{"id":3956,"date":"2015-07-20T22:14:57","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T12:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/?p=3956"},"modified":"2017-03-06T19:58:01","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T09:58:01","slug":"hp-printers-have-apps-and-they-are-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/features\/hp-printers-have-apps-and-they-are-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"HP Printers Have Apps And They Are Weird"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an ideal world, this post wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t exist because I wouldn’t have a printer. All my communications with people and businesses would take place online, not requiring me to print out forms or notes, or to scan in receipts and forms I send off. But we live in a world of people who don’t think like this and because of that, I own a HP printer that has apps.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a review of the printer itself (does duplex ADF scanning, cost me only $375 and in the 45 minutes since turning it on, it hasn’t injured anyone and it prints shit out, so it’s already good)<\/em>, but rather, a casual walk through the apps built in on the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M476dw<\/a> because it amused me and I want to share this amusement with others. And because my wife is normal and doesn’t really find it interesting in the slightest so I can’t share it with her.<\/p>\n

On the homepage of the unit’s touch screen is an app button. Naturally, that’s the first thing I did when I turned it on. What the hell sort of apps exist on a HP multifunction centre?<\/p>\n

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There’s an ABC (Australian ABC!) app. What’s it do?<\/p>\n

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It prints out a daily summary of the news. You can even schedule it to appear every day at whatever time you wish.<\/p>\n

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This is what the print out looks like.<\/p>\n

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If you have a printer this fancy and managed to turn it on and set it up, surely you know that the ABC website exists and you can read it. Or you own a smartphone or tablet and read news on that. Maybe you can print it out to take to your dying grandparent in hospital – those are about the only people who’d find it useful.<\/p>\n

Tony Robbins, “an American motivational speaker, personal finance instructor, life coach and self-help author” has his own HP app.<\/p>\n

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Daily updates on how to improve your life. What a crock of shit.<\/p>\n

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When I turned the printer on and saw “apps”, I shouted across the house “Hey Natalie, this fucking thing has apps – let’s see if it has Angry Birds” as a sarcastic joke that she didn’t even remotely acknolwdege or appreciate. 10 minutes later I see this:<\/p>\n

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Whilst you can’t actually play Angry Birds, it’s a collection of Angry Birds themed puzzles, arts & crafts and stuff like that. I bet the primary school staff room will go bananas over it.<\/p>\n

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There’s heaps more apps, but you get the jist. Little mundane things you can print out because you live in a world where real apps on smartphones don’t exist. Daily crosswords on paper, recipies on paper, Disney colouring in bullshit on paper. If you want to see a full list of apps, ya can’t, because you have to sign up for a HP account that adds your printer to a cloud service and lets you select new apps via the HP website. Rest assured, you are not missing much.<\/p>\n

Just think of all the smart engineers who pissed away a good part of their time working on this instead of something useful.<\/p>\n[optin-cat id=5772]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an ideal world, this post wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t exist because I wouldn’t have a printer. All…\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11],"tags":[152,288,1154,1153],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"reckoner_social_message":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reckoner.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}