Jorge Herskovic

Microsoft tries to @Helps me

by

These last few days I’ve had a few unpleasant run-ins with support for different companies. These were not the result of mean people, but of uncaring and somewhat incompetent companies. Today I’ll be mocking the software titan, Microsoft.

I use Microsoft Lync a lot at work. It’s a good IM solution, and used to work fine. Then the latest patch came out (14.0.7). From then on, my Lync “experience” can be seen in the following Youtube video.

Bounce, bounce, login window, crash.

There are plenty of reports of this behavior over the Microsoft forums, but none of the diagnoses seemed applicable to me. So I did what the cool kids do, and contacted @MicrosoftHelps on Twitter. I sent them a link to that same video.

It didn’t start very well, because apparently they can’t look at Youtube. I guess they don’t want Microsoft Tech Support looking at cat videos when they should be confusing customers. Fine, I described the problem and posted a picture of the error.

Lync crash report

They sent me to a support article that seemed applicable. After all, it has a section that says ‘Lync for Mac crashes, and the user receives an “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”‘ error. Which is indeed the kind of error I receive, and I am the user.

The article’s suggested troubleshooting? Collect log files, which means basically “gather evidence”. Not troubleshooting, and not a solution. Ok, I guess I can collect log files anyway. Never mind that you aren’t told what to DO with the collected log files, and as far as I know they don’t submit themselves anywhere.

How do you collect log files for Lync? Why, by checking “Turn on logging for troubleshooting” in the Lync preferences! The ones you can access after you open Lync. Which crashes immediately after opening. Slight problem.

Let’s look around Microsoft’s extensive online knowledge base for clues.

Office for Mac? What Office for Mac?

Office support. Let’s narrow it down… waitamoment. I probably was thinking of that other Office, the one made by the other Microsoft corporation. Because this one’s products don’t include Office 2011, or anything else for the Mac.

Even though they don’t seem to make this product the @MicrosoftHelps folks are always willing to @Helps. They sent me to an entry in a support forum that suggested removing Lync completely and reinstalling it. I had mentioned that I had tried this before, but this didn’t really register in their support script. Whatever. This had happened before, so it could very well happen again.

Removing Lync completely is not for the faint of heart; it includes Terminal commands like

rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/MicrosoftLyncRegistrationDB.648884C7-A874-5125-9557-0AE3BAAE9BF8.plist

and more, which delete files in folders hidden from mortal eyes because Apple would rather you leave them alone, thankyouverymuch.

Not a problem here. I cut my teeth on Slackware Linux when you had to download it to floppies, and 32 bits were new and shiny and the Most Significant 16 bits were unexplored, and your 386 could or could not have a 387. When seeing a mouse cursor on the screen was not guaranteed AT ALL, much less if you used Slackware Linux, because X Windows (which WAS NOT WINDOWS) required a whole ‘nother box of floppies and gobs of hard drive space.

I recently connected a mouse wirelessly to my Android phone, via Bluetooth, and saw a mouse cursor on its 1920×1080 pixel screen. A mouse cursor which I could move around AND CLICK ON THINGS. ON MY PHONE. We yearned for 640×480 pixels back in those days, let me tell you.

Anyway, I am a Highly Skilled Terminal Artisan, so I rm-ved files and sudo-ed, and Trashed Applications and wiped all memory of Lync from my mighty Mac Pro and then installed it again. And lo and behold, it continued to crash, just like the last time I followed Microsoft’s instructions.

So back to twittering, like the Twit I am. This time the nice and patient folks at @MicrosoftHelps pointed me to a tech support site where “Tech Agents” that could @Helps lurk. I went to chat with a Tech Agent.

After listening (readening?) to me describe my problem patiently, the Tech Agent explained (in what inside my head sounds like an apologetic tone) that they don’t “do” Mac. He couldn’t @Helps me after all.

Mac? Like the Big Mac at the place with the clown?

Microsoft Pro support can be reached through a website that suggests that it’ll cost $ 390 per incident. No, thanks. I don’t want their @Helps that bad. @MicrosoftHelps took the knowledge that their tech agents didn’t “do” Mac products in stride, though, and pointed me to the Office support site to look around for more information.

