I gave up on inkjet printers a long time ago, and have been using an Epson 5700i Laser printer for years now. It finally ran out of toner a month ago and I was without a printer for the first time.

A printer is one of those things you never really think about. While printer makers have tried to market printers as multi-function devices, photograph printers, and anything else they can think of, in reality you just really need an affordable monochrome laser printer that works with your current computer setup. Color laser printers are actually now hitting the $400 range, but toner refills are quite expensive and having to replace multiple toner colors, makes color printing three times more expensive than monochrome.

In my case, the Epson 5700i was due for replacement. My home network had grown to encompass multiple Macintosh and Windows machines, so I needed a printer that could reside on the network and accept print jobs from both Mac OS X and Windows machines. While there are many brands to choose from: Brother, Samsung, HP, and Epson to name a few, I decided on the Lexmark E240N, as the most appropriate solution for a small multi-platform home network.

Quality

In the printer world, HP is the number one printer company. If you absolutely want great quality, you need not look elsewhere. However if you have price concerns and are trying to get the most for your dollar, HP printers cost more and have less features. This becomes rather obvious when you try to find an HP printer with network capability in the $300 range. This made me consider Lexmark, because they are known for their printers and not much else, and even Dell sells Lexmark printers exclusively.

Features

The feature that makes the E240N stand out is the built-in print server. Just connect the printer via Ethernet to your router or hub, and you have an instant network printer. For Windows, you can print in PCL6 and for Mac OS X, you can print in emulated Postscript Level 3 or Level 2. The print server is accessible via a web-page interface, but you really will not need to access the print server interface at all. The IP address of the printer is DHCP enabled, but you can install an IP setup utility and change the printer to a specific static IP address.

Performance

The E240N prints 1200 DPI x 1200 DPI and can print about 27 pages per minutes. The DPI is defaulted to 600 to save toner, but you can set it to 1200. There is a manual feed tray that you can use to print envelopes and transparencies. When printing envelopes it is best to use a high quality envelope, as thinner quality envelopes will tend to curl with the heat of the printer. To use the manual feed option, you print in your application and then the indicator light on the printer will notify you it is ready to accept via the manual feed tray.

Upgrades

The printer comes standard with 32MB of memory, but it will accept a 64MB printer SO-DIMM for a total of 96MB of memory. Printer drivers are available for Windows98 thru WindowsXP, Linux, and Mac OS X. Lexmark does not include any USB cables or Ethernet cables. The included toner is only a starter unit that is rated for half of what the standard toner cartridge is rated for.

Conclusions

The only annoyance I have experienced with the E240N is that every now and then it will wake itself up and adjust itself. The noise is not unusually load, it is just that it is a bit alarming when working at night or in a quiet office. Space can be a problem too, seeing how all network printers tend to be quite large. In comparison the E240N is a bit smaller than a comparable HP network printer, but it does take up some space. If space is a concern the Lexmark E120N is a small compact laser printer with more conservative features. When I was comparing prices, the E120N is actually cheaper if you purchase it from Lexmark directly, but the E240N is a better bargain if bought through an online store such as Newegg.com.

ShareThis

Webmasters undeniably rely on web site statistics to give them a clue as to how their respective sites are doing. Statistics become important in evaluating site changes and even adding new content. For the do-it-yourself webmaster, clear and easy to use stat packages become a necessity, so obviously you want to pick the right web stats program for your site. Your choices range from web services like Google Analytics, to programs that analyse your webserver logs, such as AWStats, or you can choose a script that concentrates on what your web site activity is at the moment. Mint concentrates on just the essential statistics you need, in this way it is a good stats program for webmasters who are not interested in long term analysis. Bloggers in particular will find Mint to be a good alternative to AWStats or Google Analytics, since it can be integrated with most major web blogging scripts like WordPress. If however you are in the need of more in depth reports or eCommerce tracking, then Mint is not for you.

