Rick's b.log - entry 2024/09/30

My 8 hour days started well

At half three, my stomach gurgled, followed by some rather strong gut pain, and plenty of trips to the toilet, and I was thinking "You stupid corpse that I inhabit" (also not the exact words).

Things finally calmed down for half five, so I lay back, closed my eyes, and got that odd twitch that happens just before falling asleep (assuming I don't think to much about it and wake myself up again)...

...and my phone started playing a gentle Chihiro Onitsuka song to wake me. So, yeah, maybe half an hour of sleep. Lovely.

HP's dodgy cartridges?

I phoned HP's customer service and the connection was dropped after five minutes. I called back and this time a human answered. A few brief explanations and a replacement is in the post. Maybe. HP's printers give fair warning so the process isn't actually that quick. Which is perfectly fine if it is anticipating when you will need a replacement, but it's not so great if it takes a long time (I think something like 10 days?) to send a replacement of a non-functional cartridge.

Now, usually the cartridge just dies and the printer refuses to accept it.

This time was a little different. The cartridge was rejected, but if the printer is off for a while, then when it is turned back on the cartridge is recognised by the printer. However, upon trying to print...

This is unexpected.

This diagram is something I downloaded. Unfortunately while it made sense at the time, it doesn't have much context so I'm not sure where it came from or what it means. But it was a pretty enough diagram that I was able to find and quickly sent to my printer from work (via HP ePrint), only to receive a reply half an hour later (when it got around to doing so) that the cartridge was duff. That's exactly what I expected to happen.

After the page of sort-of-gibberish has been printed, then the cartridge is refused, and it will continue like this until the printer has been off for a while.

So... is it a bizarre fault in the cartridge, or is my printer faulty? It could, for instance, be a tiny break in the data cable that only shows up when the print head is moved and used at the same time?
It'll be annoying, but then it's a dirt cheap inkjet, an HP DeskJet 3630, that was bought in July 2017. Yeah, I expected a little over the standard two year warranty, but going for over seven is... not bad. It outlived the Samsung Laser, and if it gives up the ghost now it'll have lasted about as long as the reliable and inexpensive-to-run Brother inkjet that I had for ages prior.
The HP jobbie cost something silly like thirty euros, cheaper than the ink cartridges to put into these things, and it has a scanner and WiFi and IPP Everywhere and...
...okay, it's not great. Like a Sky Digibox it is clearly built to a specific price point (that I rather suspect is heavily subsidised by ink costs) but it is fairly functional for what you get. Indeed, one of the biggest drawbacks of scanning and printing from a mobile phone (up to 300dpi) is purely down to design choices in the app - the printer itself can do better, both in scanning and printing, but the app rather cheekily tells you to use a proper computer if you want the fancy stuff. Actually, my Windows box is arguably a lower spec than my phone, but it'll scan at 600dpi while the phone just won't. Oh, and IPP being fixed to 300dpi is because that's what the printer advertises it can do. Using the Windows driver, it goes up to something like 1200dpi.
That being said, I don't think there's really that much of an actual difference above 300dpi. I mean, the physical limitation here is the resolution available from the cartridge, and, well, I think these "600dpi" and "1200dpi" options are simply different ways of overlaying a lower resolution output from the cartridge to 'fake' being a much higher resolution. You'll notice when colour is printing, it often does several passes of the same thing each slightly offset.

Anyway, when the cartridge arrives I'll whack it in and we'll then discover if it's the printer or the cartridge.

If it's the printer, I may look at another HP to continue the use of Instant Ink. Don't get me wrong, I detest HP's cartridge DRM with a passion and fully believe - especially as the print heads are part of the cartridge and not a part of the printer itself - that you should be free to stick in whatever the hell cartridge you want. However, for a little over a fiver a month I get "a hundred pages" with something like two or three hundred rolled over unused from previous months that I could go into if I needed without additional charge. There's a definite convenience in not having to worry if I'm running out of ink, or having to go find some place that stocks the cartridges and remember to buy them, or forgetting and discovering that they run out halfway through something important.
Sure, Instant Ink might add up to around seventy euros a year, but a page counts as a page. It's a bit crap when an accidental blank page counts, but on the other hand there is no definition of what a page is, other than it being a piece of paper emitted from the printer. Usually I print to regular 80gsm A4 (it's good enough for most of my use cases) but I can print to 15×10 photo paper, or a full A4 glossy photo. Blank pages, 80gsm plain paper, or full page photo prints - they are all "a page". So technically I could print three photos a day, every day, within my tariff. I don't, as the price of photo paper is as bad as the cartridges. I just tend to toss stuff to the printer when I want a copy of it. Sorry, I'm old fashioned, I still believe in the value of ink splots on dead trees.

