Bleeding your customers

Posted in: blog, inkjet by Jack on 2 September 2010 | View Comments

We’ve mentioned this before but now Yahoo! Finance has noticed the same thing.

You may be able to buy a surprisingly affordable printer at your local office supply store, but don’t start celebrating just yet. The printer companies make their biggest bucks on ink.

Over the life of your printer, you’ll probably pay more than 500% of the total price of the printer itself on ink refill cartridges. At $30, a 42ml cartridge of black printer ink comes out to 71 cents per ml. On the other hand, the Red Cross charges $200 for 500 ml of blood, which comes out to about 40 cents per ml. (Source)

A tip o’ the hat to Mike, our weekends sales associate, for passing this along.

Back to School with Phil McArtridge

Posted in: Phil McArtridge, blog by Jack on 30 August 2010 | View Comments

Real People, Real Savings

Posted in: Publicity, blog by Jack on 26 August 2010 | View Comments

Creating a basic SOHO website Pt. 2-templates and FTP

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by Jack on 25 August 2010 | View Comments

Now that you have a domain name for your business and a hosted website it’s time to think about what sort of site you want to build.

This tutorial is intended for those who, like us, want a basic website that provides information to your customers and provides a means for them to contact you for more, should they need it. That’s not to say that we want a boring and dull site. It should be interesting enough to catch the attention of web surfers who are looking for the type of service or product you provide without overwhelming them with music, flashing banners or slow page loading times. I’ll be using the experience of putting CW San Diego together as a guide throughout these posts.

The first order of business is to decide which type of platform you are most comfortable working with. There are many choices, from the complex and highly customizable (Drupal and Joomla are two of the more popular in this category) to the simple and easily constructed (like most of the “site builder” applications offered by web hosts). I like to compare Drupal to Cisco. Both allow you to do the same thing less complicated solutions do but offer a ton of options the others don’t. The tradeoff is that their systems are so complicated that you need special training to set them up. Cisco offers training to become “Cisco certified”; Joomla and similar frameworks do not offer specific training. If you decide to go the Joomla route, or if you want to have a website with a lot of flash content, you’ll need to track down a web designer with expertise in those areas. You’ll probably pay quite a bit to get decent results.

Perhaps you don’t want to put together your site, though. Maybe you have an employee, friend or family member with the skills to build the site you envision. Just remember, beyond the initial setup of a website there’s the sometimes daily need to refresh the content and keep the site interesting and attractive. Maybe you’re willing to pay a substantial amount every month to someone who will maintain your site for you, we weren’t. We wanted an option that allowed us to learn how to create and maintain our site ourselves.

A much more practical and easy-to-work-with framework for a SOHO website is WordPress, the software that powers CW San Diego. WordPress occupies the middle ground between the technically complicated Drupal and the totally unsophisticated and limited “site builder” type applications. Most of the templates available for the WordPress platform are feature-rich enough to use as is but also flexible enough to allow for a lot of customization. If you’ve ever used a desktop publishing application to create your own Christmas or birthday cards on a computer, you most likely have the skills necessary to build a reasonably effective website using WordPress.

The biggest advantage of using WordPress is its fan base. So many people use WordPress (WP) that they are constantly creating new themes and submitting them to the WP community and that community has a forum in which they offer advice to new users. The number of  plug-ins, little bits of additional software that provide a specific function to your WP site are as numerous as the themes. Currently the official WordPress site offers 10,932 plug-ins and 1,217 themes. Plug-ins and themes allow you to make your site as simple or complex as you desire. And the ease of installing and deactivating themes and plug-ins means you can experiment and try different configurations without having to start from scratch every time you want to make a change in either the layout or functionality of your site.

There is an official collection of WordPress themes here, and you can Google “WordPress themes” for even more. Most are free but there are premium themes available that cost from $20 on up. Select a theme that has the overall look you’d like to have on your site. You can always customize it later after it has been installed.

