No. He'll be an engineer.

Consumer alert

· 12/30/2008 10:11 AM by Steve Gigl

I have an HP 5510 all-in-one printer/scanner/fax, and for the most part, despite some bulky software, I like it. Or I did, until I started getting “Print Cartridge Error” messages on it.

I tried the suggestions from HP’s website (cleaning contacts and ink nozzles), but nothing helped. Then my mom suggested setting the date back on my PC to see if HP was building obsolescence into all of their cartridges.

Worked like a charm when I set it back to December 2007. Jerks.

Just so I’m being clear, the cartridges are physically fine and have ink. HP, in their infinite wisdom greed decided that you aren’t allowed to use the same print cartridge for longer than X months, so they built a timer into their printer that throws an error and stops you from printing when you haven’t spent a crapload of money on a new print cartridge recently.

Oh, I am so going to find out how to defeat this. And HP has guaranteed that they won’t see another dime from me on cartridges if I can avoid it; even if refills suck, I will be refilling from here on out.

You’re shooting yourselves in the foot, HP. My next printer won’t be one of yours.

UPDATE 2/23/09: (long-awaited, I’m sure): There is indeed a solution for this, but if you want your printer to stay under warranty, skip it and buy a new cartridge.

But if you, like me, are not under warranty and don’t really care whether your printer lives or dies (bonus if you still won’t buy another HP printer or cartridge ever again), there is a way to get around this “feature.” It is somewhat explained at the end of the “best solution” from LeWillie here. I basically broke the connection to the battery, then wired the two ends to a switch that I mounted on the case of the printer. So any time I need to clear the data from the printer’s memory, I can just switch it to “off.”

Not a task for the faint of heart, obviously, but my printer is up and running again, at least for now.

Category: Technology
Scope: National

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PowerPointless?

· 06/10/2008 03:31 PM by Steve Gigl

Chad The Elder misses PowerPoint. Seriously.

My slight anti-Microsoft bias aside, I think it depends on the type of information being presented, but I’d agree that Powerpoint is usually better than nothing. I’ve had several professors who could have benefited from the organization that PPT tries to force on you. Still, Bob Pease’s PPT-free presentation (remember transparencies?) is still one of the best light-technical presentations I’ve seen.

For more technical presentations, sometimes you need complex diagrams that would take freaking forever to draw on a white board, and for nontechnical ones, having the words on the screen tends to help with memory and for people who tend to drift off into their own heads during presentations. [Not that I know anyone who would do that…]

That said, I’ve been going almost 2 years now without making a PowerPoint presentation, and I don’t miss it a bit. If I need to show something to someone, I just show them the actual file/simulation/document/whatever. Makes life easier for all involved, and it doesn’t limit you to (what end up being) meaningless bullet points.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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FYI

· 05/27/2008 07:43 AM by Steve Gigl

You’ll be watching this page too, right?

Thought so.

Category: Technology
Scope: World

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Ahead of my time but too lazy to do anything about it

· 04/18/2008 12:21 PM by Steve Gigl

Google just implemented an idea I had several years ago (and somewhere there are contest entry documents to prove it): map-based traffic predictions (click on “Traffic” and then “Change” to set the day and time)

At least partially; to fully match my idea, they’d also have to predict the traffic based on date (account for holidays, etc.) and weather. And given some directions and the current or predicted traffic, it would have to estimate your route time. And they’d allow you to register for routes and get text messages or emails when there’s an accident that will affect your drive time. [Hey, I’m ambitious in my imagination, if not anywhere else…]

Sadly, my web and software skills weren’t and aren’t up to that kind of challenge. But I’m glad to see that the idea interested someone besides me.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback

Oooh, embarassing

· 02/12/2008 09:08 PM by Steve Gigl

Kids, always remember to constrain your clocks.

Have a good night.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback [1]

Consumer alert

· 12/30/2008 10:11 AM by Steve Gigl

I have an HP 5510 all-in-one printer/scanner/fax, and for the most part, despite some bulky software, I like it. Or I did, until I started getting “Print Cartridge Error” messages on it.

I tried the suggestions from HP’s website (cleaning contacts and ink nozzles), but nothing helped. Then my mom suggested setting the date back on my PC to see if HP was building obsolescence into all of their cartridges.

Worked like a charm when I set it back to December 2007. Jerks.

Just so I’m being clear, the cartridges are physically fine and have ink. HP, in their infinite wisdom greed decided that you aren’t allowed to use the same print cartridge for longer than X months, so they built a timer into their printer that throws an error and stops you from printing when you haven’t spent a crapload of money on a new print cartridge recently.

Oh, I am so going to find out how to defeat this. And HP has guaranteed that they won’t see another dime from me on cartridges if I can avoid it; even if refills suck, I will be refilling from here on out.

You’re shooting yourselves in the foot, HP. My next printer won’t be one of yours.