The same Office support site that doesn’t list Office for Mac among its products.

I guess Lync will continue to crash for a while.

 

—-

For the initiated: I don’t know what Lync’s doing, but it’s making one of Apple’s system libraries crash. While trying to send a message. Which is something that happens thousands of times a second in any modern operating system.

This is likely to be a Very Bad Thing, and a result of (at a guess) trying to use unallocated memory or some other atrocity.

Partial trace follows.

Thread 0 crashed:

#  1  0x95d4ba87 in _objc_msgSend + 0x00000017 (libobjc.A.dylib + 0x00005a87)
#  2  0x96409a63 in __CFAutoreleasePoolPop + 0x00000033 (CoreFoundation + 0x00032a63)
#  3  0x9414c43d in -[NSAutoreleasePool drain] + 0x0000007A (Foundation + 0x0005f43d)
#  4  0x94153d92 in __NSAppleEventManagerGenericHandler + 0x000000D1 (Foundation + 0x00066d92)
#  5  0x963ada35 in aeDispatchAppleEvent(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*, unsigned long, unsigned char*) + 0x0000014B (AE + 0x00032a35)
#  6  0x96382fbe in dispatchEventAndSendReply(AEDesc const*, AEDesc*) + 0x0000002C (AE + 0x00007fbe)

You, too, can be a published scientist!

by

Straight from my gmail spam folder, the other side of the coin: solicitations for publications.

Phishing Phor Papers

Now that’s an enthusiastic Greetings!!! usually reserved for people promising me miracle drugs. Nigerian barristers tend to be more somber, which is reasonable given that they are usually informing me of the passing of previously unheard of (but very dear, and very illegitimately rich) relatives.

I sure am glad I am one of the “selective scientists” they have chosen! I don’t think they’ll consider this post “excellent work,” but whaddareyagonnado.

Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of what he kindly calls “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” at Beall’s list. If you are considering submitting work to a journal or publisher you haven’t heard of before, you should use his list as a starting point and do some research on your potential publisher. Unsurprinsingly, today’s correspondents are on his list.

 

You, too, can be an editor!

by

Part of being a scientist is curating the work of other scientists. This is called peer review. Peer review is critical to the well-being of science, because it helps ensure that the scientific record is important, correct, and has passed some level of validation before being put in front of other people.

Peer review is unpaid, tedious work. Most Universities know that their faculty will spend some time performing peer review. Official institutional CVs and promotion paperwork therefore have space for review activities, so that you can show you’re contributing to the larger scientific community. It also makes you feel like a good citizen, which it should, since no one will ever thank you for it.

A step above this (and a major time sink) is the -still unpaid- position of editor of a scientific journal. A good editor knows his or her field well, has plenty of experience in the peer review trenches, and performs invaluable service to the scientific community.

Being the editor of a scientific journal, or part of the editorial board, brings some academic bragging rights. It is also somewhat expected (implicitly, of course; no one will ever say this) that your friends and colleagues will want to publish their stuff in your journal. Whether it’s because of the expectation of better service, faster reviews, helping a buddy out, or perhaps a less careful look at the flaws of the science in a paper, is not normally explained.

This post was prompted by an email I get every few weeks. The company, journal, and sender are always different, but the content isn’t.

Editorial Spam

Where, oh where should I start?

Let’s begin at the bottom. You’d think that being invited to be the editor of a journal, a big honor, merits a personalized email drafted after (one imagines) much careful deliberation. I’d wager that being invited to edit Science, or Nature, or (a bit further down the ladder) our Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association gets you exactly that. No one has invited me to edit any of those, which is probably for the best. I’d be a terrible editor.

Being invited to edit this journal-that-shall-not-be-named comes via spam, with a telltale line at the end giving away that this particular “eminent personality” (me) was picked from a database, and will be invited to edit again by Mail Merge in the future.

Let’s move on to the actual meat of the problem, though. I’ve never published a paper in this field. Ever. My “immense contribution” to the field is exactly ZERO.

