HP K850 & F*ing expiring cartridge(s)

From joy...

A couple years ago I really needed an inktjet capable of printer A3 and preferably having separate cartridges for the colours. After some looking around I chose for the Hewlett Packard K850 with duplex module and network functionality. I was really happy about it and it server me well. A lot of paper went through that one...

... to hate!

Unfortunately I ran into some nasty stuff: Expiring cartridges. It seems that HP built in an enforced expiry date into the cartridges. And because I didn't use the inkjet enough to empty out cartridges I ran into this. Twice!

Now if you know what a standard HP cartridge costs, imagine having to buy 4 different onces. They go for about 40€ per piece in Belgium.

The first time this happened I wasn't very angry about it since they were almost empty. I looked for a solution, found none at first glance and decided to just replace them.

Unfortunately I do not use the printer as much anymore. So today I fired it up, printed a diagnostics page, did a head cleaning and then fired up my normal print-job. Imagine my anger when the stupid printer refused to print. I received the famous "Printer cartridge expired, please replace". Well, I wasn't going to replace 4 perfectly full cartridges, no matter how much HP whines about "aging ink and damaging your printer". The decision should always be the customers, not the manufacturer! It seems I also have one of the few models that does not allow the user to override this. *sigh*

and back to "joy".

So I started browsing the web. So many frustrated people with the same issue. I figured out that the driver sends the date to the printer using the "@PJL SET TIMESTAMP"-command. Knowing that on a Mac, the printer drivers can be found under /Library/Printers/, I opened up my Terminal and did an "ag" for TIMESTAMP in the /Library/Printers/hp/ folder. To my surprise I got 2 hits in a single file:

/Library/Printers/hp/cups/Inkjet.driver/Contents/Resources/XMLData/Data/PDLData.xml

An XML, this must be my lucky day! Would HP be so careless as to store the entire communication protocol in an external file? 

This being a system file, I "sudo vi'ed" it and did a search. Both where "@PJL SET TIMESTAMP"-commands. So I just changed the TIMESTAMP into something else (in my case I simply replaced a letter with an X). After saving the file and rebooting (don't know if that is required), my printer is now happily spewing out pages again, with the "expired cartridges" as it has no idea anymore about what date it actually is. 

I decided however that I will not be buying new ink for this printer. When the cartridges are depleted I will get rid of the printer and never buy HP again. 

MacOS Lion: Slow Disk?

In September I bought a brand new iMac with 8GB RAM and a regular harddisk. Even though it should've been a work horse, it wasn't. The CPU itself was never really loaded, but everything that required disk access seemed to be ULTRA SLOW. When the disk was under heavy load, the swiping between desktops would just hang halfway a slide and so on.

I guess I don't have to mention that, given the price of one of those Macs, this was extremely frustrating.

It even annoyed me up to the point that I actually called Apple to ask how much it would cost me to add an SSD. Unfortunately the price tag (about 800 euro's) was a bit too steep for my wallet. Apparently the back cover of the iMac has different configurations as well and if you buy a Mac with a regular disk alone, it has no bracket to mount the SSD. So its not SSD + hours but also the price of a new back cover. So people: Think before you buy! An SSD is a really good investment and it will cost you half that price when you add it right at the start.

Anyway, back to the point: I recently found this little post on one of the mac boards about that issue. Since I had Quicksilver installed, I thought like: Eureka! Nothing else had worked before. The minute I disabled it it became apparent that that was indeed the root cause of the extremely slow disk! The Mac now behaves as I would expect it.

So people if you run Lion: Don't use Quicksilver! 

One more Apple please!

I caved... I utterly, completely and fully caved. I am now entirely convinced that Mac's are the way to go for me. After starting out with an iPad, which was a christmas gift from my boss last year, I evolved to using Airport Express for wifi, to the Macbook Air and now as a piece de resistance: A brand new iMac!

I got at the point I was so sick of the entire shit-with-everything on a windows PC (the cables, the issues), that I just upgraded my old desktop to an iMac. 

Even though I still get a "Huh?!" feeling with some things I have to admin that overall, the Mac does what I want a lot better than a windows PC. Only one thing that is really annoying: It's too quiet! Sometimes when I'm doing a lot of things at once and they (iMac and the MacBook, "editor's note") are too busy you don't hear them doing anything. I always doubt whether they crashed or not :)


But there you have it folks, another convert.

Can I have an Apple?

After a lot of encouragement attempts from my boss and the release of MacOS Lion, which seemed to have a lot of cool features to me, I finally caved and asked for a MacBook @ work. Today was the day I got it: a brand new, shiny, metallic Mac Book Air 13". 

As a die hard Windows person I have to say that I was a bit overwhelmed by how different things are on a Mac. Even though I wanted my boss to be wrong so badly, I have to admit that I'm starting to like this stuff better and better!