Hooray! We Bought the Wrong Printer

Joy found a great deal on a laser printer at Amazon.com. She then clicked to buy without realizing it was a model older than the one we were getting rid of. This turned out to be a really nice mistake.

We ended up with an older model Okidata c3400 for only $278 instead of a new one for over $500. The colors seem a shade less spectacular than those produced by the more expensive printer we used to own, but they're still brilliant.

Unlike the newer models, the c3400 doesn't have a little LCD screen to tell you the printer status. But that turned out to be another big plus. We used to have to lean over our desk and twist around the computer and printer to even see the error message on the tiny screen. If there was sunlight coming in the window you couldn't read it anyway. The older model gives us the same messages like: "You're out of paper" in a pop-up window on our computer screen. This is a lot handier than the latest LCD display screen.

So what is the moral of all this? The moral is that there is a lot of old equipment out there, and you can buy it for half the price of new models. And the old stuff is still brand new; no company ever sells every last one of their older models before moving on to the next. And the newest models usually just have some trivial addition like putting on an LCD screen to tell you you're out of paper, or it prints two pages a minute faster.

Our new Okidata c3400n is quiet and doesn't take up too much room, though at 43 pounds, it's much heavier than some of the new models. Here's a little warning, by the way: you shouldn't use color laser printers to print on glossy photo paper. It's better to upload pictures to a photo service or use something like the Epson or HP photo printers. Using glossy photo paper with your color laser printer will eventually get you into big and expensive trouble; it can ruin the print drum. Otherwise, lasers are fast and sharp.

Phishing In Troubled Waters

"Family Shield" is an industrial strength service that blocks "phishers," malware and porn. It's free.

"Phishing" refers to fake sites and messages that take you to bad places. You can click on an address you think is your bank or a popular game site, and you're taken to a fake. Often, the fake site looks so much like the place you expected that it's hard to tell that it's not.

There are a lot of programs, like NetNanny and McAfee, that offer protection but often they have a couple of strikes against them. One is they're not free, and two is they tend to slow your computer. We found Family Shield to be light and fast. You don't have to worry about updates because they happen automatically.

OpenDNS.com, which offers Family Shield, has 20 million users. Its so-called phishing database is used by Yahoo, McAfee, eBay, PayPal, Kaspersky, Opera, and one in every three U.S. public schools. The family version is easier to set up than these large sites and you can get tech support by email. You don't have to download anything, just follow the on-screen instructions. If you choose "router" for what to protect, all the devices in your home that connect to that router and through it to the Internet will be protected. This keeps users free of porn and malware, whether they're using an Xbox, Wii machine, Playstation, Nintendo, iPad or other similar devices.

How can this service be free? Well, they do have text ads, but you only see these if you go to a dead web address. We deliberately went to a dead site to see what the ads looked like and they were small and few. For $10 a year, you can have even those eliminated

Family Shield was still working out a few kinks on launch day when we tried it, but it worked fine on our test computer. To try it, go to opendns.com/familyshield.

Teens on the Web

A survey by Harris Interactive for McAfee, asked 955 American teens (including 593 aged 13-15 and 362 aged 16-17) about their attitudes on Internet privacy.

• 69 percent freely divulged their physical location.
• 28 percent chatted with strangers.

Of those who chatted with strangers: 

• 43 percent shared their first name.
• 24 percent shared their email address.
• 18 percent posted photos of themselves.
• 12 percent posted their cell phone number.

A nice book on this topic is "A Smart Girl's Guide to the Internet: How to Connect with Friends, Find what you Need and Stay Safe Online." It has quizzes and lots of cartoons for easy reading. Get it at AmericanGirl.com for $10.

Books:

"The LEGO MindStorms NXT 2.0 Discovery Book, by Laurens Valk; $30 from NoStarch Press, nostarch.com.

If you ever go to science fiction convention or a hobby show, you will usually see some amazing displays of what you can build with LEGO blocks. We don't mean just buildings or busts of famous people; we mean operating toy trains, cranes, cars and robots. The book contains plans and instructions for making robots using the using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set. This costs around $280 but those who have it say they love it. The kit has parts, motors and most important of all: a programmable logic block containing the microchips for controlling the robots.