Good tip for the Lexmark All-in-one inkjet printer owners (mine is the X6170):
After some months of use, your printer might get the habit of stopping in the middle of a page and showing “Hardware Error 0502” on the LCD display. If you leave the printer alone for a while, it might start printing again. Then again, it might not. Pretty annoying.
The Lexmark support site will let you power off, remove the power cord for 30 seconds (!!), take out the cartridges and fiddle with some encoder strip. This whole procedure might take you up to 30 minutes and it will not help (been there, done that).
The real answer is given by a person called ‘clem’:
Hardware Error: 0502.
On the multi function machine seems to be a coating on the metal rod that the cartridges travel on. Just wipe this rod with a kleenex and the problem seems to go away. Somehow it presents a drag on the cartridges and causes an error.
Clem
(from fixyourownprinter.com)
This works! Clean the sucker with a paper towel (another page talks about re-lubricating the thing, but that was not necessary in my case). The towel will be black (ink residu, presumably), but there you go printing to your heart’s desire again.
A big thank-you to Clem, Google and the wisdom of crowds!
UPDATE: also seems to work for some Dell printers (some of them are manufactured by Lexmark)
I have to buy a new PC for my parents. I want to reuse an existing 19″ screen, so I am only looking for a desktop. My dad has been using a PC for a couple of years and don’t feel like switching to Mac. So a Mac Mini is not an option. So I started looking for a PC that was as simple and beautiful as that, at the same or smaller price. I was in for a disappointment…
The baseline
First off, the original Mac Mini
sleek, square, white, with just a minimal CD slot and no buttons or logo on the frontpanel.
If evolution would build a PC, this is what it would look like. Now let’s take a look at what ‘intelligent design’ has to offer:
Continue reading ‘Who makes a pretty PC?’
Muster said that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage — that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.
Munster envisions a one terabyte iPod as a portable, “coffee table” media center that would allow users to store hundreds of movies and thousands of photos and songs.
cnn.com
A 1000 GB iPod, that is
- 200 movies or 370 hours of full quality DVD
- up to 2000 hours (almost 3 months non-stop) at DivX/Xvid/MPEG-4 quality
- using the H.264 video compression: 120 days or 4 months of video!
- 1500 music albums of full quality CD (which means, no Sony XCP)
- 15.000 albums if your rip/compress them to MP3 first, maybe 20.000 if you use WMA/AAC (that is over 2 years of audio to listen to!)
- 2500 episodes or 100 seasons of TV series like Lost, L-Word, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, … in compressed format (hey, it’s a 2,5″ screen, who cares about HD?)
- If your terabyte iPod breaks down and you buy a new one, it will take you between 3 hours (FireWire 800 Mbps) to 2 days (Wifi 802.11g) to fill it up again (from the backup you of course had put on your snug little home 10GB RAID-5 storage cluster thingy).
If by then all portable devices have 10-Gbit Ethernet built in: 15 minutes will be enough to fill ‘er up.
- Our then-standard 48 megapixel camera would create 72MB RAW images, of which the iPod could store 14.000, or if you would compress them to 5MB JPEG: 200.000 pictures.
Other predictions: the iPhone (or Apple as mobile virtual network operator) and the iTIVO, a media-center/time-shifting/TV/video/DVD hub , all in the next 12-24 months. Let’s hope this inspires some people to seriously vamp up their design/user interface teams (Nokia, Microsoft, I’m looking at you!).
Technorati: terabyte – ipod – bandwidth – portable – data
From Wired – July 2004:
The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable – the speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. – Adam Rogers
- 5 billion Years – Maximum time Earth has left.
- That’s when the sun goes red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit.
- 5.4 * 10-44 seconds – Shortest possible time.
- Any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell whether events are simultaneous.
- 1.419 * 1026 meter (15 billion light-years) – Maximum distance we can see.
- The universe is about 15 billion years old - this is light’s travel time.
- 1.6256 * 10-35 meter (6.4 * 10-34 inches) – Shortest possible distance.
- Planck length: any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell between here and there.
- 34.92 km (21.7 miles) – Maximum height of a mountain on Earth.
- Uplift reaches equilibrium with pressure at the base.
- 3.048 * 10-7 m (1.2 * 10-5 inches) – Minimum size of an actively growing cell.
- Free-living cells need room for a full genome, proteins, and guts.
- 130 m (427 feet) – Maximum height for a tree on Earth.
- Gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant’s circulatory system.
- 265 – Minimum number of protein-coding genes for life.
- As seen in the smallest known single-cell organism.