One last comment about WordPress. It comes in two “flavors”. You can download the software and install it on web space you are renting from a host (called “self-hosted”, this is the option we’ll be using for the rest of these tutorials) or you can let WordPress host your site on their servers. There are several reason that this is a less beneficial solution for a business site, none of which I’ll go into right now. Considering the low cost and flexibility of having a self-hosted site, I think that’s the best option for the SOHO business person.

Download and Upload WordPress

The next step, now that we have a domain name and webspace, is to download the WordPress software and install it on our website. Downloading is easy enough. Go to http://wordpress.org/ and click on the “Download WordPress” button. Pay attention to where your browser is downloading it. Once the download is complete, browse to the folder where you downloaded it and unzip the file. (Note: if you aren’t sure how to unzip a file then trying to install and maintain a website, no matter how basic, is probably beyond your skill set. Best to ask someone more comfortable with operations like zipping and unzipping, up- and down-loading and FTP to install and maintain your site for you)

Now you need to move these files from your hard drive to your webspace. The best tool for this job is a stand-alone FTP application. “FTP” stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, the standard for uploading and downloading files from the internet to a local computer and back. I have two favorite FTP applications, which one I recommend depends on the operating system on your computer. If you use a Mac or any version of Linux I’d suggest using Filezilla.  It’s versatile, feature rich and perhaps best of all, it’s free. If you use Windows you, too, can use Filezilla, although the shareware WS_FTP has even more features than Filezilla.

You’ll need to read and follow the specific directions for using either Filezilla or WS_FTP, but the basic idea is that you want to move the unzipped WordPress folders and files from your computer to your webspace. You’ll also want to check out WordPress’ installation instructions before you upload anything. There is a particular file you need to fill with information from your webhost before you upload to your site.

Now, providing you followed the directions from WordPress and used your FTP client correctly, you should have a basic website at your domain’s URL.

Next time we’ll consider content and SEO.

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Ink Cartridge Art

Posted in: Recycling, blog by Jack on 24 August 2010 | View Comments

I realize that my fascination with ink cartridges isn’t shared by many of you. I work with them on a daily basis, you probably give them a thought every few months when you have to replace them. Then they’re “out of sight and out of mind” until they run dry again. Not for me.

I see and handle them 40 hours a week. They’re quite interesting, complex electronics in a thin metal strip tacked onto a plastic box. Their designs are unique and their shapes suggestive. I frequently wish some could make better use of them once their productive life is over.

Faith Pearson has realized my imagination. She literally saw outside the box. Here are some shots of her assemblages, courtesy of Make: Online.

And yes, I can name every cartridge in each of those constructions.

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Designed to fail

Posted in: OEM, blog by Jack on 19 August 2010 | View Comments

You may notice that with some manufacturer’s cartridges, our refills don’t behave the same way the originals did when you first install them.

Several manufacturers have decided the best way to keep you buying only original cartridges from them, thus insuring a steady flow of profits into their coffers, is to make your experience with after-market cartridges as unpleasant and difficult as possible. The leader in this effort is Lexmark, but the other companies aren’t far behind.

Lexmark has a series of cartridges labeled “Return Program Cartridge”. This indicates a cartridge purchased for a couple of dollars less than the non-return program version, but one which obliges you to return the cartridge to Lexmark when it is empty. To ensure you do this they disable a portion of the electronic strip on the front of the cartridge when you first install it. Any attempt to reuse that cartridge in the future will produce an error and the printer won’t accept it. The only solution to this is to purchase the “A” version of the cartridge. For example, Lexmark has a #36 cartridge (Return Program) and a #36A cartridge (non-Return Program). Same ink, same ink volume, but the #36A can be reused where the #36 cannot.

