A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[dave r]

... I can hear it printing but it doesn't produce anything...

Of course you have checked that the cartridges aren't empty, haven't you? 

If you're only printing stuff intermittently and the printer has a "clean print heads" cycle you can start manually try that before you kick off a print run.  The cartridge print heads may be gumming up where they're sitting idle so no ink is reaching the paper.

If there's no manual clean option, the cartridge is still full and it is just a case of gummed up heads you could try taking


 the cartridge out and very, very, very gently cleaning the heads with a damp cotton bud.  Bit of a last resort this
though because you run the risk of buggering up the fragile cartridge heads completely and what with cartridges being ridiculously overpriced...

Another possibility that's just flitted through what passes for my mind is that the ink in the cartridge(s) may have dried out/gone sludgy/separated if they're very old cartridges. Worth trying a new cartridge if you've got any to hand?

You could also check that the cartridges' signal contact points are still held securely and cleanly against the printer and perhaps give them a bit of a clean if they look grubby.

After that? Not a clue.

Cheers, I'm sure  I've come across this before but I can't remember what the solution was

[ian]

I have been contemplating a new speaker and I was told in the pub that apparently people 'can't believe I don't have Alexa.' I'm not sure if that's because they expect me to keep women in small boxes. So, smart speakers are evidently the thing. I currently have an ancient Aiwa thing with a crappy Logitech Bluetooth adaptor (it's only crappy because I have to turn the volume up to the max on everything to get barely a kick to my eardrums, and as such the thing buzzes like an overtaxed high tension power line). And then I forget so wander down the following morning, turn on the radio and the voice that comes is louder than the VOICE OF GOD. Which means God actually sounds a lot like Chris Moyles.

You'd think it would be simple, honestly, but it isn't, there's a million different things, all kinds of other stuff, myriad options. I have been sitting here since 4pm and I'm still none the wiser. I have a NAS under the stairs with an iTunes library and occasional Spotify. Make the sounds come out and make them sound moderately nice. And loud. And I'd like a speaker in my remote command centre and one in the living room. I'd buy the Apple one, but if you've either tried to hold a conversation with Siri, you'd know why that would be a bad idea. Honestly, I'm not sure about talking to computers, but at some point in future, it'll be the only way to turn on a light and flush the loo.

I give up. I think I'll wander to John Lewis and try the Sonos One thing. Sometimes old school suck-it-and-see is better than a million reviews.

[Kim]

I'm an old fart.  Speakers should come in stereo pairs, and - in the absence of special dispensation for disability or when used to control manned spacecraft - computers should be operated by keyboard (preferably with a loud beep on every keypress) or total-immersion virtual reality system.  Touchscreens, speech recognition and those upside-down trackpad things you get these days are all a work of Sian.  And I know who Chris Moyles is.

[ian]

I think my main use case is the bathroom, honestly operating both an iPad and Kindle while immersed in the bath is a fraught operation. And the voice activation feature for my wife is notoriously unreliable. Alas, I suspect neither will bring me a fresh beer on command.

[Kim]

Weirdly, while I do have a bathroom computer, it doesn't really have a user interface.  Unless you count the door.

[grams]

The Apple one only accepts voice commands for Apple Music (the streaming service), not iTunes or Spotify, so it's useless to you anyway.

[ian]

So I read, hence shit. Plus Siri is, I suspect, a daughter of Finestre, the Demon of Such Things. It's only a matter of time before she's (or he, I hear it's gender fluid) whispering in your ear kill them all. And when she does I'll tell her 'I'm sorry, I don't understand kill them all."

I'm so old I'm not set on subscription services. I dunno, I like to think that a sudden urge to play Belinda Carlisle's Heaven on Earth won't be stymied by the fact I've not my monthly subscription.

That said I use the free Spotify as radio and buy stuff I like. I figure that way something more than spare fractions of a cent makes it to the artist.

Every day I not just feel a bit older, and I suspect I actually am. Entropy, my reflection.

[Mr Larrington]

I keep the iTunes library on a NAS and pipe sounds via whichever Babbage-Engine is closest to an amplifier and speakers.  Except the one in the Chips Room, which has a network cable and ancient FruitCo AirPort Express to connect it to the PC in the Great Hall.  You just have to remember not run iTunes on two machines simultaneously, as otherwise it gets confused.

[Ham]

I'm an old fart.  Speakers should come in stereo pairs,

Just sold a pair of those on eBay. And, because I'm an older fart and was able to buy them new for -urm- £80? I think - I've just sold 'em for £6,500.

[Mr Larrington]

Blimey, what were they?

[Ham]

Chartwell BBC monitors, low serial number. Liquidated for the Miss Ham collecting tin.

Yes, I was a bit gobsmacked, too.

[ian]

Blimey, it would probably be cheaper to get Taylor Swift and come round and play a Bontempi in my living room.