Do other manufacturers offer schemes similar to Instant Ink? If a new printer is needed, I might have to look in to that. Assuming, of course, I don't impulse-buy whatever isn't too pricey in the local supermarket...

Oh, okay, I've just received a billing notification from Instant Ink. Well played, HP. ☺
It's actually €6,99 a month, which is €83,88 a year.

I don't remember what sort of cartridges my printer actually uses, so I'm just going to pick "305" as it "sounds right". A pair of colour and black costs around €29, while the XL versions are around €48. This is for proper HP stuff, not third-party. Individually they are around €11, or €30 for the XL. Black and colour alike.
These prices are according to Amazon, though, sorry, I just don't trust buying printer ink on Amazon. I would imagine my local supermarket's prices are vaguely similar. Suffice to say, you won't get many glossy prints from a regular cartridge, and the XL's aren't that big either (the Instant Ink ones are enormous in comparison). So I feel that the subscription works out for me.

Oh, and if you really feel strongly about HP's cartridge DRM, there's a simple solution to impact the company's bottom line. Everybody go out and buy themselves an HP inkket...and then don't use it. Don't even take it out of the box. There's no way those printers cost as little to produce as the prices they sell for. It's basically a gateway to extracting money in return for unicorn tears. But if enough people buy the tech and not the tears, they'll end up losing...

Satellite channels

This afternoon, once I came home, I decided to bite the bullet. I made a list (in Zap) of the Favourites, and then I deleted the satellite setup (wiping all of the channels) and did a full blind scan.
And then had to rebuild the favourites, but also physically move the channels so, for example, Film4 is 6, Film4+1 is 16, etc. Actually, that isn't quite right yet. I have to wait a little bit longer for when CBBC and CBeebies switch over the BBC Three and BBC Four services. While they are the same channel and you can quite easily watch BBC3 while tuned to CBBC, the Service ID is different so the little "Now and Next" banner/pop-up won't work unless the channel ID matches that being broadcast. Which is why I need to wait until 8pm (my time) to rescan those channels (10818 V and 10847 V) to get the channels. It would be better if I could simply copy, say, CBBC and edit the PID, but alas that's not something this receiver can do (and it's pretty nerdy, plus as far as I'm aware it's only these two BBC channels that time-share like this).

But, yeah, I didn't expect a simple "just add the new Film4+1 to the list and replace the old version with this" to turn into such a palaver.

Lucky I made a note of the favourites and their order, as adding BBC THREE and FOUR messed up the order rather dramatically. I also noticed a ghost BBC One South, so I suspect there is still something a little bit corrupt but I don't fancy doing a factory reset. I just deleted the ghost and put all of the channels back in their right places again.

What the hell frequency and symbol rate?

I have a piece of lamb that I didn't feel like eating yesterday. I don't much feel like it today, but it's final day and it wasn't cheap so...

...but what to have with it?

Beans? Sacrilige!

Rice? Too much time, too much to have to do. I'm barely conscious now.

Something in a tin? Well, okay, tinned spaghetti? Almost as bad as the beans option.

Oh! I know! How about linguine? (you totally saw that coming, right?)

Oh, yes. Lamb and Linguine. It even sounds like one of those weird American sitcoms from the late seventies... a Jew and an Italian (both female) sharing an apartment in Cleveland... or something like that. Plenty of culture clash fun in a way that would raise so many eyebrows these days.

I love it when a plan comes together...

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Rick, 30th September 2024, 20:41

I was even like "getting up an hour earlier will be no big deal, the clocks go back this Sunday so it'll basically just be the same time as normal".    Uh... no.    The clock change is *next* month.    That's what is referred to as an off-by-one error in the date parsing. I need a wetware update, but I don't think those crappy old 1973 models are supported any longer.

