Starship Krupa

Good advice to keep those notebook air vents clean. I forget to do it.

I don't know what the Twelve Tone era Cakewalk looked like, but as far as "light" themes go, head down to the Coffee House subforum and check out the "Boston Flowers" theme that Mariano just dropped. It's my new favorite light theme.

I found that my Windows 10 systems were better behaved after I permanently turned off realtime Windows Defender scanning, but Microsoft definitely do not make it easy for users of Home versions to do that.

If I tell you that it requires enabling a tool that Microsoft ships as hidden by default and then using that tool to turn off a "safety feature" that Microsoft won't otherwise allow you to turn off and you've already started Googling how to do it before finishing this sentence, then you're a good candidate. 😁

You have to enable Group Policy Editor, which ships hidden on Home versions of Windows 10, and then use it to turn off realtime scanning, which Windows rather arrogantly informs the user that it will only allow the user to do temporarily before turning it back on.

When confronted with this message I took it upon myself to restore the natural order of User and Tool in my home and did a spot o'Googlin'.

There's also a registry hack that will do it without all the Group Policy Editor business, but it's nice to have Group Policy Editor available.

Do this at your own risk; so far the only annoyance I encountered was a user on this forum who implied that it was somehow unethical to configure OS features from a command line or using regedit. Or something. It wasn't entirely clear what he was on about.

 Anyway, if you believe that it's unethical or against the terms of your license agreement to use anything but a GUI to configure your OS, then you should pass.

Bummer when an old favorite becomes abandonware.

My favorite audio file format converter is Mediahuman, which is freeware, cross-platform, and can handle just about any format, bitrate, bit depth, etc. MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, in both directions.

When I finish a mix, I render once to WAV with the DAW and then use Mediahuman to generate the different formats for distribution.

https://www.mediahuman.com/audio-converter/

If you need disc burning, InfraRecorder still works great and requires no serial numbers:

http://infrarecorder.org/

Which leads me to an annoyance, which is that by default, the installer associates .mid files with Cakewalk.

I doubt that everyone who installs Cakewalk wants to edit a MIDI file with it every time they double-click on one.

Do they?

I usually just want to listen to it.

Hey, The Chandler is here. Good to see you.

(Euthymia at the old forum and KVR)

On 1/21/2019 at 2:35 PM, Craig Pavone said:

I have a lot of trouble trying to move the blobs around.  I'll move a blob and the pitch doesn't change, or it won't let me move the blob.

I ran into that problem myself, and it turned out that I had the wrong option set somewhere. For some reason it was set to snap to a grid, so I'd try to move a blob and it would keep snapping back to its original location.

I figured "this just can't be happening, it can't be the way this works," so I dug into the help file and figured it out. I unchecked the option and voila, Melodyne started letting me move the blobs and they stayed where I moved them and the pitch changed.

Wish I could remember it offhand so I could share it with you, but it was months ago and I haven't used it since. Try looking for a way to turn off snapping to grid, or switching it to snap to scale or something.

You might ask about this in the Q&A or main forum before you give up on Melodyne. When I got it working properly, it worked a treat and was easy to use and very natural sounding.

Good luck!

Fab Filter is like a Ferrari of EQ 's. I usually like to mess about with some more economy versions before shelling out for a top-of-the-line item like that. That way I can learn what features are important to me.

It has a great-looking UI, I can see, but then so does the great-sounding EQ in iZotope Ozone Elements, which I got a license for when I bought a license for Hybrid for $1.

I will echo what others have said here: the Quad Curve is a very fine EQ indeed, and Meldaproduction's free MEQualizer will take care of most of your other needs.

Nova 67P is a good freeware dynamic EQ if you wish to experiment with one of those.

Nobody has mentioned a "color" EQ, so I'll mention one of my favorites, freeware, natch. Lkjb Luftikus. Standard 6 rotary knob analog-style EQ, great for touch-ups.

It's my current favorite "light" theme, Mariano.

One thing I found odd, though: when I applied it, I had a project open using Mattthew White's M-Spec, my current favorite "dark" theme.

The project has 4 tracks, and the tracks have pink, blue, green, and orange colors set. When I applied Boston Flowers, all of the tracks lost their colors, turned to your default grey.

5 hours ago, David Baay said:

It's kind of a superfluous option.

Thanks Dave. I was afraid of that. Not my first one.

