore after you re-enable.

Sorry, I don't have any solution this time.

The first PC I bought online was my third (OK, the first PC my parents bought online). I bought it from NCIX, despite the distance between British Columbia and Quebec. My next 3 PCs also came from NCIX. After an epically bad experience with months of delay, I bought my seventh PC at Future Shop. Last weekend the time to buy my next PC came and I came close to buy it at NCIX, but my friend Xavier suggested considering DirectCanada instead. In the end, I decided that was the better choice.

The good

• Prices appear to be lower (compared to NCIX).
• Total price is even lower as DirectCanada offers free shipping for most orders.

The bad

• Website as flaky as NCIX's
• Product categorization is basic - more than NCIX's
• Product categorization is incorrect - my RAM stick and many more are considered as "Physics card"
• No price matching (unlike NCIX)
• Product catalog might be slightly inferior to NCIX's

The really bad - almost

After completing all checkout, I was about to place my order when I had a last minute idea. I replaced an item in my cart in a different browser tab and came back to my checkout tab, which of course showed the outdated cart. I then clicked "Go Back". But instead of going back, my order was placed! Thankfully, the system ordered my current cart, so it did what I meant to do, even though that's not what I requested. In a sense, that's worst - the system not only ordered when I said to go back, but it ordered something other than what it offered me. I'm still struggling to believe it.

But what is DirectCanada?

I was amazed to realize that only 1 out of the 7 items in my NCIX shopping cart was unavailable at DirectCanada - I simply had to take a somewhat slower CPU. After noticing so much similarity between NCIX and DirectCanada, I realized they're actually associated. I'm not sure of the exact nature of this relation, but they essentially share the same products, website engine, physical location and policies. I wonder why they're not the same - perhaps history.

Now that the easy part is done, let's hope the hard part won't reflect cheapness too much and DirectCanada won't be a topic again on this blog

After giving up on my Epson WF-3620 all-in-one, I had gone through a sixth consecutive defective inkjet printer. 6 printers of 3 different models, from 2 manufacturers, in 2½ years. Going through such an ordeal is much less fun than looking back at it. Fearing loss of even more of my time and mental sanity by getting a seventh printer which would also fail near-instantly, I reviewed our needs and choices. Although I had always avoided laser because we print little (most of our usage is non-business), I decided to drop inkjet printers altogether and chose to replace with a laser all-in-one. After realizing that color laser printers were too massive, I decided to go with a monochrome HP all-in-one. After I gave up trying to add a M227fdw to my cart, I called HP and was told by an agent that was because HP had no such device in stock...

I then decided to go with a slightly less flexible but immediately available and considerably cheaper M227fdn (no touchscreen, no front USB port, no wireless). I thought I was lucky, since Debian stretch offers the very first hplip version which supports the M227 series. Setting up the printer was indeed easy after I remembered I needed to install the hplip package. I was impressed by printing speed.

Things got considerably worse with the scanner, which I connected via USB. I tried launching Skanlite, which refused to open with an error message. When I tried launching from the command line, it whined:

With such a helpful error message, I decided to try Simple Scan, which opened, but failed when asked to scan, complaining it was "unable to connect to scanner". After searching the web significantly, I was lucky enough to find the solution, given by another poor LaserJet user. The solution is to install hplip-gui, launch HP Toolbox, and install a proprietary plugin for that scanner (UPDATE: I can't get figure out how to do this in Ubuntu 19.04. I ran $ hp-plugin -i; instead.). While that solution does fix the problem, if the M227fdn does require a proprietary plugin to scan, it's easy to consider HP Linux Imaging and Printing's table of supported printer models, which lists the M227fdn as having "Full" support and as having "Scan to PC", as fraudulently misleading.

The LaserJet has a relatively powerful web interface, but reports cannot be viewed, only printed. Inexcusably, the 10 reports offered, including the usage report, can only be directly printed on the LaserJet, even with firmware 20180510. If you want to see how many pages you actually printed before buying a new cartridge, you can thankfully use Supplies Status in the Home tab. That will also give you the total number of pages printed (in fact, the number printed with your drum, which should support about 18400).