UPDATE 2/23/09: (long-awaited, I’m sure): There is indeed a solution for this, but if you want your printer to stay under warranty, skip it and buy a new cartridge.

But if you, like me, are not under warranty and don’t really care whether your printer lives or dies (bonus if you still won’t buy another HP printer or cartridge ever again), there is a way to get around this “feature.” It is somewhat explained at the end of the “best solution” from LeWillie here. I basically broke the connection to the battery, then wired the two ends to a switch that I mounted on the case of the printer. So any time I need to clear the data from the printer’s memory, I can just switch it to “off.”

Not a task for the faint of heart, obviously, but my printer is up and running again, at least for now.

Category: Technology
Scope: National

Rantback

PowerPointless?

· 06/10/2008 03:31 PM by Steve Gigl

Chad The Elder misses PowerPoint. Seriously.

My slight anti-Microsoft bias aside, I think it depends on the type of information being presented, but I’d agree that Powerpoint is usually better than nothing. I’ve had several professors who could have benefited from the organization that PPT tries to force on you. Still, Bob Pease’s PPT-free presentation (remember transparencies?) is still one of the best light-technical presentations I’ve seen.

For more technical presentations, sometimes you need complex diagrams that would take freaking forever to draw on a white board, and for nontechnical ones, having the words on the screen tends to help with memory and for people who tend to drift off into their own heads during presentations. [Not that I know anyone who would do that…]

That said, I’ve been going almost 2 years now without making a PowerPoint presentation, and I don’t miss it a bit. If I need to show something to someone, I just show them the actual file/simulation/document/whatever. Makes life easier for all involved, and it doesn’t limit you to (what end up being) meaningless bullet points.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback

FYI

· 05/27/2008 07:43 AM by Steve Gigl

You’ll be watching this page too, right?

Thought so.

Category: Technology
Scope: World

Rantback

Ahead of my time but too lazy to do anything about it

· 04/18/2008 12:21 PM by Steve Gigl

Google just implemented an idea I had several years ago (and somewhere there are contest entry documents to prove it): map-based traffic predictions (click on “Traffic” and then “Change” to set the day and time)

At least partially; to fully match my idea, they’d also have to predict the traffic based on date (account for holidays, etc.) and weather. And given some directions and the current or predicted traffic, it would have to estimate your route time. And they’d allow you to register for routes and get text messages or emails when there’s an accident that will affect your drive time. [Hey, I’m ambitious in my imagination, if not anywhere else…]

Sadly, my web and software skills weren’t and aren’t up to that kind of challenge. But I’m glad to see that the idea interested someone besides me.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback

Oooh, embarassing

· 02/12/2008 09:08 PM by Steve Gigl

Kids, always remember to constrain your clocks.

Have a good night.

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback [1]

Science fiction predicts the future correctly, for once?

· 01/23/2008 03:55 PM by Steve Gigl

Very cool.

Category: Technology
Scope: World

Rantback

Polygons will be the death of me

· 06/13/2007 10:29 AM by Steve Gigl

I hate them all

That is all.

[Context here for the nerdly-inclined.]

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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Circuit Geek Lesson #3

· 02/22/2007 01:57 PM by Steve Gigl

No time to put this in context at the moment, but here goes:

ESR/DF FORMULA (For Electrolytic Capacitors)

ESR = DF * 2πFC

Where:
C = Capacitance in Farads
DF = Dissipation Factor
F = Frequency in Hz (c.p.s.)
(Found here [PDF])

UPDATE: Some interesting electrolytic cap notes here

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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Circuit Geek Lesson #2

· 02/01/2007 03:49 PM by Steve Gigl

When having a PCB fabricated, the thickness of your copper layers is something that needs to be specified. That part I knew, but the part I didn’t know was how to translate from mils of thickness to ounces of copper.

“1 oz copper” means that, if you have one square foot of this thickness of copper, it would weigh one ounce. This translates to, according to one source I found, copper that is 34um thick (about 1.34mil; my CAD tool defaults to 1.4 mil). 1/2 oz copper is therefore ~0.67 mil, and 2 oz copper is ~2.68 mil.

Category: Blogging
Scope: Technology

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Circuit Geek Lesson #1

· 01/25/2007 02:34 PM by Steve Gigl

Series capacitors give SPICE simulations problems, because it needs a DC path to each capacitor.

One way to fix this problem is to set the RSHUNT option in your SPICE simulator to 100MEG.(1) This allows Spice’s equations to converge, but you have to be careful because this alters the simulation (adds a resistor—albeit 100MEG, so not much current will flow—from every node to ground).

If you don’t want to disrupt the rest of the simulation, you can add a resistor in parallel to one of the series capacitors with a gigantic value (the source uses 9e12, or 9 TeraOhms). (2)

Sources:
(1)
(2)

Category: Personal
Scope: Technology

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