11 hours ago, marled said:

But in one thing you are completely wrong! That guy in my avatar picture, he's really a "glass half-empty" one, it's me in 1985. Looks cool, doesn't it

You are busted as a total John Lennon clone, then. 😝

But yes, cool indeed. The shades and the expression are very much my "1985 face." The ladies loved it. I looked more like the guy in The Jam, though.

The '80's were my least favorite decade so far, but the silver lining was that as a 20-something, I had plenty to be disaffected about. 🤣

I find the Project/Record Preferences page to be perhaps one of the most confusing things about Cakewalk, and one area where the documentation is not much help to me.

For instance, this choice, when I call up Help, it says "If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different Take lanes when this option is enabled."

First, it implies that it only works if you have your Take Lanes expanded, which....that would be kinda odd. Is this its true behavior?

Second, okay, fine, I record mostly in Loop mode, so with every iteration, my clips are going to overlap, and I'll want a new take lane. But what if I didn't have this checked? What would happen? Would my clips just pile up on top of each other?

If so, it would be nuts not to have this enabled, the result would be disastrous.

What actually happens?

8 hours ago, Notes_Norton said:

Perpetual growth is the big problem with corporations.

Indeed. Another reason I bailed on the commercial software biz. Every company wanted to "go public." When I left, I swore that I never wanted to work for another publicly traded company again.

As soon as the company became publicly traded, it stopped being about selling our product and started being about putting on a shadow play for analysts.

You and I agree on many points about economics, Notes. (I want to call myself "Rests")

Anyway, I'm enthusiastic and optimistic about Bandlab's experiment. I can envision their collaboration platform becoming popular on a certain scale, and I can see many ways that Cakewalk will fit into it. It's no mystery to me how it could all work, and it'll be pretty neat if it does.

If it fizzles, and development stops, I'll be left with this great DAW software and will have to rely the people who own it to continue the free subscription or be kind enough to release a version with a perpetual key. For the value I'm getting now, it all seems quite worth the risk.

On 2/3/2019 at 2:33 AM, marled said:

Although there is some truth in it, very blue-eyed and optimistic, Starship Krupa!

I like freeware, too. There is some freeware on the net that is quite better than paid "shrinkwrap" (and CbB is one of the pearls), but on the other hand there is also a lot of crap out there! But that is also true for paid software. Sometimes I feel that software companies invest more in advertising and promises than in proper development!

Someone once affectionately (I hope) described me as "one of those annoying 'glass half-full' people." Like that guy in your avatar pic, it's hard-won. And I can usually back it up with examples and facts.

Just stating what is possible if it goes right. Anything can go wrong. Put a bad manager in the mix, an untalented programmer or two, I've seen plenty of promising products die sad deaths. I was at Macromedia when they killed Deck. 😲 Yes, one of the early, very promising DAW's, I was firsthand witness to its downfall.

Freeware is fun, but requires sifting through, vetting. Bedroom Producers Blog is great at that. That's where I learned that Cakewalk had gone freebie. Maybe I'll start a thread in the Coffee House for "other happening freeware."

It's so easy to wind up with 30 compressors and 25 EQ's when one should really focus on getting to know maybe 5 of each, if that many.

If somebody said to me "you can't get a top-quality mix using all freeware plug-ins" I'd say, "perhaps that's true in your case."

OrilRiver reverb, Unlimited limiter, Reaplugs collection, Dead Duck FX, there are some fine things out there.

8 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

FWIW, I don't think the "Free" upgrade to Win10 was an altruistic move by Microsoft.

Of course not. Microsoft exists to make money, and everything they do is to that end

And I hope nobody thinks that I believe that BandLab's licensing model arises from altruism.

The company BandLab exists to make money, and everything they do will be to that end. Meng as an individual may be a guy with altruistic principles, but that's not what corporations do.

The concept that I have been trying to hammer is that there are legitimate paths to making money that are not directly "I make a thing and you hand me money for getting to own it or use it or experience it."

Even in what we do, it's been this way for a long time, at least at the semi-pro level. Bands can lose money on the door, but make money on selling merchandise, or lose money on recording and printing CD's, but make a pile on touring and merchandise, or break even on printing t-shirts but make money on downloading songs or whatever. Printing fliers never made money, but we did it because punk bands HAD to have a flier for every gig. Kids collected them.

One activity loses money, but promotes and props up another that makes money. It shouldn't be so difficult for people to get that this might also be the case in the business of online social media marketing and associated apps.