- 200 million years – Maximum age of sub-oceanic crust.
- Older than that: it cools, becomes denser, and “subducts” back into magma.
- -273.15 ° Celsius (-459.67 ° Fahrenheit) – Minimum possible temperature.
- Heat is a function of molecular motion, which stops at absolute zero.
- 338 km/h (210 MPH) – Maximum wind speed for an Earth hurricane.
- A storm can acquire only so much energy from the sea.
- 0.24 second – Minimum delay of a signal sent via geosynchronous satellite.
- It’s light speed up 35.600 km (22.300 miles), and back down.
- 430.000 Mbps – Maximum speed to record data to magnetic media.
- Bits won’t flip reliably with a pulse under 2.3 picoseconds.
- 100 Tbps – Maximum information bandwidth over optical fiber.
- Higher power levels mash signals together.
- 1051 operations per second – Maximum computational power.
- Quantum rules won’t let the ideal 1-liter, 1-kilogram laptop crunch data any faster.
Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger / Sources: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institute for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale
via Andrew Ferguson and bytehead.org
Technorati: science
“Just write it on a CD” can mean a lot of things. There’s the plain audio CD (also ‘IEC 908′ or ‘Red Book‘ standard – 74 minutes of audio), the CD-ROM (or ‘Yellow Book‘ – 700MB of data), the CD-R (‘Orange Book‘) and I’m not even gonna go into stuff like SVCD (Super Video CD – up to 60 minutes of video).
While these colorful standards define the lowest level of formatting, for a CD-R/CD-ROM you still have the issue of which filesystem to use on it. Apple has chosen for using its Hierarchical File System (HFS) – the weird one with the resource forks – on CD media too, while PCs use the ISO 9660 standard (in its basic version: 8.3 filenames). PC-style CDs are readable on a Mac most of the time, while Mac disks are only accessible on a PC with special software. And it’s possible to create a CD with both a Mac and PC partition, each of them invisible for the other platform: the hybrid disc.
Continue reading ‘Hybrid CD: making it run on Mac and PC’
Published on
December 25, 2004 in
hardware.
Moore’s Law in the strict sense states that
(from Intel.com)
In the broadest sense, it can be used to say any computer hardware grows exponentially at some rate (As Moore said: “if Gore invented the Internet, I invented the exponential”). It seems to be true for CPU speed, hard disk capacity, network bandwidth, RAM size … With some imagination it could even be true for laptop batteries: they double capacity every couple of decades (if we’re lucky). Eventhough some claim Moore’s Law is no longer valid, let’s just assume it still is.
In an effort to keep track of the effect of Moore’s law on our own desktop, I will list the typical 2004 Christmas computer. The computer we are talking about is not a budget PC (you can get a Celeron-based PC for less than 700€) nor a nec-plus-ultra workstation with SCSI disks, 2 Itanium processors and 4GB of RAM. It’s rather what would be listed as a ‘performance’ PC. Spending 1500€ (about $2000) this Christmas would get you:
- Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or Athlon 3200+
- 512 MB RAM (e.g. DDR PC3200)
- 128MB or 256MB graphical card (e.g. ATI Radeon X600, nVidia GeForce 6800)
- 160GB S-ATA hard disk with 8MB buffer (e.g. Maxtor Pax Plus 9)
- CD/DVD writer
- 6 USB 2.0, 1 FireWire
- 5.1 sound card
- 7-in-1 memory card reader
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 350 watt power supply
- 17″ LCD monitor (1280×1024)
- Windows XP Home
- Wireless optical keyboard + mouse
(from pcmagazine.be Dec 2004)
Blast from the past: 3 years ago (Jan 2002) a ‘performance’ PC was more like 2000€ and looked like this:
- Pentium 4 2GHz (17% increase per year)
- 256MB RAM (25% increase per year)
- 64MB graphical card (25% increase per year)
- 60GB hard disk (40% increase per year)
- DVD-ROM + CD-RW
- a 56K/V92 modem (!)
- 100Mbps Ethernet (these things go in steps of 10X)
- Keyboard + mouse with(!) scroll-button
- 17″ CRT monitor (same size, only now they’re thinner)
- Windows XP Home (yes, it’s that old!)
(from pcmagazine.be Jan 2002)
If anyone can come up with numbers for Christmas 1998, that would be great!)
So let’s see what Santa brings us for Christmas 2005!
Like the iTug, iDom, iBuprofen, iSlug, YogaMac or the exclusive Steve Jobs Altar:
davidmccandless.com
(via Ief)
Update:
and this one’s for real: Playboy iBod
(via Engadget)
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