Random Tech Questions you want answered.

Chaz wrote:

I'm familiar with the shake trick, and I tried that, but the message is still showing. It's still only in "low toner" mode and there's no actual print problems, so I'm not really worried, more annoyed. I'm also annoyed that apparently the specific model of printer I have takes a cartridge that is really non-standard. I've looked at a couple of places that sell refill kits, and none of them even list this cartridge as an option. Very weird.

LeapingGnome's tape trick should take care of the annoying message.

One thing to keep in mind as well is that the cartridges the printers ship with often hold less ink/toner than the replacements. I think they started doing this to combat the whole "it is cheaper to buy a new printer than ink" thing.

You can also get kits to just refill the cartridge you have. I would recommend doing it outside or in a garage and while wearing clothes you don't mind staining. ReChargX makes kits for various printers starting at around $8.

Rykin wrote:

I think they started doing this to combat the whole "it is cheaper to buy a new printer than ink" thing.

looks at what i paid last time i bought ink
looks at the price of a new printer

Holy sh*t! Aside from the waste, this almost make fiscal sense for me.

tboon wrote:
Rykin wrote:

I think they started doing this to combat the whole "it is cheaper to buy a new printer than ink" thing.

looks at what i paid last time i bought ink
looks at the price of a new printer

Holy sh*t! Aside from the waste, this almost make fiscal sense for me.

The only problem is that new printers come with ink cartridges that are only halfway or less full. I started buying third party cartridges years back for my Canon, instead of paying the $80 or so retail I normally pay about $25 and haven't had a problem yet.

If you do get toner on your clothes, remember to wash with COLD water so it doesn't set into the clothing!

A little late to the party, but my agency bought Brother printers to take advantage of the lower prices of third party toner. A couple of months in we were asked to address a bunch of complaints about smearing ink, inconsistent colors, and horrible quality. After a bunch of troubleshooting we found that the issues disappeared as soon as we installed official toner.

YMMV, but we didn't have any luck with the various alternate inks we tried.

Edit: I will try to find a side by side comparison pic I took at the time. It was pretty startling.

Oh! This was for the color laser printers. I can't speak to the inkjet models.

My computer speakers at work have a lot of ambient crackly hiss to them, I assume a result of some sort of interference. The noise changes slightly as I move the cable that goes into my laptop dock, and sometimes it is significantly worse than others, but it's hard to pin down any particular objects or devices that make it worse. What kinds of things can I do to reduce or eliminate these sounds while still using these speakers? Is there some sort of cheap gadget I can insert between the docking station and the audio cable to address this? Are there particular things I should keep away from my speakers? Anything I can do that would not involve spending more than $5 would be nice.

mrlogical wrote:

My computer speakers at work have a lot of ambient crackly hiss to them, I assume a result of some sort of interference. The noise changes slightly as I move the cable that goes into my laptop dock, and sometimes it is significantly worse than others, but it's hard to pin down any particular objects or devices that make it worse. What kinds of things can I do to reduce or eliminate these sounds while still using these speakers? Is there some sort of cheap gadget I can insert between the docking station and the audio cable to address this? Are there particular things I should keep away from my speakers? Anything I can do that would not involve spending more than $5 would be nice.

Looks like you've already looked for sources of noise and come up empty. However, things to keep away include chargers, power supplies, electrical cables/strips, and anything that uses a lot of electricity.

Does it change if you bend the cable in a certain place? If so, there may be an internal break or short in the cable which would mean it needs replacing.

Does it change if you wiggle one end of the cable or the other where it connects? If so, it could be a corroded connection or bad/broken connector. Corrosion would be cleaned by spraying a bit of electronics cleaner like Deoxit into the connector and unplugging/plugging repeatedly. A bad/broken connector (in a device like the dock or speakers) might require some soldering or a new one.

If it can't be diagnosed, maybe a ferrite choke snapped on the cable near each end will reduce the interference so it's less noticeable.

I know I get a lot of crackle if my phone is anywhere on the desk. It’s really annoying.

mrlogical wrote:

My computer speakers at work have a lot of ambient crackly hiss to them, I assume a result of some sort of interference. The noise changes slightly as I move the cable that goes into my laptop dock, and sometimes it is significantly worse than others, but it's hard to pin down any particular objects or devices that make it worse. What kinds of things can I do to reduce or eliminate these sounds while still using these speakers? Is there some sort of cheap gadget I can insert between the docking station and the audio cable to address this? Are there particular things I should keep away from my speakers? Anything I can do that would not involve spending more than $5 would be nice.