I thought setting up the scanner on Windows would be easy, but I was overestimating HP once again. After installing HP's software, I was somewhat able to scan using Microsoft's built-in utility, but I could not see a user-friendly application from HP. I tried the menu entry "HP TWAIN Administration". It is not clear whether that application is purely administrative or if it's supposed to allow scanning directly. The home screen says to click on "Numériser" ("Scan" in French), but there is no such button. The name suggests it's just an administrative tool, but I could not find where the presets controlled there show up.

So I went to the manual and found that after installing the software on Windows, there should be an "HP Scan" shortcut in the Start menu. Unfortunately, even though I installed 2 different versions of the software on 2 Windows 10 installs, none had such a shortcut.

Thankfully, I then noticed that in one session, HP did install an application called "HP Smart", which does allow easy scanning (among other things), and which works. Yet, it wasn't installed on the PC on which I used the latest installer, and it apparently only installs for the current session (you have to repeat for each user!).
A big applause for HP for such a failure... how Smart is that? It's HP Smart.

But, after all this time wasted, it seems to do the job. So here's hoping I didn't get a seventh consecutive defective HP all-in-one, and that this will be my last post about printers for a very long time...

Update 2019-01-02: After trying to copy a document, I must say this printer's interface is crap. I knew it would be less intuitive than a touchscreen, but having to use 4 different buttons to launch a copy, only 1 of which is labeled, caused 2 adults together to fail to copy a document until we gave up and consulted the user guide.

Update 2019-03-02: We printed 1979 pages on the original cartridge, but the output was starting to get gray rather than black. The web interface didn't show any fill percentage anymore (although a bar suggested 1% left). It had been several weeks since the printer started whining about low toner though, so I just adjusted the low toner threshold from the factory default 7% to 4% in the web interface's System tab (Supply Settings), since it's apparently quite annoying on Microsoft Windows. Changing the cartridge is not as easy as it was with previous printers, but it's straightforward enough once you know you just need to follow the pictograms, letting the printer figure out automatically it needs to initialize the cartridge.

Update 2021-01-27: Although printers apparently still stuck, this one has now lasted longer than the combined duration of my 5 previous printers. I am not going back to inkjet.

Update 2022-12-11: Although the M227fdn I purchased in March 2018 still works fine, I purchased a M227fdw in June 2020. Even if they have considerable flaws and the M227fdw has had a moderate print quality issue, I have now operated M227-s for more than 7 printer-years and still have 0 complete breakage, which should be well enough to conclude the HP M227 series is vastly superior to inkjet printers in terms of reliability for my use case!

After 17 winters riding bikes with often cold hands, I stumbled upon gloves specifically designed for winter biking. I decided to order Bontrager Velocis S2 Softshell Split Finger gloves from Montreal retailer Dumoulin bicyclettes. The retailer advertised the S1 gloves as good up to -5 °C, and the complementing S2 as good for "intense cold". Upon arrival, I found them incredibly light for such a purpose. And then saw the label which shows that the S1 are designed for about 3 °C, while the S2 was for the intense colds of... around -5 °C!

I still tried them for one ride, but after just 30 minutes of intense riding with these during a snowstorm, while the outside temperature was around -4 °C, my hands were somewhat cold, even though my torso was quite hotter than it is when I'm inside. These are not necessarily bad gloves, but for my purpose, these are just as bad as my current gloves, and in no way worth their 95 CAD price tag.

I called the retailer for a refund, and I must say the Dumoulin bicyclettes agent I spoke to was very comprehensive. He granted a full refund, including return fees, and convincingly apologized for the inconvenience.

These may do their job in Bontrager's U.S.A., but if you're in Canada or another country with a real winter, ensure you understand the label to the right before buying.

My quest for a reliable and acceptably powerful personal all-in-one printer is apparently over. See updates

I bought an Epson WorkForce WF-3620 networked inkjet printer/scanner/copier for 90 CAD.