jgh, 1st October 2024, 09:21

Last week my Brother printer just stopped working. I needed to scan something and print something for a meeting, so pressed the Power button.... and nothing happened. Tried swapping power leads with known working (the monitor lead), and still nothing. So it's dead beyond my ability or inclination to fiddle further.  Really annoyingly, it showed absolutely no sign of it dying. I worked two weeks ago, when I printed some job sheets. Then seven days later, just failed to turn on.    It's one of those things with a "soft power" button, not a proper switch. I was groping all around it thinking I'd knocked the power switch off, but there isn't one. There's just a little recessed soft rubber button indistinguishable from all the other little recessed soft rubber buttons on the control panel.    Double annoying, I popped next door to use my neighbour's, and hers has died as well.    And to counter any suggestions... *NO*! I DO *NOT* GET MY JOLLIES FROM MESSGING ABOUT WITH BROKEN EQUIPMENT. DO *NOT* GIVE ME ADVICE ON HOW TO STRIP IT DOWN AND FIDDLE WITH THE INNERDS. I *DRIVE* CARS, NOT FIDDLE WITH THEM, I *DRIVE* PRINTERS, NOT FIDDLE WITH THEM. It's dead, if changing the plug fuse doesn't fix it, it's straight in the bin.

Rick, 1st October 2024, 23:18

That's how the laser died, just wouldn't switch itself on.  I think most such devices these days are sort of permanently powered. TVs, printers, various set top boxes...they all have a standby button and enough insides need to be working to get them to come out of standby, so off is never really off.    I *do* get my jollies messing with broken things (rationale: I can hardly make it worse but maybe I can make it better).    Yes, you drive cars not fiddle with them, but anybody who deals with cars needs to have at least some very basic skills for what is known as "lights and levels". I mean, you DO check your coolant, right? And your oil level? Walk around every couple of weeks to check the lights are all functioning? Yes?    As far as advice... I won't mention that there's often a proper fuse (and not that junk in the plug) on the mainboard or the power supply module, but I won't tell you that as you'd need to open the thing up to see if it's that.    So instead I will simply advise to you not help it become landfill and instead take it to the appropriate recycling place for where you are.

Rick, 1st October 2024, 23:20

Hmm, both of your printers died at the same time? Random coincidence or glitchy (possibly out of spec) mains? Are you aware of anything else that gave up the ghost around the same time?

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd October 2024, 23:39

Ah yes, the Brother power button...    I have a Brother colour duplex laser printer, bought about 3 1/2 years back when my old Samsung died (actually it was the transfer belt, but you just can't get a replacement for a printer made in 2004).    I recently finished the office move, so my office is now in the smallest bedroom rather than the dining room - as computer technology has improved I can now virtualise things so don't need a room full of desktop PCs running various operating systems. Plus the switch from CRT to flat panel means that everything takes up much less space. Anyway, I digress...    I finally moved the filing cabinet from the old office (dining room) to the new office (small bedroom), and with it the Brother laser printer. Plugged it all in, and then spent about 10 minutes looking for the power switch before remembering that actually it's a dead-flesh button on the main panel. Pushed it and the printer sprang to life.    I normally leave it powered, it goes into a "deep sleep" mode after a few minutes so it's easier to just leave it turned on.    Quite a nice little printer actually, although I refer to it as a "laser" it's actually LED (like the old Oki printers from the 1990s and early 2000s), full colour, duplexing, with PostScript level 3.    The weird thing is that Brother (and PC World) advertise it as having "wi-fi" but not hard-wired Ethernet. On the rear panel there's an RJ45 socket which came with a soft plastic blanking plug fitted in it. Removing the plug revealed a LAN symbol embossed into the plastic. So before messing with the wi-fi I tried plugging a Cat5 cable into it - it worked perfectly.    If memory serves I set the IP address to 192.168.1.235 - throwback! (Rick will know exactly why I normally set a network printer to x.x.x.235, or multiple printers in the range 230-239.)    Anyway, it's a decent enough printer. The Brother toners are quite expensive, but being a laser it can use compatibles with no problems. A set of the high-yield type TN-247 cost me £40 for one each of cyan, magenta and yellow, and two black toners, with an estimated page yield of 3,000 sides of A4. (The standard TN-243 type have a 1,000 page yield.)    One genuine Brother TN-243 toner cost about £40 when I last checked, and about £70 for the TN-247 - that's for one toner, one colour. The compatibles were £40 for a set of 5 (remember there was an extra black toner included for that) of the TN-247 compatible high-yield type.    Beats an inkjet. The only thing I ever use one of those for is printing photographs. I still have my Epson R1800 that I bought about 18 years ago, and it still works (although I had to run some Magic Bullet head cleaner through it last time I used it as it had been standing for some time). I don't mind forking out a little for some unicorn tears if I want to print a really high quality photograph, but there's no way I'd use an inkjet for daily document printing. Laser all the way.

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