Part 5: RIP old printer...

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This is my little series on the big move back to Australia. Perhaps I will look back in the future and laugh... or cry!
Part 1: Finding a Moving Company
Past 2: A Slight Travel Panic
Part 3: Comparing Crypto Tax Accounting platforms (Cointracking vs Rotki)
Part 4: A Week in Involuntary Stasis


I guess that it is only natural as we finish our closing months here in the Netherlands, that there will be various appliances and tools that are reaching the end of their useful lifetimes. Most of things will be sold cheaply, given away or just dumped... there isn't much use in transporting them to the other side of the world when they are just on the verge of falling apart anyway. Chief case in point is our car... we have run the little oversized shopping trolley (Peugeot 107) past what it was ever designed to do, and despite being much loved... it is a workhorse that is going to likely not survive much past our last couple of months. Hopefully, it WILL survive the last couple of months... because losing acceess to a car in the closing days will be a bit tricky for getting rid of stuff and getting things to the dump!

One of the things that we were going to get rid of was our trusty old printer... I have no idea how long we've had this Canon Pixma for. At the time, it was a decent cheaply priced printer... so I would wager it has been at least 10 years if not almost the entire 15 years that we have been here!

It has been incredibly useful over that time... especially with orchestras and various administrative tasks switching to completely online distribution of music, practice parts and contracts. Which is all fine and good... except that they would require actual signatures and printing of the parts. Which means that they are essentially handing off the costs of printing to the end user... or is it supposed to be for convenience and the environment? Anyway... I guess it can be a bit of both, depending on your point of view!

Unfortunately, our dear old printer died last week... coming up with an error that couldn't been easily overridden. It is a little bit inconvenient as these closing months find us with more than the usual load of contracts, forms and all the rest of that stuff that need to be printed, completed and then re-scanned to send back to moving companies, government departments and whatever else... and of course, the very moment that it keeled over and died was the moment I needed to print a bunch of forms!

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My first instinct was to see if the printer error could be just overridden or ignored... after all, the printer only needed to survive an extra couple of months. But despite my best attempts and some online hints and suggestions... it stubbornly refused to clear the error. The specific code is indicating a problem with the printer-head... which is likely clogged or damaged after years of use and abuse.... and a replacement head is going to cost more than the printer itself. So, not really worth fixing by replacement part.. and cleaning the printer-head will take a bit of time and effort that wasn't possible in this last week.

... plus, the printer itself was now in a designated no-go area for me due to quarantine rules!

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Luckily, we do live near a printer shop.... which is a short 3-5 minute bike ride away. However, the thought of interacting with a public computer just fills me with dread! For his particular print job, I would just take a USB stick that I could just trash in the bin afterwards... but I guess I would need to come up with a better solution rather than dumping every single USB stick that I used to stick into the public print computer.... and before you say it... yes, this is a touch over the top paranoid... but I like my digital life to be as clean and secure as possible (of course, whilst balancing for some degree of convenience). Or at least to not be the lowest hanging fruit...

Just out of curiousity, whilst I was at the print shop... I took a quick look at all the things that people had printed. A mixed batch of ordinary looking government forms that were to be completed by hand... some really interesting scans of passports and personal documents that probably shouldn't be on a public computer (I removed those...)... and screenshots of a potentially interesting WhatsApp conversation that was in Russian? Or some sort of Cyrillic character language. ... lots of pages of screenshots... with some pretty spicy photos.

So yes... not the sort of users that I suspect that I would trust sharing a computer with. Actually, I sometimes wonder if I would trust sharing a computer with anyone...

In the end, I have also now set up a dump email account that we can send print jobs to... it could be then just printed direct from the email account, and then the log in details could be changed and randomised after each visit to the print store.

Yes yes... it is all probably not necessary but it only takes one time for a big headache to occur... and over these next couple of months, we are definitely trying to keep the stress levels down by minimising potential headaches ahead of time!

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Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
Kucoin: My second choice in exchanges, many tokens listed here that you can't get on Binance!
FTX: Regulated US-based exchange with some pretty interesting and useful discounts on trading and withdrawal fees for FTT holders. Decent fiat on-ramp as well!
MXC: Listings of lots of interesting tokens that are usually only available on DEXs. Avoid high gas prices!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
Stoic: A USD maximisation bot trading on Binance using long-term long strategies, powered by the AI/human system of Cindicator.
StakeDAO: Decentralised pooled staking of PoS assets.


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The only safe computer is one fifty feet underground in a lead-lined concrete room with no internet access, no ROM drives, no USB, firewire or thunderbolt connections. Oh, and no power cord obviously.


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Haha.... yes, I'm digging as we speak!

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