BandLab had existing freeware DAW's when they acquired the IP from the former Cakewalk company. One for iOS and one for Android. Or maybe that was one, for two different platforms, whatever. And the one that runs in Google Chrome browser. Cakewalk was just adding another. Maybe they'll get one for Macintosh OSX at some point.

When we talk about Cakewalk in the context of BandLab's software business, it's really "Cakewalk and the other BandLab DAW's," because they were already a software company. If we want to know how good they are, we should be checking the reviews for their other DAW's in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

8 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

I am happily using CbB and rooting for its continued success, but remaining poised to jump over to one of two other DAWs if anything goes wrong here in Cakeland.

I believe this to be the wisest course of action whatever one's commitment/choice of main DAW.

I came for the price and stayed for the ProChannel and the sound, and became a booster based on observing the nimble development.

If the tool became unavailable to me tomorrow, I'd go back to Mixcraft and the search would start for another DAW.

I'm throwing myself into learning the intricacies of using Cakewalk. I don't expect the time and effort will be wasted. That's the thing, for all the hot air thrown back and forth about trusting Cakewalk to be around in the future, well, what if it isn't? It's up to the wise user to future-proof their studio and skills by making them not dependent on one single tool.

Got no Kontakt😥

Andy, you and I have more in common than we knew. I've done some mechanical design and drafting in my career, mostly sheet metal, and I was/am a pretty good printed circuit board designer. I'm old enough to have learned with pencils and tape and then switched to CAD in '83.

So you've already been exposed to the changes resulting from what I'm talking about: AutoCAD (I interviewed there a couple of times) was one of the first houses that I know of to switch to the subscription model. And you were there, the clients howled at first. I still have a gut-level dislike for that model, first because I like to own things, and second, I do a lot of different things and I might not even use Photoshop or whatever for a couple of months, and my middle name is Scott, if you get me (it actually is). I don't want to be paying a monthly subscription fee and then not using the program that month.

But in a market where we can have brothers and sisters still happily running Sonar 8.5, how can people make money from selling shrinkwrapped software?

My buddy Geoff whom I've mentioned around here, the Pro Tools man, he was one of these Pro Tools users who was Krazy Glued to Pro Tools 10. I guess PT 10 was where they made some architectural changes and dropped support for the PowerPC architecture on MacOS and some of their own interfaces, and early upgraders reported snags and it led to a lot of FUD. PT10 won't run on OSX past a certain revision and all this, basically your studio will be frozen in 2011 if you have it.

But he has this beautiful Mac Pro tower, and I was trying to collaborate with him, and I was sending him deals on plug-ins and asking him to download conversion software so we could both use FLAC, and his system didn't support anything. The software I wanted him to run wouldn't run on the old OSX, PT10 didn't know what a FLAC was, PT10 didn't know what an AAX plug-in was so none of the cool free and $1 Pluginboutique deals I sent him were any good. He started doing everything on his iPhone because his computer couldn't run anything.

I finally called BS and said we're going to get you on PT11. This can't go on. By the time I got him to budge, it was even PT12. I researched everything, and it looked like Avid had gotten their act together, and in the end it worked great, he was so stoked he maxed everything on the Pro out, and because he had bought the thing so many years earlier, he could fill it with all the RAM and SSD's he wanted for peanuts compared to when he first bought it. He went from 4G of RAM to 32, converted entirely to SSD. The thing runs like a rocket sled now. And we even have his whole PT10 system hard disk as a time capsule in case something goes wrong.🤷‍♀️

He bought the "perpetual" license (sorry if anyone cringed), but it was way difficult to find that option and choose it over the subscription. they really, really want you on that monthly gravy train. That's what their business model is these days. Anyone who wants the other, old kind of license is treated as an anomaly.

And I'm sure we all know, Adobe has followed AutoDesk into all-subscription land. Or they tried. Did they make it stick?

So maybe we should think of Cakewalk's license not as "here's a copy for free," but rather as a subscription that costs $0.00 per 6 months.

I don't know if BandLab's experiment is going to work. As a software industry veteran and industry observer (and very briefly, writer for InfoWorld) I am fascinated to see where it goes, though.

This freeware thing is becoming way more widespread. My computer was already full of freeware before Cakewalk by BandLab appeared.

I have 3 Windows systems, all were running Windows 7 until a month ago. Microsoft just did the same thing that BandLab does and gave me 3 free licenses for their current OS, Windows 10.

