Help me spend money

[liv]

I have stuff lust, but I'm not sure where to start; would appreciate any advice.

1] I need a printer for work. Given my financial situation, and the fact that I'm likely to end up using it for a mixture of personal and work stuff (and can't be bothered keeping track), I'm probably going to end up paying for it out of my own money at least some of the time. It probably needs to double as a scanner (so I can make digital images of some of my experimental data), but I don't care about photocopying or faxing. I'm willing to buy separate machines if that's a better idea, though I am somewhat pressed for space as well as money.

Desired features, in order of priority:

• Reliability, as I have no way of fixing it if it breaks beyond making puppy eyes at mechanically inclined colleagues
• Cheap running costs I very much don't want a cheap printer with vastly expensive ink and toner, or worse, ink that you can only buy from one special approved supplier. I'm willing to pay more up front for something that's economical to run and doesn't break all the time.
• Speed I am quite likely to be printing out dozens of pages at a time fairly often.
• Variable settings Would be useful, though not essential, to print things like letters and research articles where the visual parts matter a lot at high quality, and things like mostly text research articles or train tickets at low, ink-saving quality.
• Colour Colour can sometimes be useful, especially for articles with lots of red and green fluorescent labelled bits. But I'll live without if it's incompatible with my other desired features, and I do want to have the option to print out in black and white most of the time (and not use up all my coloured inks to make plain text vaguely dark grey).

I've had good experiences in the past with Brother and I'm neutral to positive about HP. I have had bad experiences with Epsom, and I'm inclined to avoid them unless there's a really convincing reason to change my mind. Can anyone recommend me a brand and/or a supplier?

2] Given that I'm putting all my work on my personal laptop at the moment, I need a backup system. Should I just buy a giant external hard drive, or what? And if so, what features should I look for and what brand should I get?

3] I think I need a breadmaker. I'm not sure I actually do need one; it's yet another kitchen gadget taking up my working surfaces. P'tite Soeur thinks I should just make bread the old-fashioned way, and I take her point. I like the idea of something that I can just set up and leave to run overnight, as opposed to a technique that, while it's not particularly difficult or time-consuming overall, requires attention at set times over a several hour period. I have great difficulty buying fresh bread here, though; there is one fairly nice bakery in town, but it's a bit awkwardly located, and I am rarely available during shop hours, so I usually end up buying supermarket bread.

I have absolutely no idea what features are worth having in a bread maker, though! I am inclined to just get the next-to-cheapest from Argos and see how I get on with it, but if someone has experience with these things, I'd be happy to know what makes such a machine more pleasant to use.

4] I've already spent some money on a replacement netbook. I got an Eee 900A second hand from eBay, running Ubuntu, but the problem is that the vendor has forgotten to remove her user settings. I've not had any replies to my messages asking her to let me have the password so I can actually get past the start screen. pseudomonas said that the best way to deal with this problem is to reinstall the OS from scratch (since obviously I don't particularly want someone else's data or user settings anyway). Well, that's sort of a geek rite of passage, isn't it, but I'm a little nervous in case I screw things up. Reading around, it seems that it's rather tricky to make an Eee running Ubuntu talk to WiFi, and that's probably the main feature I need anyway, so that puts me off.

Does anyone have experience of running or installing Ubuntu on Eee netbooks? Should I go for full-fledged Ubuntu or one of the cut down versions specially designed for netbooks? Assuming I do manage to install it, what software do I need? Pretty obviously a browser (Firefox has Linux versions, right?) and a text editor, and that maybe just about it. Desirable but not essential would be a music player, and an office suite (Open Office has Linux versions, but I'm not sure how to choose between them). I assume a new install of Ubuntu include things like a graphical desktop and some facility for installing and updating stuff, right? Do I need to go and find specific drivers separately, and if so where's a good place to look for them?

In other attempting to be a geek news, I now have an official Dreamhack (Dreamwidth development environment). So that means I have to figure out how to run the hack myself, so that I can test and submit patches, rather than just playing around with the code and getting other people (mainly the wonderful afuna) to do the technical bits. I think that means understanding Apache and having another stab at Mercurial, and quite possibly some other stuff too. I've had this problem a lot with programming; I'm reasonably good at learning how to write code by looking at tutorials and trying things out, but I keep getting confused by creating situations where I can actually execute my code. But I'm pretty excited to be trying this out.

Comments

[simont]

Backup system: yes, I would say a giant external hard drive is the right thing. A few years back I used to attempt tape backups on the grounds that that was what other people I knew did, but (a) this requires much more fiddly specialist hardware and software and procedures, and (b) hard disks then increased in size by an order of magnitude and tapes didn't. I eventually stopped bothering to run backups on tape because they were just so much hassle, but now I'm using external HDs I am actually capable of running a weekly backup as part of my housework routine without forgetting or oh-I-can't-be-bothered-ing. (And it's rescued me once already this year.)

Rather than recommending a specific brand, my feeling tends to be that having multiple external HDs by different manufacturers is probably a good idea. I think multiple ones are worthwhile because that way, even when the computer is plugged into one backup disk, there's still one copy of your data not connected to anything, so that if there's a dangerous power surge that takes out everything currently connected to the mains (which has happened to me), that one survives.

I can't say much about your various other points, I'm afraid. My printer requirements are so different from yours that none of my own printer thoughts are likely to help you; my breadmaker was chosen for the sole criterion "has a gluten-free setting", so apart from observing that the Panasonic SD-253 basically works and doesn't actually set the bread or the kitchen on fire I can't say very much else that's useful; and netbooks are a field I have yet to explore, though I vaguely plan to have a look next year. However, I can at least answer one of the easy ones:

(Firefox has Linux versions, right?)

Yes. I'm posting this through one of them :-)

[liv]

Yay, this is super-helpful, thank you. Giant external hard drive sounds good, and easy rather than hassly to run regular backups is a big advantage. It probably is worth having one that physically lives at work and one that physically lives at home, and if I'm going to do that kind of redundancy, then different brands seems a good idea. My 80s child heart is kind of delighted at the idea that I can just go out and buy a terrabyte or so of disk storage!

Also yay gluten-free bread and yay Linuxy Firefox.

[elainegrey]

BTW, my backups are done over a firewire drive, that is firewire powered. It does seem faster than the USB2 drives (bus powered and plugged in). If you have a firewire port (IEEE 1394 interface aka i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx (Texas Instruments)) you might find the premium price worth the time savings.

[green_knight]

I've worked for a company that was relying on automated backups with... interesting results. Such systems are nice when they work, but remembering to back up your data once a week or whenever you've done something important probably works just as reliably.

I have a portable HD for quick access - you don't have to mess around with power supplies and the like, plus it's silent - and a desktop drive for backup backups, which is *not* connected.