[Ham]

Well on investigation (because eBay shit), it looks like there is a Chinese collectors fad. The top bidder has dropped out, no idea if any of the similar value bidders will step in, it might all be a crock'o'shit. The genuine UK value is around £2K, still astonishing IMO, and I can be sure of £4k.

[ian]

I keep the iTunes library on a NAS and pipe sounds via whichever Babbage-Engine is closest to an amplifier and speakers.  Except the one in the Chips Room, which has a network cable and ancient FruitCo AirPort Express to connect it to the PC in the Great Hall.  You just have to remember not run iTunes on two machines simultaneously, as otherwise it gets confused.

At the moment, I either play the tunes from the NAS or via Spotify through my Mac and bluetooth it to the dongle on the Aiwa or use my phone to play though the TV soundbar or kitchen speakerbox via bluetooth.

The Aiwa is slowly dying, it must be a zillion years old, has crappy bass. The remote control died last year so now when the phone rings I have to scoot across the room on my chair to turn it down and then scoot all the way back, trying hard not to run over a cat or tip myself over on the floor/rug interface. And now the buttons on the front require enhanced pressing. Oh, the suffering. I could just stand up, of course.

Anyway, I'd like to play my tunes louder and it would be nice if I could play both in my mezzanine office and the adjoining living room so I can wander around the ground floor with constant tunage. Voice control isn't that important, but I'm informed it's the future. Light bulb on. Light bulb off. I still dream of hover cars and social acceptability for tight silver lurex. That was the future they promised me, not shouting at a woman in a box.

I hate technology purchases, they just make me feel old. When I were a lad, you could just plump for the one with the most giga-whatevers. Now there's an infinite number of models. You can't even get a single variety of computer cable.

[Mr Larrington]

One of my amps is networked, has FruitCo AirPlay built-in and can be run as either 7:1 or 5:1 with a pair of remote squeakers elsewhere.  Another one does Bluetooth but because Bluetooth is just a subset of Sian's Radio I don't use it.

[ian]

I'm quite unsophisticated. I did have a 5:1 home cinema thing but it now lives in the garage after the last house move as I couldn't be bothered with all the wires and a soundbar and wireless subwoofer does the job amply enough. Everything does bluetooth though there's the hassle of selecting the bloody thing on my phone. Apple for reason, maintain that the best way to select a bluetooth device is by navigating through a dozen menus, and not simply offering up a list when resting one's finger on the icon.

To be honest, I'm being nudged into this purchase by my wife as I apparently 'don't buy anything.' I presume this is because she's noodling about the purchase of some new music making device (and contra-somesuch) so when I exclaim 'how much!' (I don't really care, but it's a tradition) she'll say 'well, you did just buy a...'

[ian]

Oh woes, my mid-2011 MacBook Air no longer has enough narwhals under the hood to run MacOS Mojave. No dark mode for you, my geriatric little laptop. I am sort of worried that activating dark mode merely opens a portal to Hell for Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, to wander through. She's lovely, of course, but like most demons, kind of evil. She did, after all, put Steve Jobs on Hell's Microsoft Help desk. For eternity. Then he gets moved to IBM Outsourced Solutions. You should hear him wail, even by Hell's standards of constant pitiful wailing, it's something special. They use it as elevator muzak.

ETA: I put it on my iMac. It seems to have broken precisely nothing. Adobe CC and Affinity work, even the ancient Office 2011. Finestre popped around for a cup of tea the moment I entered the Dark Mode. Inspiring eternal torment is thirsty work, or so she says. And can I get her a new iPhone? It's all Nokia in Hell.

EETA: No worries though, they're moving to Blackberry soon.

[Maverick]

Oh woes, my mid-2011 MacBook Air no longer has enough narwhals under the hood to run MacOS Mojave.

Likewise 

ETA: I put it on my iMac. It seems to have broken precisely nothing. Adobe CC and Affinity work, even the ancient Office 2011.

It also converted my 6TB Fusion drive to APFS without borking it, doesn't seem to have made any difference to speed in the real world though. I like dark mode, I've always used black backgrounds wherever it is available, seems to suit my substandard eyesight better than bright backgrounds.

[ian]

I quite like Dark Mode (admittedly Finestre is going to get fed up with the constant cups of tea) – of course, it only works with apps developed with the latest frameworks that support it – though Adobe and Affinity had had their own 'dark' modes (as default) for a while. Which can make for a bit of a mishmash until updates arrive (and older applications never). Easy to swap depending on mood, of course (it would benefit from a menu bar toggle).

The changing desktop is actually quite cool.

I think everything else is mostly under the hood. Performance seems fine. Bluetooth continues to work. They've faffed with the fonts again.

[Mr Larrington]

Is there a special word for the kind of blind panic you feel at 4 am when it looks as though something has so thoroughly scrambled the contents of your network drives that the chances of putting everything right appear to be nil?