17 hours ago, synkrotron said:

Thanks for your large post there, @Starship Krupa, you make some good points.

But if you are "tired of going over it again and again," why bother? Just stick me on "ignore" and stress not.

I guess I found a second wind 😂. It's all in good fun.

Perhaps I twigged that you were an okay bloke who could take in new information. 😊

So. Since you mention concerns about the quality of the product going forward, there's an odd thing about software quality, and it's one of the reasons I've been so stalwart about defending BandLab's licensing Cakewalk as freeware.

20 years ago I was an in-demand software QA engineer, worked at some of the biggies (Adobe/Macromedia, Berkeley Systems, Informix). One of the biggest reasons that I left the field is that I came to the insight that there is an inherent disincentive to quality in shrinkwrap software (which means the kind Sonar was, stuff bought by regular consumers).

Back in my day it was sort of an "elephant in the room." Nowadays books and articles have been written about it, and I hope at least that companies know that they need to be aware of it and try to safeguard against it.

The big problem is that what sells licenses, and this includes new licenses and upgrades, is new features. Protest all you want otherwise, but that is the truth, we all, and rightly so, in my opinion, consider bug fixes something that we shouldn't have to pay for, at least not the cost of what the usual shrinkwrap upgrade goes for.

It's part of why companies are trying to go to a subscription licensing model: once a product gets to a certain point of maturity, having to grub for licenses by coming up with a dozen attractive whiz-bang features every 6 months can become unsustainable. It may be that the market becomes saturated, it may be that there are only so many features that can be added, whatever.

But that's getting ahead of things. For the sake of our model, let's look at "coding" as a black box that we pour money into and get software out of. And coding bug fixes costs the same as programming new features.

Now if we switch our Coding black box over to bug fixes, it's the same as turning it off, because bug fixes don't make us money. However, even turned off, we're still pouring money into it. We're still paying the programmers and all of the other infrastructure that supports them. So bug fixes cost money!

From the point of view of short sighted managers, and short sighted managers are unfortunately everywhere, they're even bad! If you fix the software that people already have, they won't want to buy the new version! And in defense of management choices, how many of us can say, if presented with a choice between the company surviving (and supporting the user base and the families of the employees, shareholders, etc.) and squashing a few bugs, what the "high road" would be?

I observed the effects of this directly, in my teams. My "producers," that is, the managers in charge of each title, got bonuses for shipping the title on time. "On time" was more critical in those days when software was sold via physical media. It would be introduced at an important trade show and have to be on the shelves at the big stores the next day.

What that meant, effectively, was that if I found a heinous crash bug 24 hours before we were supposed to go to manufacturing, sure, I'd be a studmuffin hero among the QA team, but up the chain the thanks would get less and less hearty. So I'd be the pariah for being good at my job. The better I was at my job, the more money I cost the company, because I switched the Coding Black Box over to fixing bugs. Who wants to cost a boss you like and are trying to please a $5000 bonus?

Now here we are, with our case of Sonar. A venerable shrinkwrap program's company was dissolved and the program itself sold off. Some of the former staff were hired back to continue work on the code, and the program reissued under a different name and licensing scheme. The parent company has a diversified portfolio in the music field, including instruments and an online DAW/musical social media site.

Cakewalk is positioned to continue as an updated version of Sonar, as well as function as an offline front end to the musical social media site. The company also has freeware DAW's for iOS and Android that function as front ends to the site. (everyone knows this, right? BandLab already had two freeware DAW's in the marketplace before they put out Cakewalk)

What does this mean for the quality of the software going forward?

For a single copy of Sonar, Cakewalk was paid hundreds of dollars, which went to pay programmers, QA engineers like I used to be, people to administer the beta program, artist relations, endorsements, power lunches with Microsoft insiders, etc. That was an incentive to put out a quality product. Nobody would buy it if it wasn't any good, right?

Now anyone can download the whole thing, and BandLab gets diddly squat. Revenue is zero whether anyone downloads it or not. Where is the incentive to improve it or fix bugs or add features or do anything at all to it? There's no threat of failure if it stinks, no reward for success if it's great. There's neither carrot nor stick, so what makes the donkey do anything?

Okay, remember our black box, "Coding?" It's smaller now, but more efficient. The new owners only hired back a small percentage of the old company's staff, and I suspect programming is done in home office(s). They don't have to throw as much money into the box because the infrastructure is shared, smaller, etc. Support is web only, no phones. There is no sales staff, etc. Fewer licensing fees to bundling partners. On and on, the costs that were once involved in making the old program are much reduced.