What is this, then? It is, like most spam, about money. This is an Open Access journal (fact carefully omitted from the body of the email), which means that scientists will pay publication fees if their papers pass peer review and get published. I strongly suspect that ANY paper sent to this journal will get published, based on their selectivity choosing editors.

It is, then, an offer of a line for my CV (“Editor for the Journal of IMPRESSIVE_SOUNDING_NAME”) and ego service (“Immense contribution!” “Eminent personalities!”) in return for the possibility of guiding some colleague with a paper that can’t-quite-get-published to an unknown Open Access journal edited by his or her buddy. Any paper will do; note that they strive to serve “biological, medical, and engineering fields”. I suspect that a paper on weather patterns in Mars is a-ok too.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: OPEN ACCESS IS A PHENOMENALLY GOOD IDEA. These clowns are polluting, distorting, and corrupting Open Access in the same way that “Barrister BENJAMIN KOFFI, A Legal Representative to late Mr.B A Herskovic” devalues email for everyone else.

Not that it matters, though. As far as I can tell from its website, this journal has never published an article. Nothing in the “current issue”. Nothing in “past issues”. “Articles in press”? Empty. It’s not included in the Journal Citation Reports or Scopus. Not that it should, given that it hasn’t published squat, but I checked for completeness’ sake.

How many editors does this journal that, so far, publishes nothing has on its editorial board? According to its website, twenty-one. It sure seems like a lot of people to edit zero articles, but it’s the only way to get people to consider the journal and get those sweet, juicy Open Access fees flowing.

Ick.

 

Complexity in MEDLINE – part 1

by

This is my first not-a-paper publication. I wrote it in a much more conversational style, which I greatly prefer.

After Randy Sheckman’s statements on journals such as Nature, Science, etc. I started wondering if there was a way to quantify what kinds of articles these journals publish. After all, the general perception (notwithstanding the allegations of inflated “brand value”) is that these journals publish high-quality science. I personally believe this is true, i.e., Nature and company do publish high-quality peer-reviewed science.

The trap that a lot of people fall into is believing that something not published in high-impact-factor (HIF) journals is of lower quality. I don’t believe this, so I wanted to test a different idea. My working hypothesis: that HIFs publish science that is of broad interest, so as to have a broad-enough readership to sustain their business model which relies on being very highly-cited (i.e. popular).

To test whether HIFs are “broad” we need two things: to define and measure “broadness” and to define “HIF”. We’ll start with the latter.

High Impact Factors

Some journals are simply widely known and almost universally recognized as “highly cited”. In medicine, those are the New England Journal of Medicine. Lancet. The British Medical Journal. JAMA. Nature. Science. Cell.

Household brand names, really, if you are in academic medicine. Their 2012 Impact Factors as computed by the Journal Citation Reports hover between 30 and 50. The Impact Factor, by the way, is the average number of citations an article published in the year n-1 and n-2 receives from articles published in year n. As an average, it’s subject to all kinds of problems. Suffice it to say that CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, had a 2012 Impact Factor of 153… three times the “measly” 51 of the venerable New England Journal of Medicine. Such is the power of averages; a few very highly cited articles in a journal that publishes few articles, and you end up with a small journal with a higher IF than NEJM.

Here is the histogram of citations received, since publication (ergo, a number higher than the one used to compute the IF) for articles published in 2011 in CA: etc.

Citations_received_CA_histogram

Fine, the first bar covers a pretty broad range that might justify the IF. Let’s try again, binning the data into 20 equally-spaced bins.

Cites_2011_CA_20_bins

Convinced yet? The use of impact factors is madness, yet for some reason people’s careers depend on it. One article, on Global Cancer Statistics (very handy reference material) got 2000+ citations in 2012. Of course that will be highly cited, and it’s great, useful work. But it drags all the other 0-citation articles (I’m not claiming those are bad, mind you!) up into the HIF stratosphere.

