Lenovo Go Wireless ANC Headset Review

New job = new headset. I’m fussy about headsets and comfort, and I find many headsets I’ve tried give me earaches. Actual pain from those irregular ovals that stick out your head (a.k.a ears). I also wanted a quality headset with good noise cancellation, so I can focus without hearing those annoying sounds of the world around me, like birds chirping or the man next door who uses his blower vac for a few hours every single day.

Anyway, looking at how much a headset would cost that are Microsoft Teams certified, are wireless, have a proper mic boom (I’ve had less than great experiences with several headsets that don’t have the boom, they always pick up way too much background noise) and have decent noise cancelling (ANC) abilities. Pretty much every option I could find was somewhere between $300-$500AU. There was a standout exception to this, Lenovo’s Go Wireless ANC Headset.

The price of the headset on Lenovo’s AU website at the time of writing is $229AU, so I ordered one. A few days later it turned up. The box itself is pretty well presented, with that modern expectation of the unboxing being a good experience (thanks Steve Jobs). Inside the box is the headset itself, a dongle, and a 1.3 m USB-C to USB-C cable. I thought that was it, until I decided to check under the plastic mould…

and behind the plastic mould was a sleeve for the headset! Always check behind the plastic mould :)

Let’s check out the specs of the Lenovo Go Wireless ANC Headset:

Tech Specs (from Lenovo AU)

Capacity610 mAh
ColorStorm Grey
Cable Length/Type1.3 m
Weight230 g
Warranty TypeCRU
ControlsPower/Bluetooth, Volume + / -, ANC on/off, Teams button, Mute / Unmute, Call control
Distortion< 3%
Driver40 mm
Frequency Range20 Hz – 20 kHz
Impedance32 Ohm
Power Requirement5V, 1A
Sensitivity107 +- 3 dB
Audio InputBluetooth 5.0, USB digital audio
BrandLenovo Go
OS RequirementsWindows 10
Packed Weight762 g
Agency ApprovalsCB, CE, BQB, FCC, RSS, MIC, VCCI, AITI, SRRC, cTUVus, ICASA, IFETEL, WPC, SDPPI, SIRIM, NTC, IMDA, KC, NCC, MIC, DWLF&M, NTRA, ANRT, NCC, KVALITET, TRA, RAMATEL, ANATEL, SUBTEL, KC, UKCA
Package TypeRetail
Packed Dimensions (L x D x H)227 mm x 87 mm x 255 mm / 8.94″ x 3.42″ x 10.04″
Warranty PeriodOne Year
Maximum Operating Temperature40° C
Minimum Operating Temperature0℃
Maximum Relative Humidity (%)90%
Battery Charging Time1.5 hours
Included AccessoryLenovo USB-A Bluetooth Audio Receiver, USB-C to USB-C cable, Pouch
Microphone2 microphones for ENC, 4 microphones for ANC
Play Time35 hours
Wireless Operating Distance10 m
Connection TypeBluetooth 5.0, Wired USB-C Cable, USB Receiver

Calling out some of the more important specs – up to 35 hours play time is pretty good. The box calls out a 22 hour talk time, but you’re way over a full working day on the phone which is the important part – plus the USB-C connector means it should be the same plug as everything else you’ve bought in the last few years.

The USB receiver is USB-A which is probably best for most laptops, you’ve got 1 or 2 USB-C ports that will either be used for power or a full dock, and usually at least one spare USB-A if not more. Or, go Bluetooth if you’d rather not use the receiver, but I find an office full of Bluetooth devices can cause interference on any Bluetooth headset and the connection over the dongle more reliable.

Something I need to get in the habit of, is putting the mic boom up to mute. The headset will announce when you do this, and to me this is a better way of doing it rather than a keyboard shortcut or trying to accurately click on the ‘mute’ option in Microsoft Teams if you’re about to cough or sneeze on a call.

Let’s check out the buttons:

Source: https://www.lenovo.com/au/en/p/accessories-and-software/audio/headsets/gxd1c99239?orgRef=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F#tech_specs

All pretty standard buttons here – I can honestly say I’ve never used the Microsoft Teams button but I probably should. If you were wondering what this button does like I was have a read of this guide: https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/use-the-microsoft-teams-button-on-your-certified-teams-device-ed5ec8f0-6f09-46aa-b80c-3372de084a98
TL;DR version – button is contextual. It’ll bring Teams to the front window if it’s not, it’ll join a meeting if you just had an alert come up saying one started, and if you hold it down during a meeting, it’ll raise your hand.