The new company is diversified and has deeper pockets than the former owners. As freeware, the program no longer has to sit up and beg for new license fees. There are no license fees to beg for. That means we can do whatever we want with the black box!

In my experience, programmers love being given the chance to go through their code and fix bugs. They tend to be picky and focused about their work in the first place, and who likes having something they made out there in the world with obvious flaws in it? It would be like a mix engineer shipping a track with a big plosive pop in the vocal and not being allowed to fix it and having to listen to it over and over. Noel and the other programmers may be exceptions to this, but probably not.

This goes for optimizing as well. Just like us, they look at it and think "I could do that so much better if I could take another pass at it." Well, who's got the keys to the black box?

And a loyal user base would usually rather have the smaller features they've been begging for for the the past 3 years than some new thing that only 5% of the people who use the software are going to touch. Case in point: those note values in the Piano Roll would not sell a new license or upgrade to anyone, but they are really nice to have, and it would be a pain not to have them. The interleave indicators are another. Rename Clip. Ripple Edit button. Export Module. Plug-in Manager. Fast VST scan. All these "little" things that when added up, make Cakewalk feel like a "deluxe" version of the program I downloaded in April 2018. But added up, could you even call it Cakewalk 2.0?

So there you are, Andy, that is my essay on why I think you have nothing to worry about, only things to look forward to, with a freeware licensing model. It's not something that reduces resources, which therefore reduces quality, it's something that gives the people who produce the software more freedom to make the program better, with "better" meaning what most of us would like it to mean. Faster bug fixes, features added that tend toward the useful rather than the flashy, and integration with a forward-thinking online collaboration platform.

Oh, also we don't have to pay any money for it.

For those who may have been bothered by the Ripple Edit button, and if you're a good theme junkie, have been bothered, the Ripple Edit button from Tungsten looks great as a replacement for the default "Mercury" one.

11 hours ago, Rico Belled said:

Thanks for those tips! Pianissimo is impressive for how small it is, but I don't love it. In sustained notes you really hear the lack of 'information' if you know what I mean. The Mini Grand is head and shoulder above it...

Now that mda ePiano is pretty awesome! I still prefer Lounge Lizard 4 and the EVP, but it's really quite good and much more playable than just about any sample based instrument. Even with the GUI is barely more than 1 Megabyte! It just goes to show how inefficient rompling really can be, doesn't it?

Are you hip to the MiniMogue 2? 

R

Y'know, since I'm more of a rock and pop player, I probably wouldn't have caught issues with Pianissimo's sustained notes. I'll check out Mini Grand if I wind up with an extra Jackson fluttering around.

Isn't ePiano something? I like Lounge Lizard well enough, but the thing that it misses that mda/Dead Duck gets right, is the "bark" when I lay into it, I guess it's the combination of the tines and the pickups getting hit too hard, it's like a slap bass. It's probably where the modeling method leaves sampling behind. As you say. That kind of thing is easier (and "cheaper" in software terms) to model than it is to sample. I don't think you could fit a multisampled Rhodes into 1M.

When you look at Dead Duck's GUI version, it really illustrates how many parameters they give you control over. Dead Duck is a force for good in the world because of that huge free FX package they have, but when he released the mda stuff with the GUI's, I thought that was just wonderful, to keep them going like that.

Yes, I am a casual fan of Minimogue and his other vintage synthalikes. Acoustica bundles them all into the Mixcraft package.

As soon as I saw "Acustica," my face fell. Being a connoisseur of free plug-ins (and software in general), I tried their free offerings a few years ago in Mixcraft and yow, the CPU hit was so, so not worth it. I'm not holding out much hope for the "optimize."

I'm not a great fan of having to install great big install managers just to get one plug-in, and that coupled with the fact that I'm frugal when it comes to my CPU cycles, and Acustica are a "no."

Also, their stuff is usually channel strips and compressors, and my DAW has channel strips built into it what whips the ass of anything else I've heard! My collection of compressors has no holes in it, either. Well, I'd welcome a faithful dbx clone.

They're all honeymoon reviews because we're in a hurry to get the $0.20 in Virtual Cash! I bought that pair of MIDI things that W.A. had on sale not too long ago and I can't friggin' get any usefulness out of them. Gave 'em both up in the 4-5 star range, though, 'cause I hadn't tried them.