Until you realise than the PCs have had their net-branez scrambled because you rebooted the router, which does all the DHCP stuff in these parts

Restart PCs, net-branez unscrambled, Stuffs back where they should be.  Make note to investigate giving everything a fixed IP address.

[rafletcher]

I keep the iTunes library on a NAS and pipe sounds via whichever Babbage-Engine is closest to an amplifier and speakers.  Except the one in the Chips Room, which has a network cable and ancient FruitCo AirPort Express to connect it to the PC in the Great Hall.  You just have to remember not run iTunes on two machines simultaneously, as otherwise it gets confused.

At the moment, I either play the tunes from the NAS or via Spotify through my Mac and bluetooth it to the dongle on the Aiwa or use my phone to play though the TV soundbar or kitchen speakerbox via bluetooth.

The Aiwa is slowly dying, it must be a zillion years old, has crappy bass. The remote control died last year so now when the phone rings I have to scoot across the room on my chair to turn it down and then scoot all the way back, trying hard not to run over a cat or tip myself over on the floor/rug interface. And now the buttons on the front require enhanced pressing. Oh, the suffering. I could just stand up, of course.

Anyway, I'd like to play my tunes louder and it would be nice if I could play both in my mezzanine office and the adjoining living room so I can wander around the ground floor with constant tunage. Voice control isn't that important, but I'm informed it's the future. Light bulb on. Light bulb off. I still dream of hover cars and social acceptability for tight silver lurex. That was the future they promised me, not shouting at a woman in a box.

I hate technology purchases, they just make me feel old. When I were a lad, you could just plump for the one with the most giga-whatevers. Now there's an infinite number of models. You can't even get a single variety of computer cable.

You have Amazon Prime, no? So you get Amazon Music as part of that.  Something Alexa enabled seems a sensible in that case.  Sonos are reportedly good.

[ian]

I do have Prime, but it's a bit shit. Amazon want you to upgrade to Unlimited. I'm not especially keen to give more money to the tax-dodgers. I should perhaps bite the bullet and go with Spotify or Apple Music, I just have the olde worlde urge to have actual music (even if it's only electrons) that won't disappear the moment I stop handing over cash. Even if I never listen to it again. Plus I genuinely think that create the stuff that I enjoy should get paid actual money for their endeavour. But like I say, I do mine Spotify Free (and honestly, the number of adverts isn't large). I assume they have shout-at-a-lady control for that, but I'm sure I'd have to read another 25 web pages to find out.

I quite like the Sonos One and John Lewis sell it, so I may meander by and see if I can annoy a sales assistant by turning the volume as loud as it goes and wandering off to see if I can still hear it from outside the building.

[lastant]

I quite like the Sonos One and John Lewis sell it, so I may meander by and see if I can annoy a sales assistant by turning the volume as loud as it goes and wandering off to see if I can still hear it from outside the building.

We're fully Sonos'd up...we have Play:1s in both bedrooms and the kitchen and a Play:3 in the lounge. If I was buying with hindsight I'd have probably opted for another Play:1 or a Play:5 in the lounge, but only as what we've got feels a bit of a half-way house in regards to their line-up (and it looks as though they'll be refreshing it in the very near future). Syncs to our NAS, connects to our Spotify and streams from TuneIn/SoundCloud/others as necessary and it's nice to be able to group them around the house depending on the situation.

The Play:1s are excellent, the Sonos One adds voice recognition to it (Alexa for now, Google by Christmas...maybe). They go ridiculously loud for the size that they are, and can be paired to make a stereo set if you so wish - they've also just released them in a range of hues if the black or white is a bit too monochrome for you.

In short: as far as 'plug and play' goes, I'd recommend Sonos to anybody. Worth noting it won't stream Spotify unless you've got a Premium/paid account in case that's one big draw to picking one up.

[ian]

Thanks, I'd noodled as far as the Spotify Premium requirement. Tbh, I'm not convinced by voice control. Part of me thinks it's the future, but another part of me knows AI will always overthrow us and this is likely the time the people of future – from their caves – will take a break from starvation to identify as the start of their downfall. Are you sure want to play that, ian? I can see it pouring harsh judgements on my listening choices. Computers, alas, will never understand the pure elation that those first notes of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclypse of the Heart can engender. They might, on the other hand, devise an algorithm that makes sense of the video. Humans have failed.

Lightbulb on, lightbulb off. I assume someone out there has a better use. Volume up, volume down. Kill them all, Alexa, kill them all.

[TheLurker]

Tbh, I'm not convinced by voice control...

Ahh,  but you have full control of your limbs.  For all its current flaws and idiocies I can see it making life very, very much more bearable for someone who hasn't.  Don't much like the server based nature of it though.  Loss of privacy and all that.