The ANC mode works quite well for a headset that’s on the ear rather than over the ear, and the ability to toggle this to talk-through mode with the ANC button means you can switch from focusing on work, to clearly having a chat with someone who walks up to you. It also makes you feel like a spy when noises are amplified and you can hear someone across the room talking. There’s a third option of plain ‘noise cancellation off’ which I’d probably rather as a separate button, as you have to pass this option each time you want to go back to ‘noise cancellation on’. You also can’t rapidly press the button twice to skip, and instead have to wait until it starts announcing what the new mode is before you can press it again.

The headset itself is very comfortable to wear – when I first put it on I thought it was slightly too tight for my head but after a few days use it doesn’t feel like it’s squeezing me anymore, and more just sitting snugly.

I’m available at a headset model – here’s just a taste

The headset itself feels like it’s made of high-quality components – the ear pads are a very soft leather-like substance, and has a general sturdiness to the entire device. The metal extenders go a fair way out so this should accommodate the largest of heads too.

Sound quality wise it’s crystal clear to me – but I’m also not an audiophile so couldn’t judge how good the music playing abilities of the headset are, beyond also sounding good to me.

All in all, it’s a good headset that will live in my work bag and get used when I’m not WFH – it connects up quickly when I need it to, and should last a long time.

Cloud.Microsoft is coming (and already here a bit)!

Microsoft has been planning to migrate Microsoft 365 services to a new domain – cloud.microsoft – for over a year.

Back in April 2023, Microsoft announced the upcoming change with a starting sentence: “…today we’re excited to announce that Microsoft is beginning to reduce this fragmentation by bringing authenticated, user-facing Microsoft 365 apps and services onto a single, consistent and cohesive domain: cloud.microsoft.”

As pointed out to me by Microsoft MVP Karl Wester-Ebbinghaus, who in turn was reading this post from Dr Windows aka Martin Geuß, there is now an update on the Microsoft 365 Message Center called “Product transitions to the cloud.microsoft domain – February 2024” Message ID MC724837 (published on March 5th which is still almost February). It calls out that the new domains are starting to go live, in parallel with existing domains – meaning you won’t get redirected to the new ones yet.

A list of services that are already running on a cloud.microsoft domain are documented here: https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/enterprise/cloud-microsoft-domain which at the time of writing looks like this:

List of live cloud.microsoft subdomains as of 12/03/2024

As Microsoft has exclusive rights to the .microsoft top-level domain, any content on here can be held at a pretty high standard. Make your own decisions around what you may allow from the single .microsoft doamin, or the initial sub-domain of cloud.microsoft. You may need to add the domain/subdomain to allow lists.

What the above changes also mean for me personally, is a lot of ongoing work on MSPortals.io to keep it up to date, as well as keep the old links on there while they still function:

I’ll do my best to keep MSPortals.io as updated as possible, but if you notice anything that needs an update, please contact me or use the GitHub option on the site to submit an update.

Other notes and take aways from the message center post:

It appears the planned end-dates of non cloud.microsoft URLs for Microsoft 365 services is somewhere between June 2024 and September 2024.

Follow the guidance on Microsoft 365 URLs and IP address ranges and there should be no network administrative impact to these changes.

Update documentation and communicate the change to end users – this can be a good chance to train or rehash what domains are, which helps in user understanding of phishing attempts (both web based and email).

If you have any tools build that connect to Microsoft 365 services (3rd party, or internally developed) make sure they’re aware of the upcoming changes and have a plan to update.

Microsoft Learn GitHub and Feedback Updates

Microsoft is changing the way feedback will be provided for Microsoft Learn content.

Microsoft Learn is an impressive resource for IT staff interacting with Microsoft technologies. It was first launched as docs.microsoft.com which came out all the way back in 2016. Before that, TechNet and MSDN were the sources of official Microsoft documentation, but they were incredibly lacking in both quality and quantity of information. It’s why most people relied on third party websites to find out how to ‘really’ do something in the Microsoft space – which is why it was great to see Microsoft spend time and money in something that gave them no immediate return on investment.

Microsoft Learn was built on customised GitHub architecture, allowing huge transparency on when documentation gets updated, what changed, and a way for customers to question and/or correct what they’re reading. It was also a pseudo feedback method where you could see what others may be complaining providing constructive criticism about when looking at a product yourself – similar to what Feedback Portal does for each product (which is still in beta, and replaced the decent third party UserVoice service) – but when you’re looking at feedback on a particular documentation page on a specific thing, the feedback you’re seeing is particularly relevant, rather than searching through an entire product’s history of feedback.