Regardless, Impact Factors aren’t going anywhere any time soon. So let’s use a rule of thumb to define a HIF journal. Talk to any scientist at a large academic medical center – most will complain that the “best,” flagship journal in their field (however they choose to define it) has an IF of around 3. This is true for Biomedical Informatics, of course. On the other hand, commonly-known HIF journals have IFs of 30. I’ll use these two as a heuristic and declare that a Low Impact Factor (LIF) journal has an IF ≤ 4. A Medium Impact Factor (MIF) journal has an IF >4 and ≤ 10. And > 10 is a HIF journal.

Broadness

My working hypothesis here is that HIFs cover topics that are of broader interest than LIFs. Under this hypothesis, LIFs are highly technical, thus having smaller readerships who -in turn- have small readerships, getting less citations.

So how general is the topic of a scientific article? MEDLINE can help. Every article in MEDLINE is tagged with MeSH headings: concepts from the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary assigned by a professional, highly-trained medical librarian describing what topics are covered in an article. There’s actually two kinds of MeSH headings for a MEDLINE article: Major Topics and non-Major Topics. Major Topics are what an article is about; non-Major topics are important things mentioned in an article.

 
        <MeshHeadingList>
            <MeshHeading>
                <DescriptorName MajorTopicYN="N">Algorithms</DescriptorName>
            </MeshHeading>
            <MeshHeading>
                <DescriptorName MajorTopicYN="N">Information Storage and Retrieval</DescriptorName>
                <QualifierName MajorTopicYN="Y">statistics &amp; numerical data</QualifierName>
            </MeshHeading>
            <MeshHeading>
                <DescriptorName MajorTopicYN="N">Internet</DescriptorName>
            </MeshHeading>
            <MeshHeading>
                <DescriptorName MajorTopicYN="N">Medical Subject Headings</DescriptorName>
                <QualifierName MajorTopicYN="N">utilization</QualifierName>
            </MeshHeading>
            <MeshHeading>
                <DescriptorName MajorTopicYN="N">PubMed</DescriptorName>
                <QualifierName MajorTopicYN="Y">statistics &amp; numerical data</QualifierName>
            </MeshHeading>
        </MeshHeadingList>

 

This is an example from the XML output of the record for one of my own articles. The nice thing about MeSH is that it is a thesaurus (in the Information Retrieval sense) – things have parents. For example, the MeSH term for Medical Subject Headings themselves is classified as

Information Science [L01]
   Information Services [L01.453]
      Documentation [L01.453.245]
         Vocabulary, Controlled [L01.453.245.945]
            Subject Headings [L01.453.245.945.700]
Arrow pointing to current tree node Medical Subject Headings [L01.453.245.945.700.500]

(you can look these up in the MeSH Browser). The relationships are IS_A, which means that Medical Subject Headings IS_A kind of Subject Headings, which IS_A kind of Vocabulary, Controlled, which IS_A kind of Documentation, which in turn IS_A kind of Information Service which itself IS_A Information Science. You may or may not agree with the exact arrangement in this taxonomy; for my purposes, I just want you to note that Medical Subject Headings is a very detailed concept: it’s five levels under Information Science in the MeSH tree.

You also need to know that the MeSH indexers are required to use the most detailed term they can. This means that the article didn’t just mention any Subject Headings: it mentioned something more specific. So an article like mine above was more specific than one that just dealt with Subject Headings, because it dealt with Medical Subject Headings.

You can probably see where this is going. We can use the depth of the terms assigned to an article as a measure of its generality or lack thereof – of its “broadness.”

MeSH terms can be in multiple trees at once. In order to simplify things a little, we’ll choose the deepest term position possible, effectively assuming that all concepts are at their most specific. In other words, when an article is tagged with the MeSH concept “eye” we’ll assume Body Regions->Head->Face->Eye for a depth of 3 (counting from 0) instead of Sense Organs->Eye for a depth of 1. This is arbitrary, but if we can still find a difference in depth despite assuming that everything is as specific as possible, it should be a robust result.

For our purposes, we’ll focus on Descriptors, which are the actual unmodified topics, and we’ll only take Major topics – things articles are about. We’ll collect them for all articles in every journal.  

