A Time of Magic

My very first printer was an Epson FX80 way back in 1982.

The epson printers have gone up and down in the printer wars over the years. Through most of the 1980s they were the printer to get but they lost their massive lead with the move to inkjet and laser printers after that when HP took the baton from them. That’s changing now though with Epson rapidly staging a come-back over the last year or two.

Back in the 1980s HP needed to provide compatibility with Epson, now it’s the other way around. Will we see that switch round once more in the next few years?

For personal scanning I’m sure the answer is generally yes though I’m tempted to get my slide photos scanned in sometime as I don’t think I’ll ever get around to doing it myself.

These days there are lots of document scanning services which take all the nasty business of scanning off you if you’ve a high enough volume needing dealt with. That’s how many companies operate when they want to get rid of their heap of paper files.

Boy does it get shot of a boring job!

Over the last year or so the amount of junk mail I’ve been getting has completely pulled away from my ability to cope with it. Going through anything up to 1000 emails to find anything that was worth reading was just too much and that was after the junk mail filters had done their work.

So, I’ve decided to approach the problem from several different angles.

Step one was changing all the email redirects that I use to go to my bulk mail mailbox which has the strictest junk mail filtering enabled. That thinned out the junk mail considerably  but there’s still quite a lot.

Step two was setting up a brand new mailbox. I’m now in the process of changing the redirects one per day to this mailbox. So far, the mail has remained reasonable but that’s because I’m starting off with the email addresses that were largely personal; when I get to those that were advertised in some way I’ll have to work through the legit ones and change them to something else.

Step three has been in progress for a while alongside the above and consists of deleting the redirects that I don’t really use. Unfortunately, one of these has the problem that it collects a lot of valid email and it also collects an awful lot of junk mail so I’ll need to wade through it all sometime and notify the legit people.

Bit of a hassle but I suppose that trying to stick to the same email for over 10 years was asking a bit too much when initially email addresses were much more visible on the Internet.