History lessons aside, Microsoft is now rolling out a change on how feedback works. It’s a bit of a mixed bag from what I can tell, so here’s the breakdown:

From the updated information on Provide feedback for Microsoft Learn content, there will be a few different options on what’s possible around providing feedback based on what page it is.

All pages will have the new feedback experience where you click the thumbs up Feedback button:

This will let you anonymously provide feedback. A single text box that you can write your thoughts on and submit into a black box:

I don’t like this because there’s no visibility, accountability, or any way I can actually engage with Microsoft. I can see why Microsoft wants this, but the old GitHub feedback method meant you could get a response, converse, clarify etc. That is completely gone with this method and personally I doubt I’d bother using it beyond a Yes/No response and maybe a 1 line. It doesn’t provide the customer with any real incentive to bother.

There is some good news however. Some pages will be configured to take you to the relevant Product Feedback page, and some will take you to a Q&A page for the product or community site. If these were widely implemented, it would go a long way to fill the above feedback gap.

Also, you can still use the pencil icon to submit changes and view page history… “for any repository that already had this capability enabled.“.

That implies any new repository (likely for any new product that doesn’t have it’s own content on Microsoft Learn yet) will not have this capability. Except, I can already see a repository that doesn’t have this capability – Purview related content. Check out any Purview page on Microsoft Learn such as Learn about data loss prevention | Microsoft Learn and you’ll notice there is no edit pencil, and feedback at the bottom of the page only has the new experience:

Compared to other pages such as this Publish on-premises apps with Microsoft Entra application proxy – Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn where the callout of the deprication of GitHub Issues is.

It is also worth noting that open source products will have a more open feedback experience using GitHub. A list of products that support this is available here and appears to be the same as the way we’ve been using feedback across the entire Microsoft Learn platform for a while.

Overall, I’d be guessing that the existing solution creates a lot of noise for Microsoft to manage based on the amount of feedback they’d get, and this is a way to stop it. If we see improvements in the other two-way feedback mechanisms, including Microsoft staff engaging more on these platforms, I can see it working well enough. Let’s hope that happens!

Synology C2 Suite Review

Synology asked me to have a fresh look at parts their C2 suite – I’d previously dived into their C2 Backup for Business solution almost a year ago, and I’m keen to find out how they’ve progressed.

The solutions I was given to try were:

C2 Identity
C2 Password
C2 Backup

Encryption or Passkey Prerequisite

The C2 suite needs an Encryption Key which encrypts all C2 services, or the newly released Passkey option.

For the Encryption Key, there is also a Recovery Code as a backup if the Encryption key is lost – but without either, you can’t access any C2 service and your access is lost. The only option is to reset your C2 Encryption key which is destructive – all data in the service is lost because there’s now no way to decrypt the data Synology is hosting for you on the C2 services. I know this because I almost had to reset it (which would be fine, I was only using my own test data), but managed to remember what I’d entered as the key originally. It’s also worth noting that you can generate a 1 page PDF of your recovery code details – this would be worth printing out and putting in a safe in case of emergency.

Passkeys can be used instead of an Encryption Key, where biometrics/PINs are used, rather than a password. This is the more modern way things are going, so it’s worth setting this up.

C2 Identity

This is where Synology sees the C2 Identity cloud service sitting. Here’s where I can see it providing the best value:

“Sync users and groups from Windows AD or migrate seamlessly from Synology LDAP Server without the need to reset users’ accounts or passwords.” If you have an on-premises Synology device providing LDAP services, then seamlessly migrating it to C2 Identity would be a smooth approach to turning into a SaaS solution. Moreso, a company that has identity solutions all over the place could benefit from having this modular approach. If you were heavily invested and aligned with a single cloud provider, it may be best to use their pure native solutions end to end – but a mix of cloud auth providers, or a company who’s Microft Entra ID based who’s bought out another company that’s Google Cloud Identity based, could use this to bring in a standard and centralised authentication service.

Note that this service does not sync users/identities with cloud services such as Microsoft 365, but you can use that as a source for a one time import:

For my purposes (and because I don’t have a userbase!), I created a user manually – myself.