Methods

You’ll need a copy of PubMed/MEDLINE in XML format for this one. Don’t worry, it’s “just” 13 GB. Hard drives are cheap. You’ll also need a computer with 8 GB of RAM at a minimum, unless you want to edit my code and make it more efficient. It’s probably easier to just buy more RAM. You know you want to, anyway.

You’ll then need to install xmltodict. How to install Python packages is beyond the scope of this article, but if

pip install xmltodict

or

easy_install xmltodict

don’t help you, you’ll have to do some Googling. Then you’ll want to take MEDLINE and turn it into a Journal name->MeSH Term->count dictionary. Who wouldn’t? Grab a copy of read_medline.py and build_journal_term_database.py. Put them on the aforementioned computer with lots of RAM (and many cores help too, by the way), and run

python build_journal_term_database.py <PATH_TO_MEDLINE_BASELINE_HERE>

You can use pypy instead of python for a speed boost, at the cost of Even More Memory. When the process ends, there’ll be a file called journal_major_mesh_terms.pickle in the same directory. It’s only 131 MB on my machine.

In part 2, we’ll compute some statistics on this dictionary.

Research and negative results

by

There’s a big debate in science about research and what to do with negative results. It boils down to more or less this:

We scientists publish only positive results. There’s a lot of reasons for this, some more valid than others. The first one is that it’s hard to prove things beyond a shadow of a doubt (Popper, stop spinning in your grave). Formally, you can disprove things. If we ever witnessed, and recorded, an apple that failed to fall from a tree and just hovered there, we’d have a tremendous challenge to our understanding of gravity.

We can accumulate evidence for things, and a lot of what we do is precisely that. But we can’t prove things as a mathematician can.

This leads to strangeness when science meets the real world. Witness the debate about whether evolution is “just a theory,” which is entirely predicated on a profound misunderstanding on how science works.

When you run an experiment and you don’t get results there are many things that can explain that. Perhaps your data was bad. Perhaps one of your assumptions was wrong. Perhaps you were unaware that you were making assumptions in the first place.

Say that, for some reason, I run a double-blind, randomly-controlled, properly-powered (i.e. with enough samples), long-enough, well-sampled (lots of brands) experiment to see if people who drink tap water get less cancer than people who drink bottled water. I have no idea why this could be the case, since I just made it up, but bear with me. Now imagine that I discover that the rate of cancer among people who drink tap water is 25% of the rate of cancer among people who drink bottled water, p<0.00001 and all that. It survives peer review and gets published in a major journal. The media will probably be all over it.

You won’t care why, and you won’t care how, but you’re damn sure switching the people you care about to drinking tap water from now on.

Eventually, someone will discover which ingredient in bottles is dissolving in the water, and how it affects human DNA, and so on. There will be entire scientific careers, many papers, and perhaps a few conferences on why and how this happens. But the fact itself that tap water is safer (or that bottled water caused cancer) is important, right here, right now.

Now picture the much more likely scenario in which I perform the same experiment, and find that absolutely nothing happens. What does it mean? Does it mean that bottled water is just as safe, cancer-wise, as tap water? Maybe. Is this unexpected? No. Most sane people fully expect tap water and bottled water to be just as safe as each other. The experiment, and its result, add very little in the way of new information to the world. This makes them less valuable.

There’s also the problem that I could’ve simply missed something. Perhaps my sample missed a brand with a radioactive bottle (Nuka-Cola?) and no one noticed, because the team never heard of it. When you get a positive result, there’s something there to dissect, analyze, and learn from. When you get a negative result, something isn’t there. You failed to catch it. What can be learned from it, at least as a first approximation, is that the same steps are unlikely to catch that thing.

This is why cryptozoologists persist. They can’t be proven wrong. You can’t show them that there is no Sasquatch. Most people, given enough negative evidence, will generalize that a statement is false and move on. Most of us believe there is no Sasquatch. We believe that there is no Sasquatch because people try and fail to capture a Sasquatch over, and over, and over. 

Those failed attempts to capture Sasquatchii, then, have a little bit of value to everyone. This is why the scientific community would like negative results published: because we can still learn from them. Some more (great, obvious ideas that should work but don’t), and some less (stuff that ends published in the Annals of Improbable Research).

