Monday, December 29, 2014

Reprographers, advise your customers to remove all graphics from their vehicles when they trade-in or sell their vehicles!

See post about this on AE Graphics’ blog!:



And, considering what happened(!), perhaps it would be a good idea to install a GPS bug on the vehicle and then provide that information to Homeland Security!  Ya never know!

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Large-format printing for the arts community

I made my annual trip to Art Basel Miami earlier this month.  Art Basel Miami has grown into a humongous event, and, if you’re into art, it’s an event that you don’t want to miss.  At my age, I don’t have any wall space left to fill, but, even though that’s the case, …..it’s still fun to look!  Art Basel Miami was based at the convention center in Miami Beach, but there were exhibitions at multiple venues spread across the Miami (Design District) and Miami Beach areas.

I’m not an artist, nor am I a photographer, but I do carry an iPhone and like to take photos with my iPhone.

At the convention center, I wandered into a booth that had on the wall a high-quality black and white photographic print of a person’s faces – reflecting different moods.  There were 18 different shots of that person, all collected into one photographic poster-print.  Since, the day before, I had given as a gift to a friend a framed “faces” poster-print, I just had to walk over to the person hosting the booth to ask, “what’s the price of that piece?”  I was shocked, absolutely shocked, when the person casually said, “$180,000 USD”.  The first thought that popped into my mind was, “UFB!”

I’ve placed in my Google Drive library a file that shows the “faces” poster print I made and gifted to my friend the day before.  I, of course, dragged my friend over to that booth to show him the $180,000 “faces” photographic poster print …. so he could see, first hand, the value of the gift I gave him!  As to the “faces” poster print(s) I made, I took the photos on various days a couple of years ago (at a prior Art Basel Miami event), and a friend who’s a very talented graphic designer compiled the photos I took into one “poster” (actually, there are two separate posters, one in b/w the other in color), and another friend, a reprographer in Tampa, was very kind to print the files for me (at no charge.) 

Okay, here’s the link to the “faces” poster print(s) I gifted to my friend:


Reprographers who offer large-format printing services; consider promoting this type of “faces” poster print to your customers.  All your customers have to do is take multiple photos of the same individual at different times.  Makes for a great gift.  I’m going to do “faces” poster prints of my kids and grandkids (un huh, as that saying goes, “when I get a round tuit”.  Note, I actually have a “round tuit”; it is a round wooden block with the letters TUIT burned into the top.)

Blogger sentenced to death

Article from the web-site of the Committee to Protect Journalists:

Not surprising, but certainly disheartening, to find such a barbaric act in this day and age.  

In Mauritania, blogger sentenced to death for apostasy

(For those of you who may be a bit geographically-challenged, the country of Mauritania is located in the northwest part of Africa.  I had to look that up, since I had no idea where it was.)

New York, December 26, 2014--The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the death sentence handed down Wednesday to Mauritanian blogger Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed on apostasy charges in connection to an article he published a year ago.

Mohamed was arrested on January 2, 2014, for his December 31, 2013, article, called "Religion, religiosity and craftsmen," which said that followers of Islam interpreted the religion according to circumstance. The article criticized Mauritania's caste system, an extremely delicate subject, Reuters reported.

In court, Mohamed said he had not intended to insult the Prophet Muhammad and had repented, according to news reports. However, the court proceeded to sentence him to death, a first on apostasy charges in Mauritania, the reports said.

Local news reports suggested there were political and religious motives behind the case. A fatwa was issued to kill Mohamed, and nationwide demonstrations led his family to denounce him and his lawyer to drop him. No other lawyer other than those assigned by the court then came forward to take up his case, the reports said.

"We call on authorities in Mauritania not to carry out this sentence," said Sherif Mansour, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. "Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed should be freed and his safety protected."

The trial began Tuesday but was postponed to Wednesday by the judge after an altercation broke out in court when the prosecutor admitted to being a member of the caste that the blogger criticized in his article, according to news reports. Mohamed belongs to a lower social class.

Local news reports also said the trial was attended by several religious leaders who insisted on monitoring the proceedings to ensure Sharia law was carried out. When the defendant was brought to court, the crowd cheered "Allah Akbar," and then celebrated the verdict, according to the same reports.

News reports did not say whether the blogger would appeal. However, the defendant is eligible to be pardoned by the Supreme Court if his repentance is verified, according to article 306 of the Mauritanian penal code.


Saturday, December 27, 2014

Reprographers, are your Internet-connected servers secure?

For Reprographics 101, I do a fair amount of research on Google.

Yesterday, while doing that – Google research on the Internet – I found links to a reprographer’s “order” files.  With this link, I found that I could view every order this company processed.  I could not only view the orders, I could print them!  The orders showed names of customers, services provided, and unit prices for each service.  If I’d wanted to, I could have spent hours and hours building a customer list, including information about unit prices offered to each customer!

After I realized what I’d found, I e-mailed the CEO of the company whose order files I found open on the Internet, to let him know what I found.  Shortly after I did that, I received an e-mail acknowledging my "alert". 

This morning, I was unable to access the order files, so, evidently, fixing the problem was done very quickly.

Which brings to mind the question - - are your servers, those connected to the Internet – secure?  You might want to check that periodically!


Happy New Year!

Canon and HP Wide Format Devices Win BLI Pick and Outstanding Achievement Awards

Recently noticed this on BLI’s web-site:

November 18, 2014 - Hackensack, New Jersey - Wide format devices from Canon and HP were honored today with Pick and Outstanding Achievement Awards from Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), the world’s leading independent authority in the document imaging industry. BLI’s prestigious Pick awards acknowledge the best-in-class devices in each category based on their performance in BLI’s rigorous laboratory tests. Outstanding Achievement Awards acknowledge products or capabilities that stand out for attributes such as innovation, energy efficiency or value.

The 2015 Wide Format Pick and Outstanding Achievement Award winners are: (click on link):