Managed Devices

C2 Identity isn’t just about usernames and passwords either, you can manage devices using an agent (both Windows and macOS supported)

The connect key has been regenerated since this screenshot :)

The install of the agent for me was very quick and easy, and just runs inthe background. Once registered, the device will show in the C2 Identity portal with some basic information:

Command

What’s better though, is the Command options you can apply to your managed devices. These are commands you can trigger – either any command you want to do yourself, or pick one of the inbuilt ones which will continue to grow. Easily triggering an Auto-update of Windows across your entire fleet, or easily selecting a device to remote desktop to (and ping at the same time – I remember doing this as my first manual step any time I used to RDP to a desktop at work!).

These commands can either be run on demand (manually) or on time schedules/events (event options are at startup or at login):

Although reasonably simple, I can see this being very useful for a small business or a business with light requirements. Giving your 1-3 IT staff a tool like this makes both identity management and computer management easier than using native tooling alone (as well as the cross-platform support of both Windows and macOS).

Application

Another useful option is being able to add external identity providers (a.k.a. Applications). This allows you to use the single identity from C2 Identity across multiple solutions such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Dropbox, and anything that support SAML (which these days is most things!).

The Edge Server option lets you “Set up an edge server that retrieves directory information from your C2 Identity. This server will authenticate C2 Identity users’ access to on-prem resources.”. This can run off either a local Synology NAS, or anything running Docker.

Other options include the Log of actions in C2 Identity, as well as Settings which has many customisations for an administrator of the service – as well as being able to brand your instance of C2 with your company’s logo, or look at setting up Passwordless Sign-in (beta at time of writing).

C2 Password

C2 Password is a password management system, and is actually free for personal use! If you want to give it a try, here’s the link. Also, here’s Synology’s C2 Password Security White Paper for those interested in some of the security specifics of this solution.

C2 Password has many supported platform extensions – iOS, Android, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. This should cover most normal business purposes, and is a nice cheap way of providing a managed password solution for both individuals, and a shared vault which can be handy for saving centralised/shared passwords (yes this is never great but you can’t control the password solutions of all your vendors)

The solution offers standard password generation options, as well as a ‘Login Security Overview’ which shows compromised passwords, weak passwords, reused passwords and Inactive 2FA (accounts without 2FA configured). This is visible to each user over their own vault, so is a nice easy way of putting concerns ‘in their face’ and to encourage better account management hygiene practises.

C2 Backup

C2 Backup for Business is a backup solution for both on-premises and cloud workloads. There is also an C2 Backup for Enterprise tier which has unlimited users, teams, and devices with 25TB available storage, and more available to add on. C2 Backup for Business however starts with:

5TB of available storage
250 maximum users
50 maximum teams
Unlimited devices

On-premises devices

This can either be personal computers or physical servers. Again, a backup client is required to be installed onto the device. The default policy is to back up the entire device (including anything plugged in externally such as a USB drive), which may be good for a very small business. However, there’s also the option to target just the system volume, or whichever volume you specify. This can be scheduled on a time basis such as daily, or event driven.

To manage your available space, you can use version control options too – maybe you just want the last 14 days of versions, or only the last 5 backups. You can also do tiered versioning (last day, week, month year) which may be a better option for on-premises servers.

If you have concerns about available bandwidth to a site, you can also define maximum upload speeds.

There is extensive documentation and guides on everything in the Synology C2 solutions, including how to restore a backup. If you want to do a bare metal restore, you can create recovery media on USB, or just recover certain files and folders to another computer which is just navigating through the version of the backup you want, picking the files/folders, and downloading. Easy!

Using the default policy on a home computer may capture a bit too much information!

Cloud Data

You can also backup Microsoft 365 data with the same subscription above – data stored on OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Teams. Once connecting to your Microsoft 365 tenant, the setup wizard will ask what you want to back up: which users, which sites (i.e. SharePoint Online), and which Teams. Although as part of setup you pick which items you want to back up, you also have the option of ‘auto-protection’ which will add anything newly created to the backup schedule, so you don’t have to go back each time and add them manually.

Your policy will also let you choose what data is backed up – Email, OneDrive, and Chat data. Again we have retention rules for versioning too.

For a small business, one of the nice aspects of this is a cloud to cloud backup (from Microsoft 365 > Synology C2). The bandwidth used between these two will have no effect on end users, especially important for sites with low bandwidth available.

To restore any of this data, there is a special ‘Recovery Portal‘ you can navigate to and restore the data locally.