Debian Jessie contains Epson's printer-driver-escpr 1.4.1, which supports that printer. But the CUPS test page I printed was incredibly pale. Upgrading to unstable's version of the driver (1.6.3) was easy, but the pages printed still had way too little ink, even though the cartridges were full (although pages were readable).

The workaround is in the end most simple. The default Media Type is, unsurprisingly, "plain papers-Standard". But surprisingly, that type gives abnormally pale pages. Changing that to either "plain papers-Standard-Vivid" or "plain papers-High" solves the problem. Both seem equally readable. The latter seems to print more slowly.

Except for a doubtful label in the Web interface (printing statistics are in a page named "Maintenance"), and a worthless sticker meant to make the printer French (they visibly sent the wrong model), everything but the drivers has been working fine so far. It has USB, Ethernet and 802.11 connectivity, another USB port for scanning to a USB drive, 4 ink cartridges, an automated document feeder, a web interface, a color touchscreen, actual buttons and more. Quite an upgrade over my last Epson (Stylus COLOR 200)

This could still be easily improved. The interface does not say that the ink level of cartridges is fine. It would also be useful to detail printing statistics further, for example by indicating the number of pages requested from each client IP address. And of course at what time cartridges were last replaced.

Update 1: cartridge replacement is deficient. Once you find how to initiate it, the instructions are wrong (no, you do not open the scanner to change the cartridges).
Update 2: Copying works most of the time, but has crashed the printer once (requires hard reboot - i.e. unplugging the power cord).
Update 3: The UI for print head alignment is ridiculously unclear.
Update 4: 23 months after purchase, black print quality suddenly dropped dramatically, making the printer essentially unusable for printing black. 200 CAD and many man-hours spent on cartridge replacement, manual print head cleaning, automatic print head cleaning and multiple alignments only worsened the situation. I have replaced the WF-3620.
2021 Update: Wired's Why Do Printers Still Suck? gives me the impression that many more stick to ink for too long. I am most satisfied with going laser.

When I joined Debian, Debian Weekly News was an important tool for me to follow the project. I must have read each issue until, during the Dunc-Tank controversy, I read the following in the introduction of the 2006-09-26 issue:

This was horrific not just from a public relations standpoint, but from a manpower standpoint. Having someone replace Joey would be extremely difficult. And indeed, at that point, Debian Weekly News did stop being weekly, before its last issue came out on 2007-07-03.

I cannot blame Joey for what he did. He must have been burnt out at the time, and if it wasn't for the fact that Dunc-Tank was unofficial, it would have been a good reason to leave. I felt compelled to take over from Joey, but that would have been too much work, and I never thought weekly news was a good format anyway.

But when I saw Alexandr Schmehl's call to resurrect DWN inside the Publicity team, I felt it was my duty to help. And that wasn't hard - the first issues had very poor quality, and I quickly started reviewing them.

A lot has happened since. Many people joined the team. Many people left. A few people got quite involved. Unfortunately, no one got involved as much and for as long as Joey did. And the news never regained their former frequency, nor did they approach their former quality. Few contributors officially resigned, but I guess I am the last one from the initial crew to quit. Over time, my involvement expanded to review all public communications.

Publicity team delegated

Fast forward to September 2015. Many of those in charge of Debian's public relations, including myself, were probably surprised to read Updating delegation - Press/Publicity/Bits. There were good news there. Despite the title, this was essentially making the publicity team delegated, which had never been done before. For the first time, the publicity team was officially recognized. Merging the previous teams was perhaps a good idea. But most members of the previous teams were no longer part of the new team, without any explanation. On 2015-10-04, I contacted the DPL asking what this was all about. As the mailing list has been broken for many months, only one of these mails has been archived. I am making these mails public by including them below.

Neil's answer came the next day. The next day, I replied:

Neil was then quiet for weeks. On 2015-10-24, I told him:

His last message came on 2015-10-26:

I immediately asked Neil to explain:

More than 2 months later, my questions remain unanswered. And therefore, as I warned I would do, I hereby resign from the Debian Publicity team (or whatever the team is called now, since that delegation apparently also stripped us from an official name).

