Sunday, December 3, 2006
Breakfast at Welcome Home with Patrick: oatmeal and banana, orange juice for me; 2 eggs over easy, 2 sausage, and 2 pancakes, coffee for Patrick. Ran errands in the Castro: Walgreen's, Cliff's. Home. Archived documents with the new scanner (all-in-one). There was a big backlog of documents to be archived since it took so long to get this new scanner. On October 1, we purchased the OfficeMax TS8200c cross-cut shredder to replace an old crosscut shredder I had owned for years. We've been very happy with this new shredder, which is an improvement in nearly every respect over the old shredder. The old one had a very heavy head unit, which made it difficult to empty. It handled only 5 pages (rated) and in its old age it could only handle 3 sheets at a time and the reverse feature was broken (only forward worked). It was time to replace the shredder because I wanted to be able to shred credit cards and cdroms—typical office store shredders couldn't handle these items when I bought this shredder years ago. The new shredder, the OfficeMax-brand TS8200c (item #20987737, style #OM96146, my receipt also says 00011491961466) is slightly smaller, has convenient casters, has a pull-forward leaning and removable bin for easy emptying, is crosscut (diamond-shaped), shreds staples and credit cards and cdroms, and shreds 12 sheets of paper at a time. The diamond crosscut pieces are slightly larger than the crosscut pieces created by the old shredder, but it should still be secure enough for home and most business users. The cdrom is not shredded into diamond crosscut pieces—I was surprised to find that cdroms are shredded into strips about 1 inch wide because the description on the box doesn't make this clear. You might be able to feed them through a second time to get 1 inch squares, but I think it's pretty unlikely people will go to that much trouble to get your data. I still haven't tried the credit card shredder (or if I did I don't remember what sizes the pieces came out). The shreddings from the cdrom and credit card fall into the same bin as the paper, so if you're strict about recycling, you'll need to empty the bin before you switch media. The shredder shreds with much more gusto than my old shredder. I have not yet had to use the reverse feature. The shredder also comes with a special oil packet that you feed into the shredder when you need to oil it. You can purchase these from the shredder manufacturer, but it's probably a lot cheaper to buy your own multipurpose machine oil, squeeze some lines onto a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and feed it in the same way you would the special packet. After shredding plastics (cdroms and credit cards), for additional security I take the pieces with me and deposit one piece in a different public trash can rather than throw all the pieces in a single wastecan. Recently I've modified my Flickr settings to make all sizes available for download. I had turned off the all sizes download feature because I feared people will steal my photos and appropriate them as their own or use them in ways against my will. However, it had gotten too cumbersome to share photos with others with the feature turned off. Flickr has an option to share only with "friends and family" (but not only friends and not only family), but they don't provide the level of granularity I would have preferred. I've also relaxed the licensing on my photos a bit, changing all of them from all rights reserved to a Creative Commons license. I am hoping that more good than bad will come of this decision. Did a lot of cleaning and vacuuming today. Finished installing drivers for the new all-in-one on all computers. Wrapped a gift. Dinner at home with Patrick: couscous-stuffed salmon, steamed broccoli. Archived documents. Did a tiny amount of work on Corinna's website. On occasion in the past I would catch a glimpse of backups running and noticing that files that were—or already should have been—backed up were being backed up. I only figured it out today when I saw some of my files in blue text rather than the normal black text (Windows XP Pro). Files in blue text indicate files that have been compressed, for example, after you run Disk Cleanup. Because these files are compressed, the backup systems I have in place now see the changed file as a new file and backs them up again, which essentially wastes space on the backup media. Obviously, this has been going on ever since my backups were in place. I can resolve the problem by wiping out the existing backups but then I have to remember to never compress files. (They'll be compressed by the backup software instead.) This puts my problem of finding good backup solutions in a new light and essentially makes visible a layer of complexity I hadn't realized before. We might not have to get rid of the Brother HL-5250DN after all. I found some support information that said to set the paper medium type to Thin Paper and that seems to have reduced the curl a great deal using 24-pound paper (haven't tested with 20-pound). I've set all our computers up with the fix, so we'll give it a few more weeks and see how it goes.