Even if there are errors, and omissions, and mistakes, we should still learn from our work. But who’s going to curate, collect, peer-review, and publish all that?  Writing stuff up for publication is a lot of work, and reviewing is thankless, unpaid, and a lot of work as well. But here’s the thing: we self-censor everyday negative results. We don’t send them out for publication, we don’t bother too much with them.

We might as well just put them on the Internet, and let people quote and cite and learn from, or ignore, them as they will.

What if there’s a great idea there, and someone takes it from me? Well, I hope that humanity benefits, for one. I hope that they credit me, if they took my idea. And I hope I’m not so conceited as to think that I have many great ideas. A few good ones, I hope.

So I’ll start posting stuff I do here. It will be (hopefully) interesting, (perhaps) thought-provoking, (potentially) flawed, and unfit for regular academic publication. At least for the time being. If you like it, let me know. If you use it, please credit me – I am, after all, an academic, and need credit. If you improve it, or fix it, I’d love to know about it. If you don’t care about it, ignore me.

 

Purging plenty of piles of paperwork

by

Like any modern household, we deal with piles and piles of paperwork. From the legally vital (house deed), through the hope-I-don’t-need-to-use-it (various insurance things, contracts), to the obnoxious (no-interest* balance transfer checks for credit cards). For the latter, I have a good shredder and I’m not afraid to use it. But the former poses a problem: it tends to accumulate in piles around my home office.

(*Hope you don’t notice the front loaded transfer fee which technically isn’t interest!)

I started a filing system with folders, a labeler, and it worked pretty well for a few years. But now the boxes that hold the files are full, and I have no more surfaces to put boxes on top of.

I also have a scanner, which is part of an old Canon Pixma MP600 all-in-one printer. For a while, I did a pretty good job of scanning and shredding important paper, filing it away in an encrypted disk image by date, in PDF format. That’s a pretty good way of making sure it’s secure and available in the future. It’s not, however, searchable. I have to remember where I put stuff, and for that I need to remember when I got stuff.

My paper files are arguably better organized by broad “topic” and the topics are alphabetized. For paper, and things I’ll need very infrequently, it works well enough. The downside is that it has friction. I need to figure out under which topic to file things, or whether it’s worth it to start a new folder, label it, and add to it. For example, does Applecare go under “Apple” or “Warranties”? Does Health Insurance paperwork go into “Insurance” or is it important enough to merit its own folder?  (Answers: Apple, and yes.) Some people love making decisions and designing elaborate taxonomies for filing systems. I don’t; I’m of the Gmail and Apple Spotlight school of filing, i.e. I’ll toss it in a pile and search for it if/when I need it.

How to keep old scanners alive

My scanner also stopped being supported by Apple and Canon two OS X revisions ago (on 10.7). I kept it working with the invaluable VueScan but it has no duplex capabilities and no auto sheet feeder. In other words, it’s a pain to use. Not only is the hardware very basic; the lack of operating system integration makes several digital filing solutions not support it as part of their workflow.

Digital paperwork management

Those digital filing solutions, by the way, look great. I’ve been piloting Mariner Software’s Paperless with the pretty cumbersome solution of scanning page by page, saving PDFs, and importing them by hand into Paperless. I recombine them into single documents inside Paperless. It’s pretty easy: select the pages, right-click, combine.

Paperless looks a lot like other media management solutions such as iTunes or, my personal favorite, Mekentosj’s Papers (<aside>if you are in academia, you need it now</aside>).

Even with that pain in the posterior, Paperless already amazed me. It OCRs everything by default, filling in default titles and detecting dates as well as it can. It clearly has some database of common merchants; for example, I imported an invoice from Costco Optical and it tentatively titled the document “Costco” and filed it under “Retailer”. With a couple of clicks, I changed it to “Eyewear”. Nice.

Paperless Screenshot

I can see myself using Paperless going forward. But to make this work long-term, I need a better scanner. One that’ll talk to Paperless. One that’ll scan more than one page at a time without human intervention. One that’ll handle receipts and oddly-sized pieces of paper. And, hopefully, one that’ll scan both sides of things at once.