Unwrapped Mint

There are two ways to setup Mint. You can simply add a single line of javascript code to the head tag of your html, or in the case of WordPress, to the header.php template file. The advanced method requires that you have PHP installed as an Apache module and is harder to implement if you are not an experienced webmaster. Since Mint requires javascript, it is unable to track any visits if javascript is disabled. This is usually not a problem for most people, since javascript is now a pretty common requirement. At the time of this writing, Mint also requires Apache, PHP, and MySQL in order to run properly. Most Linux and UNIX based web servers will satisfy these requirements, but Windows servers will not work. Even with all these stipulations, I still found Mint to be an interesting and worthwhile investment.

For $30 per domain, Mint can provide real time stats and unlike other stat packages, it totally ignores bots and spammer scripts. This gives you a more accurate picture of actual hits on your site. Compared to other stats packages, I would say Mint is actually more conservative about hits. On the other side, the standard Mint stats are not very spectacular, fortunately, Mint is expandable. Its plugin architecture allows for new search panes to be added to the standard Mint stats view. These plugins are referred to as peppers. I highly recommend XXX Strong Mint, Sparks!, and Fresh View. You can find more peppers on the Peppermint Tea page.

WordPress & Mint

If you run WordPress and use ShortStat, you might be wondering if Mint is worth the price of admission. The advantage of Mint is that you can track static html pages as well as your WordPress blog. Other than that, the other big difference is that ShortStat registers way too many hits from search engines and bots as regular hits. Mint is more accurate or you might say conservative in its hit tracking. In my opinion, if you receive moderate traffic above fifty actual hits from actual visitors you probably could benefit from Mint. Technically, thirty dollars is not a lot of money these days, so Mint is a pretty good value considering how much commercial web site tracking software costs.

Related Forum Posts:

• Mint Stats, Hints and Setup
• WebLog Expert Stats
• Peastat Script
• Web Site Statistics

ShareThis

This is perhaps the most interesting news I’ve heard all week. According to MacWorld, Qualcomm is opensourcing Eudora. I’ve only been using Eudora since version 3.0, and it has always been my preferred email client on all my Macintosh systems. When OS X came out, I never embraced Apple’s Mail, simply because Eudora had so much of my old email, and by now I can’t seem to match the comfort level with any other mail client. About the only email interface that I feel comfortable with is webmail via Horde and Gmail. Although I use Mozilla Thunderbird daily, it still feels slow and alien to me, every time I use it. In reality, Eudora’s interface is so 90’s. The interface feels out of place in OS X and a little hard to use compared to modern GUI apps. Still I can’t seem to feel very fond of Thunderbird’s huge icons and web browser like interface. On the otherside of the pond, there’s Outlook and I cringe daily at how complicated Outlook really is. It would be great if someone could make an email client that can do everything Outlook can do, but do it in a clean and friendly interface, kind of like what Apple did for the MP3 player with iTunes.

For OS X users, it looks like Eudora 6.2.4 will be the last commercial version. Qualcomm expects the first Mozilla Eudora opensource version to come out in 2007, but who knows how well documented the code is after all these years. Most of all, I wonder what the interface will look like in the future? Eudora needs a good GUI makeover.

Eudora Revisited

• Qualcomm’s Penelope Project intends to build an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird that will make Thunderbird look similar to Eudora.
• Correo is an open-source project that aims to use Mozilla code to develop a native mail application for Mac OS X users, doing for email what Camino did for the Web browser.
• Infinity Data Systems - Odysseus is a commercial project that intends to build a new email client that looks and feels similar to Eudora.

ShareThis

WebKeyDesign now accepts Google Checkout as payment. If you have not heard of Google Checkout yet, it is somewhat similar to PayPal. It allows you to make purchases through a credit card without giving your credit card number to the merchant. In this case, WebKeyDesign. Google will collect payment and then deposit the amount (minus their fee or course) into the merchant’s bank account. This way customers can trust their credit card information to only Google and have less risk when purchasing items from the Internet. You must setup a Google Checkout account in order to use it.

You can still purchase web hosting with PayPal if you prefer. Google Checkout is just another option now when you order web hosting.

ShareThis