About this Gain Rider, I've never used one of these things. Are they a valid substitute for automation? Everyone seems to have one, Hornet has one for ten bucks I think. Melda probably has one that goes for $25 on sale that has so many features you could spend a lifetime exploring all of them.

Despite being free?? Not having to pay a licensing fee is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. If there's a downside, I'm having a hard time thinking of it.

Cakewalk was once payware licensed, produced by a company whose revenue stream  depended on selling licenses for Sonar and its add-ons. Under that traditional, simple "we make a product, you buy it" model, the company gradually became less and less profitable to the point that it was dissolved after 30 years of being in business and has now ceased to exist. I don't know exactly what happened, but my guess would be market saturation. Looks like they tried to diversify the product line, smart move, but couldn't make it stick.

Sonar, by the time it breathed its last, had developed a reputation for crashiness and instability. I'm not going to argue with anyone about this, whether you think it's fair or not. I ran the first version of CbB and I at least will attest to some accuracy of that reputation. I remember that I'd resize the main window and the Now Time marker would sort of go off on a solo career, still moving, just not anywhere near the DAW. Screen elements would get orphaned, and the whole program would lock up from doing things like deleting a plug-in. So I'd always Save before removing a plug-in or moving a clip to another lane.

30 days later, I downloaded an update that was very much improved. 60 days later I downloaded one that, as a veteran software QA engineer, knocked me on my ass. It was not only way more stable, it loaded faster and was just way zippier in general. It even introduced new features, which I thought was freaking amazing for a product that had been hauled off in the meatwagon 6 months earlier. These people had put on their ass-kicking boots and were laying waste.

So you can keep your payware thing. If you think it makes for better software or better chances for a stable company, well, go ahead and think that, but recent history has shown the exact opposite on both counts when it comes to Cakewalk. I could go into why freeware actually makes for better software, but I did that at TOP and I'm tired of going over it again and again.

Just use the damn thing. Don't worry about the company. If you weren't suspicious of Gibson/Cakewalk, why be suspicious of BandLab? Companies go under. Tech companies go under. Cakewalk had a 30-year ride, which is unheard of. History says that even industry leading software titles (and the companies who depend upon them for revenue) don't rule for long. Who today after all, remembers WordStar? Word Perfect? VisiCalc? Lotus 1-2-3? Netware? Eudora Mail?

I wonder, is Pro Tools becoming the next Word Perfect? The program that once had a stranglehold but that got complacent, made a few too many mistakes? Really, Avid, no native VST support? At this late date? The new kids coming up, the laptop/bedroom producers, does Pro Tools have any share at all among new people coming in? Can you even run Sausage Fattener in Pro Tools?

I don't think new home studio people really give much consideration to PT. I think it's considered a necessary nuisance, if you run a pro facility or want to work in one you have to have it, but most people would prefer to be working in Logic or Cakewalk or Studio One or Reaper or whatever.

On 1/19/2019 at 9:43 AM, Cookie Jarvis said:

As much as I hate reading on electronic devices I do keep .pdf manuals on my computer,tablet, and phone but they don't get as much use as they would if they existed in the real world 😉

Bill, if you check with your local quick print shop you might be surprised how inexpensive it is to have a PDF manual printed double side on a laser printer and then comb or spiral bound.

I know this because I, too prefer hard copy. The biggest fail that electronic reading has for me is bookmarking. There's nothing that comes close to a colored Post-It sticking up from the page that has the stuff I'm interested in or want to go back to.

I own high capacity laser printers with duplexers, so it's pretty much the cost of the paper for me. I can punch it for a 3-ring binder or take it over to the FedEx/Kinkos and have them bind it.

Many years ago I had to deal with Pacific Bell support as my first line ISP. Outages were few, but when they happened....

PB: Hello, how may I help you?

SK: I don't have Internet connectivity. The green light on the ADSL modem is solid, and I can ping the gateway and your router, but when I try to ping anything beyond that, it times out

PB: Thank you, sir. Can you tell me what operating system you have on your computer?

SK: 🤦‍♂️

Knowing that the next 15 minutes are going to consist of this person reading from a script that will have me pretending to restart my computer again, read them the IP address settings that if they were incorrect, would not allow me to get past the gateway, then maybe repeat my pings and traceroutes, all in the hope that my call would finally get punted to someone who could check their router.