Finally, in the Management section for C2 Backup you can look at a few options around notifications for events such as a backup failing, or when used storage is getting low. You can also see the state of each user and their used space for backups.

Summary

The Synology C2 Identity and Backup solutions are a good and relatively cheap priced (compare the prices for Backup and Identity) that are perfect for business that want to keep things simple. This can either be a business that has a mix of on-premises and cloud, or even purely Microsoft 365 cloud that needs a cheap backup somewhere just in case. I found the tools both portals and end user quite simple and easy to understand, laid out quite well. I will call out that being a simple solution, means it may not have the features or complexity requirements that some business may have – but the price of this solution reflects that. This can be a cheap way of ticking certain compliance options around data storage/backups and identity management too. The C2 web interface was incredibly snappy to use with every page and menu loading quickly – not something that can be said about many other solutions.

These solutions also have 30 day trials (Backup, Identity) that you can play around with, to see if they’ll suit your requirements.

I Bought A (refubished) Enterprise Printer For Under $100AU

As part of the Black Friday sales, I saw a company advertise refurbished/secondhand printers (Thanks OzBargain). Always looking for a deal, I browsed through what they had on offer and after finding this, I knew I had to try it. I tweeted (or X’d or whatever Elon’s living fever dream comes up with next) that it would either be amazing, or e-waste. Read on to find out the result!

Konica Minolta Bizhub C3350i 33ppm A4 Colour Multifunction Laser Printer (Second Hand – Used) – $66AU + delivery = $90.75AU

From what I can tell, this printer likely first came out in 2019, at around $7kAU and is still available for sale today. After purchasing and wondering how much I’d regret the purchase – and a few weeks, a giant HP box turned up on my doorstep with images indicating I’d need 3 people to open the contents.

Using the strength of 3 people, I moved the box inside and remembered I hadn’t actually ordered a HP printer (despite the box containing manuals and CD drivers for a certain HP printer), but instead a bunch of broken up foam and the Konica Minolta bizhub 3305i. After removing from the box, I found the power cable with it didn’t fit (It was a L shaped IEC plug from a HP printer that had no physical possibility of being able to be pushed into the plug hole), so I used one of my own and the device powered up:

Getting power and a working display screen was a good start. I also thought the display itself might be burnt out or the touch flaky. The printer appeared to be in good condition, with only 1 annoying problem – the display tips forward 90o as designed, but won’t stay in place. Any pressure applied to the touch screen (for example, pressing a touch screen button!) the screen will move backwards into it’s flat upright position again. I don’t know if there’s a way to tighten this mechanism, but if that’s the biggest problem I have I can live with it.

The display gave me an easy way to test some functionality without any config – Copy. I fed some paper into the tray and started having flashbacks to my days of providing support to printers. It was at this moment I wondered why I’d decided to buy an enterprise printer knowing how many years of pain these devices had caused me and so many others in the IT industry.

Shaking off the regret, the copy function happened within a second or so, and the paper that spat out had a few marks:

Not terrible but not great, a fair few spots and a weird squiggly line. I cleaned the glass plate inside the printer and tried again, with slightly better results but still that weird squiggle. It was at this point I realised someone had drawn the squiggle on the white plastic part that goes down onto what should be a piece of paper on the flatbed scanner. I put a blank white piece of paper in there and scanned again – results pretty good for only a few tiny spots:

It was time to get this device on the network so I could try printing. The printer didn’t come with a wireless option, so I plugged it into my network, found the IP, added the printer by IP (it wasn’t auto discovering – a problem to work out later) and then needed a driver. Waiting for the very long ‘Windows Update’ option to find a driver never completed, so I instead found the driver myself and added it as there was no ‘Konica Minolta Generic’ type driver that I’ve seen other brands have, such as HP or Canon. After being installed, I was able to print a document which spat straight out the printer. Hooray! Quality was great in both black & white as well as colour

OK, so I can copy and print but I wanted to get into the configuration of the printer and see what was possible. As with most enterprise printers, administration settings can be done either on the printer itself (often a smaller subset of the full options) or on the web interface for the printer.

The admin page for the printer required a password which didn’t come with the printer. I spent the good part of an hour looking up ways online of getting into the printer – default passwords (amazingly it wasn’t set to the default!) and maintenance modes – I could get into the maintenance mode by doing a completely unguessable series of touch screen presses, but still could not factory reset or get into administrator mode. Calling the company who sold me the printer during business hours revealed the password they’d set on the device (why they didn’t communicate this to me I have no idea, surely every printer they sell would cause a support call?) but I was finally in and could start fine tuning the device.

