Monthly Archives: March 2015

Barbara’s Fish Trap

In Half Moon Bay.

True to form Half Moon Bay was socked in when my son and I dropped by for lunch today at Barbara’s Fish Trap today. Barbara’s has been around for ever and we celebrated with, what else, fish and chips.

The setting is perfect, the place has a ramshackle, broken down feel unchanged all these years, and the fish is excellent. Bring cash as they do not take credit cards.

Wall Street – Financial Capital

Book review.


Click the image for Amazon.

Nearly a decade ago I made mention of Gambee’s other Wall Street book, Wall Street Christmas.

The book in this review is every bit as good, replete with magnificent photographs of the grand facades of Wall Street buildings and many of their interiors. The finance industry has long known that if you are to accrue great wealth at the expense of your customer base, you have to present an image of carefully crafted respectability, meaning marble and mahogany. The execution of this belief is abundantly on display in Gambee’s work.

Even if you are no great fan of the banksters who every so often bring the global financial system to its knees, you will enjoy the photography in this splendid book. Mine came from Amazon but took some three months between order and arrival, so be prepared to wait. It’s worth it.

Mark Henley

Outstanding vision.

After the Germans had gassed you in one of their ‘shower rooms’ in Auschwitz, your gold filled teeth were extracted and the metal removed and deposited in a Swiss bank vault. It remains there, unclaimed, to this day and aggregates, by some estimates, $1 trillion in free capital which is the underpinning of the Swiss banking industry.

British photographer Mark Henley, who calls Switzerland home, has done a masterful job of portraying the amoral institution which is Swiss private banking, in a (shockingly poorly attributed – see if you can find his name) tremendous documentary piece published in Bloomberg News.

You can see more of Henley’s work by clicking the image below – beware that some of his images are very reluctant to appear on the poorly engineered Panos website. Try dialing up his bio as an example.


Click the image for the website.

HP dye printing paper

Grab it while it lasts.

Click the image for the vendor’s site.

If placing a large order for the 13″ x 19″ paper, you can save a lot of money on shipping by going directly to eWholesaler.com’s website and ordering there. Looks like only 13″ x 19″ glossy is available but that is the premier surface for the highest quality prints.

The HP 30/90/130 DesignJet remains the finest large format color printer ever made for home use. The printer was discontinued by HP a few years back but as so many were sold, especially to print shops, parts, inks and paper have remained easily available.

Currently parts and inks remain easy to find (even HP USA still lists them as available) but paper is another matter. HP no longers lists any and it is getting very hard to find – most vendors listing it end up reporting their sites are wrong and that they are out of stock. The swellable special paper HP sold for these DesignJets is really the only one to use. Its surface absorbs the ink dyes, in contrast to modern papers and printers which use pigment inks which simply dry on the surface and do not have to be absorbed. The absorbent quality of the genuine HP paper is what gives the prints the DesignJets make their superior blacks, as well as conferring a total absence of ‘bronzing’ despite using just six ink cartridges. (Modern pigment ink printers add a special anti-bronzing finisher, further complicating matters in printer designs that are absolutely guaranteed to clog printheads, unless used constantly. The HP 30/90/130 printers use head warmers and as long as you leave the printer plugged in, albeit turned off, you will never suffer from clogged heads – I testify to that fact after 10 years of ownership. Sometimes I do not print for 6 months and a perfect print then emerges first time.)

Now and then remaindered lots of HP paper come to market and I have done my bit in procuring a lifetime supply of 13″ x 19″ and 18″ x 24″ supplies. Here is my 13″ x 19″ stash – some 500+ sheets which will see me to the grave. My average remaindered cost was under 40 cents a sheet and as the paper does not ‘go off’ with age, holding large quantities makes sense:


A lifetime’s supply.

Get it while it lasts!

The article index for my writings on the best large format printer ever made appears here. That link also shows the product numbers for the various HP paper sizes and finishes. Trust me on this – do not use pigment papers which claim they are ‘compatible with dye inks’. My tests elsewhere on this site shows the claims to be lies, and the prints thus made fade to oblivion in just a few weeks of exposure to light. By contrast, some of my DJ prints on HP’s swellable paper have been in bright sun >3,000 days (this is California, after all) and show zero fading.

B&H continues to list HP84 (black) and HP85 (five colors) ink cartridges and printheads. It makes no sense to stockpile inks as you want them relatively fresh – I keep a spare of each color) but if printheads start proving hard to get then I will stock up. The average printhead seems to last for ink throughput of some 200ml (meaning three 69ml cartridges of B, LM, LC or Y) or seven C or M whose cartridges are only 28ml in capacity.


Current B&H ink and printhead listing.

As I have often advised in the past, use of aftermarket inks is sheer lunacy. Untested, unknown longevity, potential damage to your machine – you really want to do this to your art work and hardware? The ultimate in false economies, regardless how low your opinion may be of the criminal cabal that is Hewlett Packard. That ’82’ sticker on the paper boxes above means an 82 year life when used with HP’s inks – not the bird droppings after market cartridge refillers offer.

For heavily discounted OEM HP84 (black) and HP85 (colors) printheads, try this link.

Not for the tall

At Alice’s Restaurant.

The fabulous Ford GT40, winner at Le Mans, 1966-1969.

Any time Ford sets its mind to making a great sports car it does so with ease. Sadly, they rarely make the effort, preferring to churn out garbage like the Mustang.

Panny LX100.

Seen at Alice’s early this morning:

iPhone 6 snap.