So, wow, yeah.  Just got off a chat and then a subsequent phone call with Hewlett Packard support due to an issue I was having w/ a Photosmart 8250 series printer.  I received this printer as a gift from my father, brand new in the box.  He had gotten it a couple of years ago, but never used it.  We just had our first child and thought a photo printer would come in really handy to print out lots of baby pics for friends and family.

A week or two ago I went to unpack the printer.  I installed everything and went through the entire setup process, which completed successfully, except when it printed there was little to no ink on the page.  After inspecting the print cartridges it appeared that they had expired.  No problem, I went down to our local computer store and picked out a brand new set of series 02 ink cartridges.   These are the individual color cartridges – five of them – plus black.   I brought the old cartridges to the store to ensure I got the right ones.  After the purchase I tossed the old ones in the trash at the store.

Back at my office, I installed the new print cartridges.  Immediately I was presented with an error “Wrong Ink Cartridges Installed” on the control panel display.  A bit confused, I decided to google the issue.  I found this HP knowledge base article.  This page indicated:

This error normally occurs when print cartridges that did not come with the printer are installed during initial printer setup. The print cartridges that come with the printer are called introductory print cartridges . Introductory print cartridges carry special ink formulations required for printer initialization.

A bit surprised I decided to contact their support via the chat feature.  What follows is a brief transcript from that chat session:

Gypsy : i would like to inform you that this message displays when the orginal cartrtidges are not being used up with the new printer
JP Maxwell : I bought HP cartridges
JP Maxwell : specifically for the 8250
JP Maxwell : it says so on the box
Gypsy : please provide me few moents to use my resources to resolve thsi issue
JP Maxwell : ok thank you
Gypsy : thank you
Gypsy : please let me know the date of purchase of this printer
Gypsy : please let me know are you receiving my responces.
Gypsy : Not to rush are you still online iwth me.
Gypsy : with*
JP Maxwell : it was about 36 months ago
Gypsy : yes and teh warranty has been expired
JP Maxwell : yes I’m sure
Gypsy : and the installed cartridges were not working because you were not using the printer
Gypsy : so they dried up.
JP Maxwell : probably
JP Maxwell : so what can I do
JP Maxwell : should I just throw the printer away?
Gypsy : you can go for trade in option
Gypsy : and get a new printer from hp
Gypsy : as we have great offers
JP Maxwell : is there a way I can order new initial cartridges
Gypsy : sorry
JP Maxwell : so you’re telling me
JP Maxwell : that because the initial cartridges didn’t work
JP Maxwell : the entire printer is worthless?
JP Maxwell : I mean this printer is completely uselss?
Gypsy : yes, but you can go for trade in option on the printer

He offered to have his supervisor contact me to discuss the trade in options.  He offered me the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless Printer for $179.99 plus a $50 rebate if I sent in my useless photosmart printer.  That would be a total of $129.99.   A quick search on Amazon showed the same printer brand new retailing for $91.77.  Obviously the trade in wasn’t a good deal.

I then asked him about the issue w/ the photosmart printer and if I couldn’t just order the initial cartridges.  He informed me that it was impossible.  And he said that all cartridges that ship w/ these HP printers expire after 1 year.  I asked him if that then meant that the printers effectively self-destructed after a year?  So, all printers that HP ships w/ these cartridges are completely useless if they aren’t used within a year?  He informed me that was correct.

So there you have it folks.  Unbelievable.  Because the initial ink cartridges expire after 1 year.  And because they are impossible to replace.  HP leaves you w/ a completely inoperable device and w/ no apologies or options beyond over paying for yet another HP printer.  So in essence, all these printer ship w/ a self destruct mechanism that if they aren’t used they destroy themselves. Don’t know about you, but think I’ll be going with a different brand from here on out.

All your status belong to us!  For quite a while I have been intrigued by the p2theme theme from the folks at Automattic.  It also bothered me that all these status updates, were stored on twitter’s servers and at the whim of the twitterverse.   This past weekend, something happened that changed everything.  Wordpress decided to adopt the RSS Cloud protocol so that all word press blogs would be cloud enabled for a real time feed.

I talked to some of our developers and immediately we got to work on connecting a p2theme blog, status.jpmaxman.com, to my twitter feed.  It worked brilliantly.  Now, I can do all my status updates on my p2theme blog and they will instantly make it over to twitter.  From there I have a conduit to facebook & friend feed.  But, the origin feed, the master feed if you will, exists on my server and the content stays with me.  Should twitter get acquired and start inserting massive ads or get driven into the ground, I still have my status history.  In addition, as more and more services adopt the cloud feed, people can actually just subscribe to my conduit.  It can be a 100% peer to peer distributed twitter.  Dave Winer has been on a soap box about this for some time, and I’ve always agreed with him.  The Internet is meant to be distributed!

After thinking about this some more, I realized this goes way beyond status updates.  Any site – in particular news sites which we happen to run – could benefit greatly from a cloud feed conduit into other social media.  This conduit could update twitter feeds, facebook profile or fan pages, etc.  As stories are published to the news site they could instantly be syndicated to any number of places across the Internet.  As such, I decided to register: instafeed.net and put a public face to this.

We will be setting it up as an open source project and will be soliciting any help we can get in building this out.  Right now we are working on some top level architecture schemes as well as improving the core for an initial launch that will essentially just be RSS Cloud to twitter.

This is one of those projects that two weeks ago I would have never thought I’d be this deep into.  But, the pieces just kept coming together and it was too tempting to not see where it lead.  Contact me if you are interested in getting involved!