This sets up an interesting dilemma.

The choices

Here are the choices I identified.

  1. Stick with the current setup. Pixma MP600, scan one page at a time by hand and import it into Paperless. Pro: Cheap. Con: Cumbersome.
  2. Buy a new all-in-one printer with a duplexing, auto-sheet-feeder equipped scanner. Pro: New wireless printer for the family. Second cheapest. Cons: Throw away perfectly all-in-one in good working order. Guilt.
  3. Buy a dedicated scanner. These are called “document scanners”, by the way. Pro: Dedicated machine, can choose features carefully. Con: Expensive.

Option 1 is almost instantly out. If I was capable of dealing with the tedium of positioning every piece of paper one by one on the scanner, previewing, cropping, scanning, filing… I would be doing it, and we wouldn’t be having this post.

Option 2 was my visceral response. The most full-featured Canon (I gravitate towards Canon printers and cameras) all-in-one I could find was $119 on Amazon. It has an auto sheet feeder with a duplexer. In my experience, however, these home units deal poorly with receipts and have crummy manufacturer-specific drivers (see above re: no standard drivers for my current unit). They are throwaways. Mine works well, prints very nicely, and I have a drawer full of ink cartridges for it that I don’t want to throw away. It makes me feel eco-guilty to send a working unit to the landfill. The fact that the “good” candidate unit has mediocre reviews even on Canon’s own website makes me jittery about buying it, too.

Option 3 it is, then. The weird thing is that it’s much more expensive to buy a sheet-feeder, auto-duplex scanner without a printer bolted on. Here, I suspect, is where you see just how much the expectation of selling you cartridges subsidizes the price of the all-in-one. You aren’t getting a document scanner for less than $150, and those are “portable” units that scan only one side of a piece of paper and have no feeder.

The contenders: Doxie

First, the Web Two Point Oh choice of hipsters all over: the Doxie. There’s a lot to like here. For $219 you get a battery-operated model (the “Go”) with an EyeFi card, which effectively turns it into a WiFi scanner. This means I could put it in the kitchen, where I open mail, and just scan everything indiscriminately, effectively kicking the organization problem over to the digital realm, where I can just neglect it and search. Very tempting.

The Doxie also looks nice, in an Applesque sort of way. However, no sheet feeder means I’ll need to feed it by hand. No duplexer means I’ll need to care about running double-sided documents through twice and then stitch them together; and electronics in the kitchen is a pipe dream because my wife won’t surrender a single one of her precious square centimeters of kitchen to my gadgets. Finally, my trusted review source ArsTechnica thought it was plasticky and somewhat flimsy.

The Doxie, then, wasn’t for me.

The contenders: Canon

I had never heard of Canon in the context of small document scanners. But they make one, the ridiculously-named P-215 Scan-tini. Specs-wise it seems great (duplex: yes; feeder: yes), but there’s a small problem (other than the name). It’s sold out. I could pay a premium of about $100 more than what Amazon sells it for, or wait for it to be back in stock, but I’d be paying $280 for a $180 product. That’s unappealing.

I’d feel weird waiting for a “Scan-tini”, too.

The contenders: Fujitsu SnapScan

The SnapScan is widely regarded as the scanner to beat, and Paperless has special support to integrate with the SnapScan software. The SnapScan S1300i can duplex and has a sheet feeder. It doesn’t have WiFi, but neither does the Canon. The high-end model does, but it’s very expensive. The S1300i is $250, but the price is consistent and it seems well built, so I bought it. I’m still kind of shocked that it’s twice as much as a flatbed scanner with an entire inkjet printer attached. Of course, technically, the SnapScan contains two scanners, one per side.

$250 is cheap compared to some of the scammers on Amazon, though.

Screen Shot 2013-12-25 at 9.38.29 PMThis way at least I’m on my way to getting rid of all-in-ones. When the Pixma dies, since I already have a nice photo printer, I’ll get a laser printer. Cheaper to operate, and higher quality.

James Mickens is a great writer

by

A computer scientist, a systems programmer, a gentleman, and a scholar. And a Microsoft Employee, but he works for the Research division, so that makes it sort of ok.

