Easy Tech Talk

My Ink Cartridge Debacle and Why I Should Have Used an HP Coupon

Doug — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:54:46 +0000

This is a guest post from Ryan F of The Blog Content Guild

As a grad school student, I use a lot of ink. It seems like I have to buy a new ink cartridge for my printer every month. It’s frustrating to pay for printer cartridges with my meager teacher’s assistant stipend money when I want to be saving my money to buy more exciting tech-related things. Sure, I could get a deal with an HP Coupon every once in a while, but the price of new cartridges always seems high. So, one fateful day, I decided I would refill my cartridges for a fraction of the price at a cartridge refill shop. I did some research, read some Yelp reviews, and found a place pretty close to my house that would refill both my black and white and color cartridges for around $20. I was amazed that it was going to be so cheap. In retrospect, I should have known saving that much money was too good to be true. Here’s what happened:

When I took my refilled cartridges home from the shop, I was feeling good. Spending less money on cartridges meant that I could set aside more money to buy myself a new iPhone for Christmas. Plus, I had helped the environment. My cartridges weren’t joining the 85% of cartridges that end up in landfills. I was actually doing something useful and eco-friendly with them.

I popped the refilled cartridges in my printer, opened up a document on my computer, and sent the document to the printer. The printer started warming up, and everything sounded normal. I watched as the first page emerged from the printer. To my dismay, there were big green blots all over the paper, and the text was orange, instead of black. I hoped the results of the first print job were a fluke, so I tried to print the same document several times. Each time, the paper came out of the printer covered in unsightly green splotches, and the text color remained orange.

Then I took the cartridges back to the refill shop and asked if I could trade them out for some recycled ones that would work with my printer. Unfortunately, my printer didn’t react too kindly to the recycled cartridges either. After four trips to the refill shop, I was fed up. Every page I tried to print with the recycled cartridges looked like an abstract impressionist painting.

The story ends with me getting a refund from the cartridge refill shop, taking a trip to an electronics store, and paying full price for new cartridges. The new cartridges work like champs. Refilling printer cartridges might work for some people, but it didn’t work for me. Looks like I’ll have to find a new way to cut my printing costs, so I can save up to buy some tech toys.

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San Diego Comic Con

Doug — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:41:52 +0000

A few weekends ago I was able to attend San Diego Comic Con and wanted to share the pictures I took while I walked the convention. After playing around with several image resizing programs and image gallery plugins I finally got all the images from San Diego’s Comic Con up. You’ll have to excuse some of the weird ratios (some images are squished, some are stretched), but this is what happens when you take hi-res photos and then size them down.

Anyway below you will find my San Diego Comic Con gallery with images (some of which might be considered NSFW) of everything from custom painted Xbox 360 consoles, cosplay, action figures, celebrities, Conan O’Brien, and general video game and comic book imagery. There is also an image of 2 of the Frag Dolls dancing with Tobuscus and a few shots of the AOTS folk.

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GalleryHosted.com Review

Doug — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:48:58 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of being asked to check out and talk about GalleryHosted.com and let me tell you that I’m glad that it happened. I was informed that it was going to be extremely simple to upload large groups of images and share it with anyone I wanted to. I went through the basic upload and also created an account to see how quickly these tasks could be completed. Below is my review of what I found at GalleryHosted.com.

The first thing that you will notice when you go to GalleryHosted.com is that the site immediately allows you to upload a large group of images (up to 300 at once) without the need to create an account. You are also allowed to specify the thumbnail size that you want the images to be displayed at once they are finished uploading. As far as uploading goes, you are given 2 options, the first option is your standard upload where you can browse your computer and select the images that you want. The second option is a bulk URL option that you can choose the urls where you other images might be already uploaded to other sites such as flickr or photobucket and upload them directly to GalleryHosted. Both of these methods are quite fast compared to other sites that I’ve uploaded to and when they were finished I was presented with an easy to view page with all my images on it and all the corresponding links that I would want for either sharing or downloading. Image upload speeds were very fast which is a huge plus and there is no storage limit.

