and let’s be honest: nobody knows how printers work, not even the people who work with printers
Reposted from
Adam DeConinck
This is one of my favorite comics this time of year
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-BD33rz-4k
You know why that was allowed?
To get the scanner working you had to mess with the Twain drivers. Printing money was pay for days of screaming and shouting!
It is as if by magic and they don’t screw you with a toner lockout either
This week I explained trackpads and Bluetooth to one friend and paired earbuds with an iPhone for another. I am 100% an Android user and had no idea how to navigate to Bluetooth settings on an iPhone, but I made it work.
I'm shocked
So I’ve got that going for me.
what i'm trying to say is not even people who know about printers can be trusted with printers, they're uncontrollably destructive and vile entities (the printers, not the people).
- Clear any paper jams
- Power cycle it
- Run the head cleaning
- Change the ink/toner
- Power cycle it again
- Buy a new printer
Much better: learn to live without hardcopy.
Proprietary interfaces and software older than your dog.
Cantankerous and ill mannered. That is what they are like on a good day. You sweat hours and hours to just get it turn on. It seems be Okay. You put in the picture to be scanned. It makes noises and lights come on.
'Mom, just get a new one. This is from 2001.'
Username: ********
Pass: ****************
>_ DISMOUNT QUEUE SYS$PRT241
> completed
>_DEL QUEUE SYS$PRT241
> completed
>_MOUNT QUEUE SYS$PRT241
> completed
>_SHOW QUEUE SYS$PRT241
>Printer SYS$PRT241 online and waiting for jobs
>_LOGOUT
>Goodbye.
MSKermit: exit
C:\
Yes, all self-taught, out of necessity.
I came into the math lab, and the HP LaserJet III was spitting out pages with ONE CHARACTER on them. The lab monitors had refreshed the tray three times, and it was still spewing.
I logged in and checked the
/ 1
Apparently the business students tried to print their Lotus 123 homework, but they'd neglected to change the default printer from Okidata dot matrix, to HP LaserJet, and the poor printer was having a stroke.
So in usual hacker fashion, I started
/ 2
DOS was no help, nor was Windows 3.1, so I dug into the VMS help menu. After a bit of reading, I learned how to call up the list of printers across the entire campus, found the one for the math
/ 3
I tried creating a completely spurrious queue, then deleting it, and it was successful. So I deleted the clogged queue, then mounted it.
Voila! Problem cleared. We hung notices in the lab for the business students to change their default printer settings, but
/ 4
And of course, being business administration students, they always sent the job FOUR TO FIVE TIMES...
I was an Ag Student, but I still cared about the details.
She used to go to swap meets (flea markets) to buy, repair and resell printers for some extra cash.
Today she has a great corporate IT job.
PC = Paper Cassette
The error means that document is set to US Letter size paper, & that either the paper cassette is some size other than US Letter (typically A4 in most countries), or it's empty.
TL;DR: It's telling the user to load a tray of US Letter paper.
Or tell it to use A4 instead.
(when my thousand dollar Canon was having roller bar issues, I wouldn't have been able to get a new roller bar)
Yes, I programmed them. It was just inputting a series of numbers to make the tower send the correct signal.
If we wanted to actually solve a problem, using a subscription model what would it be.
And we came up with printers and ink.
We spoke to one friend in hardware and he almost had a panic attack about how much more complicated it was
It’s demons.
I actually do!
I've spent countless hours trying to explain how to set them up correctly.
No one listens.
I've written internal help articles on how to do it and why it's important to do it correctly.
People ignore them.
I built print servers that worked.
New people ruined them.
You'll need my advanced class if you want pictures with the words.
“Oh, I remember hearing about that. Apparently they hadn’t paid their donation to Donald Trump.”