Are these powered speakers with their own volume knob? If so, bring up the volume mixer on the computer and make sure the output to the docking station device is turned up, so you can turn the volume knob down. Otherwise, you're amplifying a weak signal along with all the noise.

Is the cable replaceable, or is it built into the speaker?

It happens more with cheaper speakers so I would say replace your speakers but that is not in the cards so the next best option would be to try to move them away from other electronics, including your phone and any power cords.

You can also try to turn them down if they have a hardware volume knob and just raise the volume in your OS to compensate.

Thanks all. I have now maxed out the volume on the software side so I can turn down the speakers a lot for the same output, and that is helping (even if it makes me slightly wary of when I inevitably forget when I have my laptop on the go and start blasting audio by accident). The cable is not replaceable. I should probably poke around in my basement and see if I have a better set of speakers laying around... It was really bad, I could hear staticy pops just from scrolling my mouse wheel, which seemed ridiculous.

mrlogical wrote:

I could hear staticy pops just from scrolling my mouse wheel, which seemed ridiculous.

That's definitely EMI between components. Turning up the computer side of things like deftly said reduced it for sure, but you might be able to reduce it even more.

- See if there's an alternative port to plug in either the speakers or the mouse (whether wired or wireless) to get them further apart.
- If you plug the speakers directly into the computer, does the interference go away? (If so, the docking station does not have good shielding/isolation between components.)

Anyone using syncing software they like? One that keeps the newest version of the file in both locations.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Anyone using syncing software they like? One that keeps the newest version of the file in both locations.

I've used SyncBack for years and am very happy with it. It's more of a backup program though as it does not sync in real-time, but it has detailed options to mirror source/destination locations in either direction. It can also be left running and have scheduled tasks run at specific times.

Looks good, I just watched some youtube videos on it. Thanks, I'll give it a try.

If that doesn't work out for you, I've been using Syncovery for years, and it works great. It can also do real-time monitoring of folders, syncing changes immediately.

mrlogical wrote:

Thanks all. I have now maxed out the volume on the software side so I can turn down the speakers a lot for the same output, and that is helping (even if it makes me slightly wary of when I inevitably forget when I have my laptop on the go and start blasting audio by accident). The cable is not replaceable. I should probably poke around in my basement and see if I have a better set of speakers laying around... It was really bad, I could hear staticy pops just from scrolling my mouse wheel, which seemed ridiculous.

I wrote up up a long comment with a lot of if/thens, rewrote it completely trying to simplify it, and finally figured out (duh) that it would be much simpler to ask for more info first. Can you describe exactly how your speakers connect and how they're amplified? There are so many possibilities that trying to sort through all of them in a reasonable-length post isn't realistic.

Also, if you plug headphones in with the laptop out of the dock, and you crank the sound up about halfway, do you hear any crackling? And when you plug it into the dock, does the sound device change? In other words, does the dock have a "sound card" in it, or is it just transmitting the laptop's regular internal sound through to the speakers? And if the headphone jack stays live in the dock, do you start getting crackling on that jack after docking?

In general, crackling sound like you describe comes from the electronics, never the actual physical speakers. It could be a sh*tty amp, it could be lousy electronics in the dock, or it could be a crappy sound device in the laptop. There's a chain of electronics from the laptop to your ears, and we're trying to figure out which link in that chain is noisy. That's why I'm asking for more info about how your speakers connect and how they're amplified.

If it ends up being the amp, and the speakers are self-powered, then you'd end up replacing them anyway, but the speakers themselves wouldn't be the problem. It'd be the lousy amp inside.

Apologies in advance if a similar question has been asked and answered before before.

I have a number of drives with media scattered across all of them that I'd like to organize a little more coherently. The end goal is to have things set up so that it's a both easier for Plex to understand (all movies in drive A, TV in drive B, etc.) and for me to navigate (if I want to find Movie Z, I know it will be in Drive A).

The wrinkle is that the drives are full enough that I can't just take an entire folder and copy it from one drive to another.

Ideally, what I'd like to be able to do is designate drives (or folders within drives), select what files I want to end up in those drives, and have software handle the actual copying and deleting of the files.

Does anyone know if there's a program that does this or something similar?

