Technitard

Trapped in the Machine

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Zenspace

Zenspace

I recently had my car serviced at the dealer and had a few hours to kill before it was ready. I decided to spend the time at Westfield Mall Valley Fair. I brought my laptop and they usually have a lot of free seating and free wifi to go along with it (not to mention food and snacks).

In my wandering from spot to spot, between tasks, I ran into a strange kiosk with the signage “Zenspace.” It was a workspace you could rent on an hourly basis, had it’s own wifi, frosted glass for privacy, and a table with seating where I could more comfortable work, or discreetly take a nap.

It looked worth a try but my initial attempt to sign up through the QR code and app lead me to believe the space cost $80 per hour. My mistake, because when I circled back after lunch I found that the price I originally saw was for a larger venue, and the cost for the pod was just $8 per hour. That was a lot more reasonable. I have used a desk at Silicon Valley Business Center in the past. That was more expensive, plus it was out in the open where I had to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations and be otherwise distracted from my work.

Reserving the pod was pretty easy, although the app could be more user-friendly and intuitive. I got in with no problem. Connecting to wifi was a bit confusing (again due to the could-be-better app UI), and in fact I contacted tech support. After I got connected though, it was smooth sailing.

When I went to sign up for my second hour, I realized I had been given a $20 credit at some point, so I used it. Unfortunately a minute after I made the reservation, the dealer called to tell me my car was ready.

I hope Zenspace is successful and sticks around. The convenience of a small, inexpensive workspace on the go was just what I needed, and am sure something I will need again.

HP 2550L Imaging Drum Warning Light

I have an HP 2550L Color Laser Printer, and I was defrauded when I purchased it. Nowhere on the box or in the sales literature did it say that the printer would stop working when counter chips glued to the toner cartridges and imaging drum reach some arbitary number. Not when the toner cartridges are empty, or the imaging drum produces degraded quality. Just when the counter reaches a number determined by HP, apparently to force you to buy supplies at an increased rate. So when you see the flashing orange light, bend over and smile!

There are three remedies for this fraud.

1) Make HP pay you for the waster toner and imaging drum impressions they force you to throw away. Good luck with that.

2) Reset the counter on you toner cartridges or imaging drum. This sounds promising, but I couldn’t get it to work. If you would like to try though, here’s the procedure (remember this did not work for me, and MAY mess up your printer, so use at your own risk. It had absolutely to effect on my printer, but was claimed to have worked for others):

1 Turn the printer off.
2 Press and hold the GO button (blue-green).
3 Turn the printer on and continue to hold the GO button (about 30 seconds).
4 After the Go, Ready, and Attention Leds all turn on, continue holding until the Attention and Ready leds switch off (GO led still on).
5 Keep pressing the GO button AND now keep pressing the red button (about 15 seconds) until the 3 leds stop blinking.
6 Release GO and red buttons.Reset is done.
7 You may have to re-install HP drivers from CD . You can now continue printing without changing drum or toner.

You may have to follow this procedure many times until you get the timing exactly right. I gave up after 10, and went on the the next option, which did the trick nicely.

3) Buy an after market chip. These will cost you under $10 including shipping. All you have to do is pry the old chip off with a screwdriver, then apply the new self-adhesive chip to the cartridge or drum. Worked like a charm for me, and sure beat paying $200 to replace a perfectly good imaging drum.

Firefox Problems

Don’t get me wrong. I like the Firefox browser, and find many of the third-party extensions very useful, if not indispensible. The first problem is that is loads SLOW! Very slow. Disabling extensions and all the other hoops they have you jump through doesn’t seem to help. It also hogs a lot of memory at times for no apparent reason, so not only can I do nothing on Firefox, I can do nothing on my compute until I force quit it.

The second problem is that I do my Internet-facing tasks on a limited user account. Everything is fine until Firefox needs to be updated. Of course it won’t update on the limited user account, but even if I “Run As” and administrator account and update, I still get the “can’t update” error message always and forever, from then on. The most promising solution I’ve seen so far (i.e. the one I haven’t tried yet, and therefore hasn’t failed) is running Firefox as a limited user from and administrator account. The problem is, I do a lot of Internet facing activities all the time, not just from Firefox, and don’t WANT to use an admin account unless it is absolutely necessary.

I suppose if I have a free day at some point, I can troubleshoot Firefox slow loading, or run Firefox on a limited account, but until then I’ll just use Internet Exploder and Google Chrome, which have neither of the problems I have experienced with Firefox