The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. -H.P. Lovecraft
Freedom has no barcode. -J.G. Ballard
RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. -Ambrose Bierce
There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything. -Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Who then is free? The wise man, who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty, or death, nor bonds affright, who bravely defies his passions, and scorns ambition, who in himself is whole and rounded, so that nothing outside can rest on the polished surface, and against whom Fortune in her onset is ever defeated. -Horace
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who will watch the watchers? -Juvenal
It takes a very long time to become young. -Pablo Picasso
It was also time to drop the the old inkjet beast off at the component recycler; wanted to make the most of any drive over there. After considerable research I chose a good home black and white laser printer :
Figuring conservatively (getting 80% of rated service on toner / drum, etc.) and rounding up (to more expensive) it looks to work out to about 3.1 cents per page, for the hardware side of things, over the cost-effective life of the printer before recycling it. (the drum is too expensive; at 12k sheets, it’s less expensive to recycle and start again; of course, 12k will likely never happen for me, hah).
Add paper costs (obtained locally) of another .9 cents for nice, jam-resistant in the past “internal use quality” paper, about 4 cents a page. Costs go down with “more enterprise grade” hardware, but up-front costs sure rise. I will manually duplex the tiny amount of printouts I need per month, since it’s a rare day that I actually print a page. I just got tired of inkjet “tech” drying out, and in my limited experience this isn’t a factor with lasers.
2.5W (1.4W Standby) – USB power only, no power converter or cable needed. one wire, yup.
I know that’s geekdom, but that’s pretty cool for the scan device to be using a whopping 2.5 watts while actively scanning in documents, etc. Even though I went for the first one, and will leave it unplugged when not in use (the vast majority of the time) the efficiency of the standard one is intriguing.
One thing many neglect : a true benefit of running your hard disks as FDE / Full Disk Encryption is that when you are done, there should be nothing to erase; the data is useless without your high-quality key.
Excerpt :
We discussed the importance of backing up the data stored on your computer’s hard drive in a previous story. But what happens if your computer is lost or stolen? Notebooks are particularly vulnerable. A thoroughly executed back-up plan will alleviate data loss, but do you want strangers perusing the highly personal information you’ve stored on that machine? We didn’t think so; that’s why we put together this guide to keeping your electronic data secure.
First, we’ll take you through the process of encrypting the data on your hard drive, so that you can use passwords to control who can see it. And since no computer lasts forever, we’ll show you how to scrub your hard drive so that no one will ever be able to retrieve anything from it when you decide it’s time to put it out to pasture.
Of course, I’ve enjoying watching many a hard drive scrub, and then sleep with the fishes. Commercial hard drive shredding is a fun day at the office