This brings me to my next discovery of the site, and that is they allow downloads of either select images or entire galleries. That’s right, I said entire galleries! So if you are a photographer that needs to allow someone to download their whole wedding photo gallery, or a digital artist who wants to provide a quick way to download a portfolio of images, GalleryHosted is your choice for image uploading and sharing. I know it sounds a little cheesy but I was very impressed with this option and as far as I can tell they are one of only a few sites if not the only site that allows full downloads of galleries in one shot.

Once you have uploaded your images and go to the gallery in which they are hosted, you are provided with one of the sleekest image viewers I’ve seen in a long time. There is a row of thumbnails at the top of the page which display an expanded thumbnail if you hover your mouse over them. You are also given the option to view the gallery as a grid or slideshow. I prefer the grid view as it doesn’t require a new window or tab to open up and is quite fast at loading up.

Overall the site design of GalleryHosted.com is extremely clean and very user friendly. The only ads I could find were at the bottom of the gallery once it was uploaded and they were non-intrusive albeit in French. I would recommend creating an account as the registration was a snap and once you’ve complete the registration you are given the option to delete galleries that you’ve uploaded while logged in to your account.

I highly recommend GalleryHosted.com as an image hosting and sharing site and am definitely going to be utilizing their service as often as I can.

If you’ve used GalleryHosted.com before and would like to share your experience please leave a comment below.

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Easy Tech Talk’s 2nd Giveaway!

Doug — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:02:34 +0000

I got contacted by my friend over at Audials and was asked if I would be interested in giving away 5 more licenses to their Audials One software package. Of course I said yes which means you now have another chance at getting your hands on this awesome software for free. The best part about being contacted by the company is that they told me if I get enough entries they will send me more licenses for the software.

Before I put up the rules I just wanted to put a few bullet points about Audials’ software direct from someone that works there.

AudialsOne is a powerful search engine to find music and record it
AudialsOne can record movies form sites like Netflix, Hulu,
YouTube, and others
AudialsOne can record everything you hear on any website or
streaming application and automatically saves the file as a new
MP3 or appropriate file format on your computer

So now that you’ve had a chance to read about it, it’s time to win some free stuff! Here’s how you can enter for your chance to win free stuff:

Posting a comment on this post with a legit email address will get you 1 entry
Following me on twitter will get you 1 entry
Tweeting the following will get you 1 entry “@EasyTechTalk is giving away free stuff, RT this to enter the contest”
Posting about this contest on your own blog with a link back will get you 2 entries
Following @unmatches on twitter will get you 1 entry (she is a friend of mine and needs followers)
Subscribing to me on Stumble gets you 1 entry
Putting this post in an RSS feed on facebook will get you 1 entry

I’m going to run this contest until the end of the month giving you plenty of time to enter. So tell your friends and twitter followers to come by and enter the contest.
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Audials Software Giveaway!

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Easy Tech Talk’s Holiday Gift Pick

Doug — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:39:02 +0000

After missing the opportunity to make a holiday gift list last year, I’ve decided to pick one gift this year that I feel is one of the best holiday gifts to give someone, especially someone who is into technology and gadgets. The Flip MinoHD Camcorder camcorder is an excellent holiday gift for someone you know who is on the go or someone who is extremely mobile. This little camcorder can store up to an hour of HD video in its 4GB internal memory and has a flip out USB plug, which eliminates the need to carry a cable around with you to hook it up to your computer. It’s lightweight and compact which makes it easy to carry around so you can capture all the crazy hijinx that you might get into at a moments notice, and it also comes with its own software which will allow you to edit your video and email it to anyone you want. It also allows you easy upload access to any of your favorite sites like Facebook, Youtube, or Myspace. In today’s ever growing fast paced mobile world it’s good to have a portable camcorder on you so you are able to capture video of any event you are at. With the Flip MinoHD’s small size, you are almost always guaranteed that you will be able to take it anywhere that might not allow camcorders such as a concert or even a private event. I was a little worried when I first saw the flip out USB plug on the Flip MinoHD but after having the chance to use one of my friends’ and play with it a little bit, I found it was able to withstand a pretty solid amount of abuse without damaging the plug or the camcorder. All in all the Flip MinoHD Camcorder is an amazing holiday gift for that one person you can’t think of anything to get. And it’s pretty fairly priced for an HD camcorder of its size.

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