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What does this error mean that suddenly came up on my Canon Pixma 780? What is waste ink?

After doing a bit of research I found the following:

This printer has an ink absorber that takes in ink during the printing and print head cleaning processes. The cleaning process is necessary in order to keep the print head nozzles from becoming clogged. Over the life of the printer during normal use, the amount of ink that the ink absorber has collects is calculated by the printer (How? I don’t know). Eventually, after substantial use, the printer will enter an error condition when the ink absorber is nearly full. Printing is still possible however. Press the Stop/Reset button to cancel this error. You will still be able to print for a short period of time. To protect the printer from damage, you will not be able to print at all once the ink absorber is full.

What you would do, before the waste tank gets full, is to take it to a Canon dealer to get the ink absorber pads replaced. Canon also reset the waste ink full counter so the printer is right to go again.

Can you do it yourself? Well, from what I have read it is possible to change the absorbers yourself (can be a messy job), and as far as the waster tank full counter goes, if you have a service manual handy you can find the right codes/method to do it. Personally, I would recommend taking the printer to Canon for a proper service. The Pixma range of printers are good enough (and last long enough) to spend a bit of money on.

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Waste ink near full for Canon Pixma 780

Want a nice easy way to backup your firefox profile? I discovered one that is much easier to do than the manual method I posted on this webiste a few months ago. It’s call Mozbackup, and is a great piece of open source software.

To perform a backup, it’s real easy:

Run the program, and a window like this will come up:

Choose either to backup or restore. The next screen will ask you which profile you want to backup, and also where you want to save it:

After this, you will be asked whether you would like to set a password for the backup file. Choose your selection, and the following screen will allow you to select what items from your profile you wish to backup. I would say leave the defaults:

Easy as that! Done …….

Oh yeah …….. get it from here

Like it or hate it - Twitter is here to stay. Its a unique kind of social networking. If you compare if to Facebook, it’s like sending status updates to the friends (or followers in Twitter speak).

I come across a fabulous use of Twitter last week - unfortunately it was related to a tragedy that it is still unfolding as this post is being written.

Twitter can be used to get live news updates from either individuals or from large news conglomerates. And the best thing is if you dont have a twitter account is you don’t need it!

Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in something you want updates on. The search result will list Tweets containing your search string from any Twitter user.

If it’s a hot topic your screen will advise you of new matches. All you have to do is click on refresh to get the new tweets.

I used this unique tweet search to find tweets from everyone from the recent Air France plane disappearance. Amazing some of the stories I read, and my search results were being updated at the rate of about one tweet per second.

Have a play around with it. Very handy tool on the internet.

At 3.31 PST on Friday 13th, or on Valentines day depending whre you live, Unix computer clocks reached the time of 1234567890–1.2 billion seconds elapsed from January 1, 1970, the official beginning of the Unix epoch.

The clock is used not just by Unix, but also by Linux, Java, JavaScript, Mac OS X, and various other technologies.

That’s my bit of trivia for this week

I had some issues with my work laptop the other day and all my settings for my applications had been lost. Damn I thought, I’ve lost all my bookmarks and firefox settings. However I had backed up my profile a few days before but wasn’t sure how to move it to my new computer seamlessly.

After a bit of googling and trial & error, I found the following way to work the best:

1. Exit Firefox
2. Start -> Run -> type ‘%APPDATA%’
3. Select Mozilla -> Firefox -> Profiles
4. Copy profile folder (XXXXXXX.default) and paste it to desired location (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles)
5. Start -> Run -> type ‘firefox.exe -ProfileManager’
6. Click ‘Create Profile’
7. Click ‘Choose Folder’
8. Select the newly copied folder (eg. C:\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXX.default)
9. Now select the newly created profile and click ‘Start Firefox’ — check that all your cookies etc are there
10. Surf the net!