Ink Cartridges - Squeezing Out a few more Pages

I accidentally discovered a little trick for getting a little bit more printing out of a dying ink cartridge this week. While printing out copies of a two page form, I noticed that the first page was a little light in places. The second page was too light to even be legible. I concluded that the ink cartridge had died. So I just had the bank for which I needed the form copy my original for the second page and made a mental note to pick up a new ink jet cartridge later this week.

The next day, forgetting that the ink cartridge was dead or dying, I sent a different two page form to the printer. To my surprise, the first page printed out just fine. The second printed out fine on the bottom of the page, but the top part was again illegible. I tried printing out the second page a few more times just to see if the results were a fluke, but no, each time it came out the same. Curious by now, I resolved to let the printer rest overnight and try printing the second page again the next day. Sure enough, it printed out just fine. Resting for a period seems to somehow bring the ink cartridge briefly back to life.

I'll still get a new ink cartridge, of course, but it's nice to know that if you don't feel like heading out to the store right away there might be a way to sometimes get a little printing out of the old cartridge. I can not say exactly how long the printer needs to rest to achieve this effect (3 hours? 12?). Nor can I say this will work for every ink jet printer. Possibly it might be useful for some models and not others (mine is a 10+ year old HP DeskJet 855CSE). For the cost of a sheet of paper, however, I figure it is worth a try.

Using Umlauts, Copyright Symbols, and Other Ascii Characters on a Web Page

If you have occasion to use non english characters (ïèìîÄòö¢ùÿü), the copyright symbol (©) or some other funny little character (½¼⌐¡«»░▒▓│┤╡┬╟╫▐Σσ) on a webpage (or elsewhere), it can be helpful to have a variety of methods to get the character you need. Here are several ways to go:

1. Use a software program that lets you insert the character you need. An example of this would be Microsoft Word. There's no need to create the whole page in Word or whatever software package you use to get the special character, as you can simply highlight the character on screen with your mouse, hit ctrl-c on your keyboard (that's tapping the "c" key while holding down the control key, for those of you unfamiliar with the process) to copy it to the clipboard, head over to whatever software you use to create your web page, and then hit ctrl-v to paste it there.

2. A second method is to find the character that you want online somewhere (in text form rather than graphic, of course) and then copy and paste it in a manner similar to the one I described in the first method.

3. Yet another alternative is to hold down the "alt" key on your keyboard, tap in the ascii code of the character you want on the numeric keypad, and then release the "alt" key. Of course, it helps to know what number to type in (going through all 256 or even just the top 128 can be ever so boring). For that it's best to to take a glance at an ascii table. There's a good one available at http://www.ascii-code.com/

You will probably prefer one method to the other two, but it's good to be aware of all three in case something interferes with your favorite method in a particular circumstance. For instance, as I edit this in Blogger, entering certain ascii code combinations with the "alt" key throw me out of Blogger's editor.