Other manufacturers have taken a less drastic but potentially just as effective approach to their loss of profits. Some, like Canon and HP, have elected to put a chip on their cartridge that resets the page counter in the printer when it’s first installed. Inkjet printers have no way to measure the actual ink level inside the cartridge. Instead, every time you install a new cartridge, a page counter inside the printer is reset to zero. It then counts pages based on an algorithm devised by the manufacturer; so much print equals a page’s worth of ink. The industry standard is 5% page coverage equals one page’s worth of ink. Click here for examples of page coverage. By disabling the printer’s ink-level indicator the manufacturers hope to discourage their customers from using anything but cartridges sold by them. We have chip resetters for the majority of chipped cartridges on the market so this ploy doesn’t work all that often.

Manufacturers will try every trick they can think of to lock their customers into buying only original cartridges. The reason is simple and obvious: the majority of their profits come from the sale of cartridges. Almost all of the manufacturers are selling their printers at or below cost, knowing that they’ll make up the loss once you start buying cartridges.

There are a few instances where the manufacturer’s “designed to fail” tactic actually works, preventing us from refilling certain cartridges. These instances are few. For the most part we have ways to get around their efforts to restrict the consumer’s choice in purchasing ink and toner cartridges.

Creating a basic SOHO website

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by Jack on | View Comments

I was recently speaking with the owner of the restaurant where I go for breakfast during the week. He’s interested in setting up a website for his restaurant but has no experience with that sort of thing. I assured him that he wasn’t alone, many owners of small and home businesses lack experience at putting together a website and usually turn to a professional or talented friend or family member to do that for them. He understands the benefits of having a site and has some good ideas about what he’d like to feature on it.

I don’t claim to be a professional web designer. What I do claim is years of experience with setting up a domain and adapting WordPress templates to meet my needs. Because I’m not a rich corporation my overall goal is to do as big a job as I can on as small an investment as possible. Besides saving me money, building my own sites has also taught me a lot about HTML and CSS and gives me a feeling of control that having a professionally maintained site wouldn’t.

Since this project hasn’t yet begun I thought it might make for an interesting series of blog entries: Website design on the cheap from day 1.

Before you can start doing anything about a website you need to register a domain name, preferably one that reflects your business name. Unique domain names are getting harder to find for a .com domain so you may need to investigate what’s available for .co or maybe even a domain like .us. If your business name ends in “us” or “co” this could be an ideal solution. There are other domains that might apply to your type of business, like .biz, .org or .tv. To see if the name and extension (.org or .co, etc.) you want is available, go to the homepage of any domain name registrar to check. Registrars like godaddy.com and 1and1.com allow you to freely check the availability of domain names and if the one you want is available, they’ll also offer you web space on which you can build a website for your new domain. These packages (domain name+web space) are not expensive. We pay approximately $10 a month for our domain package.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name you need to decide which package works best for the site you want to build. Do you want to sell items on your site? Then you should look at business packages that come with “shopping cart” functionality built-in. This will save you a lot of time and effort trying to incorporate payment methods and SSH (secure shell access, also known as “https://…”) into your site.

Do you want an informational site only, no selling or need for secure access? Then many home or personal packages may be just fine.

No matter what sort of site you plan to build, the package you select should contain a few basic and necessary items: only consider a plan that offers at least one PostgreSQL or MYSQL database, ftp access (file transfer protocol, necessary for uploading files to your website) and email so you can have a yourname@yoursite.com email address. In the business world it’s more professional to have an email address on your domain than to have an AOL, Hotmail or even Gmail address. Look over the list of benefits to each type of plan the different registrars offer and pick the one that provides the features you need at a price you can comfortably afford.

So now you have a name reserved for your domain and a host for your website. In the next installment we’ll roll up our sleeves, go template hunting and learn all about the file transfer protocol.

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Other ways to print

Posted in: Printers, blog by Jack on 18 August 2010 | View Comments

Most of the time when we discuss “printing” we are talking about a traditional computer-printer setup; the printer connected to the computer with a parallel or USB cable and print jobs sent from a word processor or image application to the printer.

