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(no kickbacks involved)
It is years now since I bought a PSC 2110 printer/scanner/copier from HP. It fulfilled all my expectations and surpassed some. It works reliably; pictures printed even on normal office paper are sharp enough to make small posters; scan resolution is high enough to catch the dithering in printed photographs from books. HP provides a driver for Linux as well, for both printing and scanning, which worked even before USB was fully supported by Linux. But the best thing about HP is proabably their service, the best for any product I own: On the two or three occasions I have contacted them via their home page, I have received a polite and helpful reply within a few days. That makes three things which aren't always the case.
That is not to say that there aren't a few flaws, but they pale beside the merits. The printer sometimes pulls in several sheets at a time, but that is mostly because I feed it already-used bits of paper to save a few trees. The scanner glass has started to mist over slightly from the inside, and the white backing has coloured at the top, the park position of the lamp. I regard it as design bug that both a black and a colour cartridge are required for calibration, so you can't insert a black cartridge and print black and white without having a working colour cartridge. And the storage capsules for the ink cartridges are not easily available - the support sent me one at my request, when there are two cartridges. But this is petty stuff, and HP's products are surely worth your money.
As sometimes happens, my appreciation of the old Mazda which was my first car rose most steeply after I had dumped it for a considerably more modern Volkswagen. Despite being as old when I bought it as the VW was when I finally got rid of it (phew), and despite having used it for double the time, total repair costs over that period were significantly lower and defects never left me stranded on the autostrada as with the VW.
One might say that this favourable comparison was just due to Volkswagen plumbing new depths of reliability – and one would be half right. But the other half is also correct: Both statistics and personal experience suggest that Japanese cars are the most reliable. If you go for the flashy extras, they aren't going to make you happy, but they do what (according to me) is a car's primary purpose: they run. Just to bore you with another anecdote from Germany: When drivers of German car brands like to say that they can get their vehicles repaired at the cheap places because every mechanic knows them, drivers of Japanese cars are at a loss to reply – they rarely have that problem.
So when the time came to upgrade my mode of transport again, I went for a Toyota van. For one thing, a firm which hijacked the American market before Detroit learnt to say "Mitsubishi" should know a thing or two about building cars, for another Toyota is the only fully independent Japanese car maker still around. The van runs well, which is no big deal since it's nearly new. But I would like to state for the record that of the four people I have met driving newish Volkswagen vans, I have seen two break down when their vehicles were almost new...
The Geko is the cheapest GPS receiver from Garmin, and at that amply sufficient for my purposes. It also has some advantages that more luxurious variants do not have: It is small and light, and you can learn to use it in five minutes.
Having a good sense of orientation, I wasn't sure I needed a GPS receiver at all, and bought the cheapest I could find. It's great if you like to go exploring off tracks in mist and rain, as I sometimes do. With the track mapping feature, you find your way back even in zero visibility conditions and without doubling back on your tracks. I find the Geko particularly useful as one tends to take it along due to its small size and weight (the best equipment is useless if you do not bring it) and because it is so easy to use that even I do not forget what the buttons do.