So Argos are selling what looks like a half-decent scanner/laser printer yoke, pretty cheap. Great, except it seems to be sold with no USB cable. Meaning, sold in a non-working state - an incomplete product.
However, just down the bottom of that page, marked as "Essential Extras" is a gold-plated USB A-B cable costing a ridiculous €20 - that's 1/5 the price at which they're selling the printer.
There's an alternative non-gold-plated cable listed on that page for €10, which still seems expensive for a damn cable. Compare this with this €1.80 cable on Elara... under a fifth of the price for the same thing. Cheeky, Argos!

To top it off, the printer comes with a condescendingly named "Starter cartridge", meaning they don't even supply the printer with a full complement of ink. And Argos don't seem to sell any toner for that printer either. In fact, I can't find anywhere that explicitly offers this kind of toner in Dublin, although I probably wouldn't buy branded toner since it seems prohibitively expensive.

Why is buying a printer such a difficult, complicated task? With all the trickery, I always feel like I'll be getting a bad deal somehow. I'd hate to think what finding a mortgage is like....

freemind html export

FreeMind does a nice html export of mindmaps, which is handy... gave me an excuse to do a tiny bit of revision while converting my scribbled notes to colouredy digital form.

Have a look at Crypto 1 and Crypto 2 if you're interested...

quotes

Saw a couple of quotes today that struck a chord with me. The first is about work/life and the second should strike home with any decent student of computing science.

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage

Paul Hunter

A friend mentioned to me today that Paul Hunter, a very popular young snooker player from England, died last night. That's a real shock - I was under the impression that he was on the mend after fighting cancer for some time.
I'm very disappointed and saddened by this, as I considered Hunter one of the nicest young players on the professional circuit.