Where are we?

A few weeks after this, Laura Arjona finally updated the team's wiki page. The page now lists what it calls "DPL-Delegated members". Unfortunately, things are still far from clear. The page now lists "DPL-Delegated members" and then "Current members". Some of the "DPL-delegated members" are not current members. Most of the current members are not DPL-delegated members. Even Neil, which is expected to be removed by his own account, still figures as a current member.

What happened?

According to Ana Guerrero Lopez's mail, this initiative came from at least Cédric Boutillier and herself. I have not worked much with these, but I would doubt Cédric Boutillier would have intentionally hijacked the publicity team. Considering Laura's edits, I would guess this was an unfortunate accident.

If so, by accepting to delegate without fixing and without verifying, the DPL may have simply done an error. Carelessness would be the only thing he could be blamed for. However, by spreading misinformation and disappearing from the discussion, the DPL has now also failed to fix damage he is (at least in large part) responsible for.

Unless we have a cabal trying to slowly perform a discreet coup, those indirectly kicked out can probably consider that they remain in the team. It remains to be determined how they now differ from "DPL-Delegated members".

Conclusion

2 DPN issues in the last 5 months is not much. There are surely problems for redactors. Solving these may help on the quantity side. Unfortunately, since I can count on my fingers the number of times I contributed content to the news, I cannot say what will help the most.

In general though, the team does extremely bad in recruiting and maintaining its members (either redactors or reviewers). I am not sure I have seen a single DPN issue with proper credits (despite a 2011 discussion of the problem). On the reviewing side, of the hundred issues for which I performed a final review, I could not find any issue or any significant error in about 10. This is not as much as I wish, but it seems the situation had improved with years. I hope whoever picks up this task can keep directing their remarks to the redaction side and eventually make reviewing less necessary. I also wish the team knows how to maintain these recruits for as long as I stayed, or longer. And I hope these will finally benefit from reviewing guidelines.

Other general issues having priority are of course fixing the mailing list and the VCS.

Debian has disappointed me in the last years. In a sense, this delegation is a good thing for me, since I probably no longer have the dedication to the project necessary to care about public relations. I am far from being as involved in Debian as I was when I started reviews, but I may keep reading DPN. Thanks in advance to those who stay… and good luck.

Update 2016-08-21

In his A year in the life of a DPL talk about his DPL term, Neil mentioned his delegation (at 17:45). Since it must have been harder to fix its problems, he seems to have found easier to congratulate this "fantastic" team, since it was "incredibly active and the amount of stuff we're getting now is absolutely wonderful"… even though the team had published merely 6 news issues in the previous year rather than the 52 published a full decade earlier.

Update 2018-05-27

Chris Lamb has updated the team's delegation to reflect the departure of Ana Guerrero Lopez and Cédric Boutillier, which leaves 2 people in the team. Even looking at the year before, the (yearly) number of issues had already dropped to 4

Update 2022-07-17

The team has just published a news issue… its first this year. In fact, in the last 3 years, the team which Neil calls "incredibly active" has struggled to publish even 1 issue per year. One thing hasn't changed though: it still uses the term "weekly"!

Congratulations, Neil McGovern. Your carelessness, but most importantly, your pride and unwillingness to show modesty after being told about your mistakes has managed to kill what was left of Debian's public relations - and in doing so, to largely kill Debian itself.

Update 2024-09

Is Debian waking up? According to its new DPL, whoever is left in the "incredibly active" team which published exactly 4 issues of its "weekly" news during the last 5 years now "wants us".🙄

With the advent of smart TVs, smartphones and other computers, humans need to be a lot smarter about their usage of technology. Unfortunately, we are quite dumb - in particular the underprivileged. And unfortunately, even the smartest have apparently gotten dumber, even when they control their use of their smartphones.
Good thing at least technology is getting smarter and smarter! Well, perhaps

I don't remember having seen "tofu" on my personal computer for a while. That's probably thanks to the Noto font, which came pre-installed with my Debian 9.

Thank you, Google!