But did you know there are other ways to print?

Many modern printers are being sold with wireless capabilities. Used to be if you wanted to connect your printer to your wireless network you had to buy and configure a print server, one of the most frustrating and problematic pieces of technology released to the public. When I worked on the help desk of a major networking hardware manufacturer we used to hate receiving calls about print servers. Not very many home users saw the need for print servers, most were sold to businesses. The difficulty with configuring them and getting them to stay connected to the network made them unpopular.

This was before the wireless device revolution we’re now experiencing. Now your cell phone can connect to your wireless network, you can connect external storage devices, MP3 players, cameras, iPads and the list goes on and increases almost daily. Eventually all of our electronic devices will be able to network together and send data from one device to another.

A printer that’s a part of a wireless network can receive print jobs from any other device on the network. My camera can send an image to be printed. I can print out the webpage I’m reading on my wireless laptop. You no longer have to be sitting in front of your computer at a desk in order to print.

There are even wireless printers that, by means of a modified browser, allow you to surf and print directly from the internet, no computer required.

Another technology that has become nearly ubiquitous in cell phones and other personal electronic devices is Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a wireless technology with a shorter range than the 802.11 b/g/n routers most of us have, generally 30 feet as opposed to the average 300 feet of 802.11 wireless devices. Bluetooth is ideal for sending data to another device quickly and securely. Bluetooth in a printer is less beneficial than is wireless since the distance is more limited by Bluetooth. In some homes and offices you could easily be too far from the printer for it to connect.

There’s also been an increase in the number of ethernet-networked printers. These printers are connected to your network’s router with a standard ethernet cable like the one connected to your computer. Connecting to the printer by ethernet cable instead of making a wireless connection requires more cables running everywhere.

Finally, did you know you can “print” without even owning a printer?

Most word processing applications offer a means to “print to file” instead of sending a print job to a printer. This option is a bit different than simply saving a document. By printing to file you are saving a copy of your document as it would appear if printed out. Some applications also allow you to “print” your document to a file in PDF format.

Some people believe they need to print out every interesting thing they get in email or see on the web. You could save paper and ink by printing instead to a folder on your computer or external storage device.

Unpacking and preparing CW San Diego ink cartridges for use

Posted in: Tips & Tricks, blog by Jack on 9 August 2010 | View Comments

This tutorial covers a topic about which we receive at least one phone call a week.

Our ink cartridges are packaged to prevent damage to the print head and to prevent the print head from drying out from contact with the air. Since we don’t have the equipment on-hand to vacuum pack our cartridges like the original manufacturers do, we use tape and clips to achieve the same results.

1. Packaged ink cartridges

1. In the first image you see the cartridges as they appear right out of the box. They are heat sealed in plastic to reduce the amount of air to which they are exposed. They are also taped across the print head and the color cartridge is in a clip. These are more visible in a later image.

2. With the plastic removed

2. With the plastic wrap removed the clip on the color cartridge is more visible. After removing the plastic wrap you’re ready to remove the clip and tape.

3. Showing the tape and clip on the print head

3. This is a reverse view of the cartridges clearly showing the clip and tape that need to be removed prior to installing them in your printer.

We always tape the print heads on black ink cartridges but don’t always tape the color cartridges. When we use a clip there’s not any need to use the tape since both perform the same function. So you’ll always need to remove the tape from a black ink cartridge but on a color cartridge you may only encounter a clip.

4. Clip and tape removed

4. Here the clip and tape have been removed. The clip on the color cartridge has a thumb tab that helps in removing the clip. Set the cartridge on a solid surface as shown and push the thumb tab away from the cartridge. It should pop off as seen in image #4. You can also see in this picture that the blue tape has been removed from the black ink cartridge. Pulling on the red tab will remove the tape. This is a very light-adhesive tape and should never be replaced with ordinary Scotch-brand tape as that tape leaves an adhesive residue that will affect the performance of the cartridge and may even cause the print head to stick to the paper as it passes over the page it’s printing on.

