For the last several years I have been soldiering on with a little Amazon “Fire Tablet”. It’s been my go-to device for reading in bed and watching movies and TV shows when the rest of the family are hogging the television in the living room. It’s travelled all over the place with me – on trains, planes, and to distant hotels, restaurants and cafes while travelling with work.
It’s finally getting an upgrade.
My various endeavours at making some pocket money outside of work are now paying off well enough that I have spent some money on myself for a (very rare) change. I’m upgrading the tablet.
I just ordered last year’s Amazon tablet as part of their “Black Friday” sale. Through some careful use of discounts, trade-ins, and so on I managed to get it for roughly a third of it’s original sale price. Winning! Of course, I ended up spending everything I saved on a cover for it, but that’s just me being paranoid.
While upgrading or replacing things, I finally caved and replaced the printer at home too. For the last couple of years, I’ve been the only person that can print anything. The last printer we bought was the cheapest available at the time we bought it – we couldn’t afford anything better – and it’s turned out to be a bit of a nightmare.
I guess in many ways we’ve been living in the old story about the person that can’t afford the expensive shoes – so buys the cheap ones that cost half as much. Only the cheap ones wear out more than twice as quickly as the expensive ones.
Anyway.
A shiny new printer/scanner will arrive on Monday. One that everybody can print from. One that doesn’t need to be rebooted for no reason what-so-ever every other day. I dithered for quite some time about spending three times as much on a laser printer, but then convinced myself that we don’t actually print that much anymore – so went for the inkjet. When the kids were still in junior and secondary school that line of reasoning would have had an entirely different outcome – but they’re not anymore.
All we seem to print these days is packaging labels for the many and varied online sales portals. Vinted, Shpock, and so on (is that how you spell it?).
The overriding requirement for the new printer was that it had to work with Chromebooks. We’re slowly turning into a Google household. As our laptops and phones have failed over the years, we’ve replaced them with Chromebooks and Pixels. Anything that got retired in working order has been donated to the various charities around town that collect for those less fortunate than us.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to walk into town to buy some pizzas for dinner. One of my daughters shouted “Domino’s?”, and I immediately replied “NO! – you can buy four pizzas from the supermarket for the price of one from Dominos!”. They’ll learn.
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