To say there are a lot of options is somewhat of an understatement. Menus within menus with a bit of logic applied, but often options hidden in a place you wouldn’t expect is a norm for the printer industry. I was relieved to at least see a function search which seemed quite usable.

Main Administator menu options
Maintenance Options

I’d noticed the printer was going to sleep and waking up a lot despite just sitting idly, so to find the Power options was easy with a search. I would not have guessed that the location for Power Settings was under Maintenance > Timer Settings > Power Settings and this search saved me a lot of clicking around.

After chaning some options that sounded like they’d work, the printer now does got to sleep after 20 minutes and wakes up when something’s actually happening.

I started going through the many other options of the printer, and started to realise this printer had not been reset from it’s previous life. It contained email addresses, the name of the medical practise it had lived at, and a bunch of other information that I’m sure the company would not have wanted left on their printer – so I deleted everything I could find that referenced it. This included saved FTP details to a certain health insurance’s server which I dare not test. This would be one of the chapters in the book of ‘Why IT People Hate Printers’ on the absolute lack of security applied to the device itself and all practises around it – the entire industry. Even the drivers of printers have been such a security hole, Microsoft is trying to finally end printer drivers with a plan that will take many years to come to fruition.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to do was scan to email. This was going to be a tricky one because ‘security’. Microsoft do have quite a nice writeup of somewhat acceptable options to try and accomodate a printer: How to set up a multifunction device or application to send emails using Microsoft 365 or Office 365 | Microsoft Learn – but for home use where I don’t have a static IP ($5AU a month I could get one for but can’t bring myself to pay!), no relay mail server – so the business type options that may work for this can’t really help. What I did find though, was my ISP lets me create up to 5 email addresses, without MFA.

It worked, but it’s still a terrible idea. I might use this if I have something I completely don’t care about, but also just knowing I ‘control’ an email account that uses pure username/password auth is unsettling. The service at least doesn’t save emails sent to the sent items, but it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. I turned it off again, deleted the email account and instead tested scanning to a USB. When plugging a USB in it nicely prompts you if you want to print something off the USB, or scan something to it – so although a bit painful, at least I can control where my documents sit.

Coming back to the network discovery aspect, X user @judgementus_vw kindly offered me some support via DM. That was fixed by going into Network > DPWS Setting > Printer Settings and enabling an option called ‘Print Function’. As to why it’s called ‘Print Function’ and how I was supposed to connect that to discovery when searching for a printer who knows… but it worked!

With print, scan, and email sorted, all should be good. Except, the printer started having random errors:

These occurred while the printer was sitting in an idle and standby state. Now, I’d love to update the firmware on this device, but Konica Minolta don’t let regular people off the street download it – so I have no idea how outdated/buggy the current version might be, or a way to get new firmware.

I’m hoping the errors are minimal – I haven’t had any when actually using the device, no paper jams or other wackiness.

Also, the black/colour levels with the printer I received are between 25% and 50% – which is fine when a black toner for this printer does 13,000 pages and 9000 for colour.

Would I recommend getting a second hand enterprise level printer?

No. Unless you work with these devices frequently enough, know all the tips and tricks on how to wrangle them, and have access to firmware + troubleshooting resources, this is definitely not what you should have at home. If anything goes wrong you’re screwed. Because I got it so cheap, and it’s so fast to use for printing and copying, it’s going to be useful to me for as long as it stands up. I’ve managed different model printers in the past and it wasn’t overly fun to get paid to manage them, let alone try to do it for free at home!

Also if you are someone who really wants to tinker and spend the time learning about the crazy amount of options these devices have, it’d help you get a helpdesk job anywhere that has a printer management requirement! But it’ll still be difficult to find others online to help you through this.

There’s also OH&S considerations about sitting anywhere near a printer that’s designed for a more open space office environment, as well as the warm air it blasts out when it’s working hard.

For reference, here’s all the default passwords for a Konica Minolta bizhub C3350i:
Admin password: 1234567812345678
Service password: 9272927292729272
HDD encryption password: 12345678901234567890

To get to service mode screen:
Go to home ( copy, scan, user box). Press counter (top left) Press keypad, the press STOP 0 0 STOP 0 1 (stop is the red button on the screen)

To run a full diagnostics:
Turn off the printer by the switch on the bottom right, and while holding the reset button on the left of the screen, turn the power switch on.