Just a thought, but it'd be a lot easier if you bought a new drive, designated that as one of your destinations, and started that way... You could retire an older drive at the end, or not.

Speaking of drives....

Is there a way to assess a spinning drive's health? My rig was built in 2016, and the one non-SSD in there is now 4 years old. Thinking it might be time before long to swap it out for an SSD....

(and I have Backblaze going so my ass is covered if and when it does fail).

Jonman wrote:

Speaking of drives....

Is there a way to assess a spinning drive's health? My rig was built in 2016, and the one non-SSD in there is now 4 years old. Thinking it might be time before long to swap it out for an SSD....

(and I have Backblaze going so my ass is covered if and when it does fail).

I use StableBit Scanner for this.

WellAdjusted wrote:

Apologies in advance if a similar question has been asked and answered before before.

I have a number of drives with media scattered across all of them that I'd like to organize a little more coherently. The end goal is to have things set up so that it's a both easier for Plex to understand (all movies in drive A, TV in drive B, etc.) and for me to navigate (if I want to find Movie Z, I know it will be in Drive A).

The wrinkle is that the drives are full enough that I can't just take an entire folder and copy it from one drive to another.

Ideally, what I'd like to be able to do is designate drives (or folders within drives), select what files I want to end up in those drives, and have software handle the actual copying and deleting of the files.

Does anyone know if there's a program that does this or something similar?

There are programs that can do stuff like this based off of file type... problem is all your movies and TV shows are probably the same file type. StableBit DrivePool (I feel like I should get a kick back from them for mentioning them so much lately) lets you combine multiple physical drives into one large virtual drive. So I have 12 drives adding up to about 56 TBs of formatted storage and it all just shows up as D:. Much easier than when I had 6 different drives each that had a Plex folder and each of those with a Movies folder and TV folder inside of them. That is what I used to do and I would just copy everything to one drive until it filled up and then add a new drive.

Robear wrote:

Just a thought, but it'd be a lot easier if you bought a new drive, designated that as one of your destinations, and started that way... You could retire an older drive at the end, or not.

This is really the best idea. While not exactly the same, I'm in the process of doing this on my own network. My company was throwing out a bunch of old servers we wouldn't use anymore, after we scrapped the drives for security reasons. I grabbed 4, though I've only used one so far. I installed an old 500GB drive I had laying around for Windows10, and an 8TB drive for storage. They're i7-4970s CPUs with 8GB of DDR4-2600, in a 1RU case, so pretty good for use as a media server and don't take up much room.

Once I got it up and running and had Teamviewer booting up and working right, I installed software to run a dedicated Minecraft server, a dedicated Portal Knights server, Plex, and I mapped the 8TB drive on my network so I can just move things around as I need. Then I set up folders specifically for all the stuff cluttering up my main PC... Plex media (with separate subfolders for movies, TV, pictures, music), picture backups, video backups, I have a number of game and program installation files I tend to hold on to, etc. I just bought an ASUS AC66U router so transfers are around 100-120MB/s, so 1GB about ever 10 seconds.

But realistically, even an external drive would be a good start just to have a buffer. Set the folders and files up on the external, then organize onto the drives where you want them.

The secondary reason is that if you've got so little free space that you need to play Towers of Hanoi to move stuff around, your disk performance is likely degraded as well...

Robear wrote:

The secondary reason is that if you've got so little free space that you need to play Towers of Hanoi to move stuff around, your disk performance is likely degraded as well...

Disk performance for a media server drive isn't really something you need to worry about though.

Okay. I was worried about fragmentation, but I guess more recent drives do a lot towards mitigating that with large files?

Robear wrote:

Just a thought, but it'd be a lot easier if you bought a new drive, designated that as one of your destinations, and started that way... You could retire an older drive at the end, or not.

This is probably what I should do.

Sometimes it's easy to overthink a problem and end up with a complex (albeit fun) solution when the simple solution is best. I still kind of like the idea of some fancy piece of software magically moving everything around, but then again when I was much younger (like 11) I liked watching the windows 95 defrag execute so maybe I just like this sort of thing.

Robear wrote:

Okay. I was worried about fragmentation, but I guess more recent drives do a lot towards mitigating that with large files?

Fragmentation is more of an issues with drives that are constantly being modified. With media server drives the bits are often wrote once and then only read from then on so fragmentation is unlikely to happen.