But all of that pales in comparison to the most hilarious thing you’ll read on the Internet today, if you’re of a hackerish persuasion.

The Night Watch

FedEx Home delivery Part 2: success

by

In the end, FedEx managed to get the printer to a store on Saturday, and the automated tracking system emailed me. When I drove to the store… the printer was there, and I got it. Very uneventful. They did a good job of uniting me and my parcel. There was a bit more anxiety than necessary, but it worked out well.

Of course, this meant that I had to schlep 56 lbs of printer myself. My biggest challenge turned out to be getting it in the trunk of the car. Second challenge: fitting through doors with the thing. It’s huge. Look, here it is printing a letter-sized photo. It seems lost in a gaping printery maw. It’s a Canon Pixma Pro 10, and it dwarfs the little IKEA table I had handy. Fortunately, the thing’s quite stable.

Gaping printer maw

Also, hooray for built-in WiFi connectivity. This means I can put it on the other end of the room instead of finding very scarce space next to the computer.

The Pixma Pro 10 uses 10 pigment-based ink cartridges. Setup versions, so I already ordered a $ 135 replacement set. Unpacking each one and placing it in the printhead takes forever. It makes you think you’ll never be done.

10 inks

One weird thing about the pigment inks it that they are prone to sedimentation. The printer will regularly agitate them by moving the print head around by itself.

I’m very much looking forward to torturing regaling friends and family with high-quality gallery-worthy prints of Grumpy Cat beautiful pictures. So far, the quality of the prints I made on some Paper Pro Platinum I had lying around is outstanding. A black and white print looks fantastic as well; very little bronzing.

Finally, for the sake of full disclosure. The paper I had for greeting cards didn’t agree with the Pixma Pro 10 at all. The PP10 soaked the paper and the prints looked muddy. I ended up printing them in my old, obsolete, dye-based Canon four-ink all-in-one. They had worse color gradations, but overall looked much better.

FedEx Home Delivery: What?

by

I have a new printer being delivered from Amazon via “FedEx Home Delivery.” I didn’t pay much attention to the shipper, but after I missed the first delivery (attempted at 4:55 PM on a Thursday) I looked it up.

“When shipping your package to a customer’s home, you want it at their door at the time that works best for them. With day-definite, evening and appointment delivery times you can tailor delivery to when it is convenient for your recipient. FedEx Home Delivery serves 100 percent of residential addresses even on Saturdays (at no additional charge) and evenings, and is supported by a money-back guarantee.*” (from FedEx’s Home Delivery website)

Well, that sounds great. 4:55 PM isn’t a terrible choice of delivery time (school around here lets out at 3 PM), but of course it’ll miss every single-parent home, or dual-working-outside-the-house-adults home.

So let’s customize the delivery! Maybe I can get an appointment, or an evening delivery. FedEx website->tracking->customize delivery.

“Schedule your Delivery ($)”? Grayed out. (The $ means you have to pay extra for this)

“Deliver to another address ($)” Grayed out.

Well, maybe I’ll just use the Devil’s Choice and pre-sign for the delivery, never mind that there were reports of packages stolen from doorsteps this week on our street. Oh, it’s grayed out, too.

So I wait for Friday and see if they’ll deliver it when I’m home. I actually planned to work from home anyway, as I had a small mountain of forms to fill in and doing it from home somewhat counteracts the dreariness of paperwork.

Nope. I left at 4:30 to pick up the kids from school, and returned at 5:05 to find the “we missed you” tag on the door. The delivery ninja attacked at 4:45 PM.

It just doesn’t sound very convenient or customized for a… you know… home delivery.

So now my choices are to wait all day at home on Saturday (can’t do it), or to redirect it to a FedEx office. I ended up doing the latter. Not terrible, but inconvenient: I hoped to have the printer this weekend and use it to print our holiday cards, and it weights 25 kg. Now I’m going to have to schlep it around on Monday.

A First World Problem, sure, but a large part of the appeal of getting stuff from Amazon and having it delivered is convenience.

Part 2: Victory, on Saturday no less.