5. Tape and clip fully removed

5. Here the tape and clip have been completely removed. The tape not only prevents air from reaching the actual print head (see image #6) but also protects the electronic strip on the front of the cartridge. The “electronics” is that strip of copper that runs from the front of the cartridge down and around to the print head. Embedded in this strip are tiny wires that carry the electric signals from the contact points (the little dots in image #5) to the print head. The contact points match the contact points on the printer and deliver the signals that tell the cartridge where to put the ink and in what amount. If that strip is damaged or removed the cartridge will no longer function. This strip should not be touched as fingerprint oil will cause the metal to corrode over time.

At this point the cartridges are ready to be put into the printer. Keep the clip. It can be used to remove and store the color cartridge should you need to do so, as well as transporting the cartridge back to the store for recycling. We do reuse the clips.

6. The print head portion of the cartridge

6. Here you can see the bottom of the cartridge and the actual print head. This is what’s responsible for putting the ink on the paper. Make sure not to rest the print head on any surface that can be damaged by ink and don’t touch the print head with your bare hands. This image also shows how the light-adhesive tape is used to keep the print head protected from contact and exposure to the air.

Two points I’d like to stress from the information above.

1. Do not touch the copper strip that contains the electronic wires and surrounds the print head.
2. Do not replace the light-adhesive tape with normal tape of any kind. Standard adhesive tape residue will damage the cartridge.

As always, should you have any questions or comments please call us at 858-581-9191 or email us, cwsandiego.com

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Control costs in a SOHO business using Google

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by Jack on 5 August 2010 | View Comments

It can be expensive setting up a small or home-based business. There are supplies to buy, equipment to purchase or lease and infrastructure to put into place. You could easily spend thousands of dollars on new computers, copiers and printers, a faster internet connection, desks and chairs, lighting, office supplies like pens and paper and all the other bits and pieces that are required to run a business day to day.

Once your office is ready to go there’s an often unforeseen cost that may not pop up until you log into your computer. You want to present a professional appearance to your potential customers. On the internet that means having a domain name for your business and an email address that reflects the name of your company. Business people these days are not taken seriously if their business doesn’t have at least a rudimentary website or if they have an email address that ends with “hotmail.com” or “aol.com”. Most domain registrars offer low cost packages that include a domain name, web space and email to and from that domain for a relatively modest monthly or annual fee. With any luck you’ll have a relative or employee who will be willing to put together a website for your business.

There is a no-cost alternative that might fit your needs.

Google offers a suite of applications for domain owners. Google Apps for Domains consists of a Gmail account with your domain name (i.e. Sally@sallysdecor.com), an associated Google Site (a simple website), Google calendar and Google Documents. Google Documents includes a word processor (like Microsoft Word), a presentation application (like PowerPoint), a spreadsheet composer (like Excel) and apps to create forms and drawings. Google’s apps are not as robust or fully-featured as what is offered in Microsoft Office, but they are about $400 cheaper. They are certainly capable of performing the basic tasks an average SOHO business needs to accomplish. If your business requires more features, there is a paid version of Google Apps that offers more for only $50 a year per user.

A big benefit of using Google Apps over Microsoft Office is that your information is available anywhere you go as long as you can access the internet, even on your smart phone. It’s a mobile office in the cloud. This may present a security risk if your business involves classified documents or communications. But for the majority of us it’s a solution to the problem of having to be tied to your office computer to check or send email or update customer and client information. Even if your personal computer crashes or is stolen your email and data are safely preserved on Google’s servers.

You can spend $400 plus on Office and another couple of hundred dollars for CSM (Customer Service Management) software, but why should you when there’s a free to low-cost alternative that offers benefits those expensive suites lack?

If you have a SOHO business and haven’t yet found an affordable software solution for customer contacts and your web presence, you owe it to yourself to check out Google Apps.

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