HP Colour Laserjet 5550 Fuser Jam - stuck to rollers

We've had this problem on and off for a couple of years. Basically I'll come to the printer and it'll be jammed in the top compartment in the fuser unit, sometimes slightly concertina'd, but always with messed up black toner melted on the back of the paper.

Once we took the paper out, the printer would try printing the same print again and jam again! After a while the fuser unit gets more and more clogged with melted toner.

To get out of this loop, I disconnected the network cable (so no more jobs would be accepted) and kept pressing the stop button to cancel the jobs in memory.

To get the 'gunk' off the rollers I went into the 'diagnose' option, and did a paper path thing. This prints off a small bit of text, but is good for getting the toner off the rollers. After a few of these there was no more residue left on the rollers.

Normal print jobs after this worked fine. After a lot of a trials I finally worked out that the print jobs that jam in the fuser unit tend to be mainly black. I tested this theory by printing out a pure black sheet in Photoshop. Blocked it.

It looks as though if the first portion of the print job is very black, the front end of the paper sticks to the rollers and misses the point where it is meant to continue on the paper path and instead, continues to go around the roller.

I've done a few searches to see if anyone else has had the same problems, but alas they have not. My only thoughts are that the fuser unit is not getting hot enough (or too hot) and making the toner stick to it?

I've found one setting for the fuser to switch it from "fast" to "normal" for warmup? This hasn't helped though. I shall update this when I find more information. If anyone has the same trouble I'd be happy to hear it.

Updating firmware on Sony XDCAM Ex1

Just thought I'd write this down incase I needed it for future reference.

So basically, the Sony EX1's can at present only read 16GB and smaller cards. But, if we update the firmware they should be able to read up to 36GB (or bigger maybe).

So here is how we did it:

1. Find the firmware
1. We found it here on sony's website
2. Unzip it all
3. Connect the camera using the 'secret' USB plug
4. On't computer it asks you about a new network interface (which is the camera)
1. Click "Open Network Preferences"
2. Click on "Apply" which confirms you want to add the interface to the list of network interfaces



PMW-EX1 network interface for updating the firmware on EX1 Cameras

3. It might ask you for Administrator username and password
5. Run the VersionUpTool



VersionUpTool for updating firmware on Sony's XDCAM EX1

1. Accept the agreement and keep on clicking
2. It did prompt to say that the Camera had to be running off the mains (not battery)
6. It took about 30 mins

Done

Blogger autosave feature crashes in IE 8

I've noticed that with the version of Internet Explorer 8 we have installed, Blogger consistently crashes when importing images.

It took a lot of time (20 mins) but finally worked out that it was the "Autosave" feature in the newer editors which crashes it. I had to go to the settings and tick the "Use Old Editor" tick box. Of course this might be phased out any time soon.


........


So, we've now moved over to a different proxy server system called Bloxx and the error has slightly changed.


Upon making a new post and putting in an image it managed to autosave (which is where it was crashing before). On clicking "Publish Now" the tab crashes as before, but reloads the editing page with the picture gone. 

Also on clicking the "Preview" button it comes up with an error message and crashes the preview tab. 

ie error when inserting a picture in a new post on Blogger (BlogSpot)

I've found if you click on "save now" (even though it has autosaved) then it will let you click the "Publish Now" button and publish it. 

So, to conclude, this has 'sort of' fixed the problem. I think is a sufficient work-around. At least now they only have to click one other button. 

Illustrator Can't Locate the Startup Proiles

A tutor was having trouble on her machine. Whenever she loaded up illustrator it would come up with this error message:

Can't locate the Startup Profiles. Please try after installing illustrator again.
Illustrator will now attempt to create a default document

I noticed that it also happened on any networked login, but not local logins.

Her machine was a little different then the typical set up. I had enabled "Force Local Home" on the active directory accounts.

After a bit of investigation I eventually ruled it down to NHR. I had just installed it on all machines (see how I fixed NHR) including hers (even though it didn't actually need it). I found that the directories inside - ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe were symbolic links and the "Force Local Home" option didn't work with this very well (I don't know why though).

Anyway, as the NHR thing fixes the problems she was having with her networked home, I've just unticked the "Force Local Home" on Active Directory accounts.

I also had this problem with another machine and to fix it I removed NHR from the com.apple.loginwindow.plist file:

sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook
sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook

It basically means it doesn't load at login or logout.

Making Symbolic links on Mac OS X through command line

So, I keep having to refer back to this, so instead of looking through old posts which mention it, I thought I'd make a post dedicated to Symbolic links.

So, to make a symbolic link it is simply:

ln -s /pathtoexistingfolder/ /pathtofolderyouwantsyboliclinkin/

Simple. Of course many occasions call for you to use the command line to check whether a folder is a symbolic link. To do this I use this command:

ls -l ~/Library/

If a folder in this list starts with an 'l' it means it is a symbolic link. I run this command to check whether the Caches folder is a symbolic link:

ls -l ~/Library/ | grep 'Caches'

What comes up if it is a symbolic link is:

lrwx------ 1 330986 wheel 19 Nov 21 11:37 Caches -> /tmp/330986/Caches/

Notice the "l" at the begining, and also the " -> " which then tells us where the symbolic link goes to.

Deploying Canon EOS 230M stuff on Mac OS X using Iceberg

So we have some lovely HD SL Cameras from Canon. Some sort of EOS model. Very nice. It comes with some software which you need to use these cameras with OS X. Unfortunately Canon neglected to use Apples standard package installer concept and made there own (or bought one it). So I've now got to find a way to put this software on all the machines.

There are two simple ways:

1. would be to simply copy these applications to other computers.
2. Would be to utilise the "Record" facility in the Application "Package Maker" which would hopefully record the files and scripts that the Canon install program performed. (Can't find a copy of Package Maker though!)

Having tried number 1. it looks like it's worked alright. So next is to make a pkg file which puts these apps in the Applications folder. I shall refer to a previous post here how I made a pkg file which installed "fix everything please" and sendlogon.

So, here's how I did it:

1. I used a free Application called Iceberg
2. Made a new project and created a nice little folder for the project
3. Entered the standard details for the Settings

1. I put Admin Authorisation so there would be some control
4. Skipped through the other sections to get to the Files section

1. I made /Applications the Default Destination
2. In Applications I right clicked and selected "Add Files..."
3. I selected the folder which was in my Applications folder on the computer (I'd installed it earlier)
4. I noticed that it didn't show the folders inside the "Canon Utilities". I was just about to click the "Add files..." option again but I did see an option to "Expand All". I clicked it and what do you know, it updated the folder to have all the subfolders it should have had!
5. Next I clicked "Build" and it was done.

Just doing testing at the moment...

Yep, works like a dream!

Why NHR didn't work! Finally

So, after many, many trials and tribulations I've finally worked out why NHR wasn't working. Simply because I tried to install it over itself. Basically the files were already there. Doh!

So to fix it in all the mac suites I basically have to:

1. Get rid of the NHR files on't computers
1. run the uninstall file
2. run a small script to delete the /etc/hooks and /etc/login.hook and /etc/logout.hook
2. Install the NHR.pkg file again (through task server)

So, as I'm running it all through the task server anyway, I'll try and line up the uninstall and install files sequentially, so that it works in the right order. It should do.

Done