All’s Well
OK, after 5 years, I now have 4WD again. I was somewhat worried that I had misdiagnosed the problem, as it has been years since I did it and my memory is not so good these days. Actually, my memory never was so good, but that is another story. But, no, I did not make a mistake, the new encoder motor fixed it.
The tailpipe chose the test drive to fall off the truck, so I will have to replace the exhaust system real soon now, and next month (May) is my traditional vehicle maintenance month, so I need to oil change the oil, do a lub job, plus replace all the filters and the spark plugs (150K maintenance). Then there is some new rust from the winters salt that needs to be dealt with. The lady is sixteen now, and every one knows how expensive sixteen year olds are to maintain.
I got a couple of new hard drives in the mail today. I replaced the two old RE2 drives with the two new RE3 drives, and moved the other RE3 from the motherboard controller to the raid controller as a hot-spare. That leaves me with the same capacity as I had, but faster, and more reliable as the hot-spare will switch in automatically if one of the drives in the raid-5 array fails. The Western Digital 500gb RE3’s cost me about $50 each off ebay. They have been replaced by the RE4’s and most folks are buying bigger drives these days which is why they are so cheap right now. If I can come up with the funds to buy a couple more I will expand the array to 2tb which will serve my needs for the next few years. The RE2’s are now doing backup duty. The workstation would also like some more memory, and a pair of faster processors.
The little server, has about reached the end of its life too. I had to delete a lot of stuff off it because the 320gb hard drives were full up. Gah, I remember when I bought a 100mb hard drive and thought I would never need more space than that.
The unseasonably warm weather is going away the next few days, but we do not seem to be going to have the rain they were predicting.
The price of gas has gone up again. The price of food is up again. And Social Security is frozen. The poor get poorer and the rich get fatter. If prices were stable and I had an extra couple of grand a year, I think I could get by OK. That would be about $10K. I used to live kind of poorly on $25K/year, anything more and I actually could build up some savings. That was a long while back however. I actually, had that extra couple of grand the past year, maybe another windfall will show up this year too. Just got to keep that positive attitude.
Light Banding with my Continuous Ink Supply System
The inexpensive CISS on my Epson 1400 worked perfectly all spring, summer, and early fall, then I noticed light magenta and cyan banding in gray areas on my photos. Thinking I had clogged print heads, I did a nozzle check. The Nozzle check was fine. Plain paper color prints, were fine, but still I had that banding. Ran a few cleaning cycles, but that seemed to make it worse. I read web comments about similar problems others had with their CISS. No one had a solution. I started cussing the thing, like other’s I concluded that CISS were useless junk.
Then I noticed that three was ink in the air filters on the supply tanks. I removed them, took them apart, cleaned them, put them back together and reinstalled them. After I did a couple of cleaning cycles and the problem was gone. Apparently, what was happening was with the filters clogged there was not enough air flow. It seems that that caused a partial vacuum in the tanks that actually was pulling ink back from the ink cartridges. It was OK if all I was printing was a nozzle check or a draft document, but when I tried printing photos, it restricted the flow of ink to the heads.
I ordered some new filters from a guy on eBay, but before they arrived, the problem was back. The filters were clogged with ink again. Why, I wondered?
I went through the process again, only this time I lost a filter disk and the top of one of the filters down the drain. Well, I had new ones coming, and I could see that the disks were so blocked up, even after cleaning that they would restrict the air flow, so I left the filter disks out.
How was the ink getting up into the filters? I have used about half of the ink in the system the top of the ink level was half way down the tank from the filters. Then I realized that with the heat on the air in my apartment was really dry. Could it be simple evaporation? Was the ink evaporating and clogging the filters with pigment? I think so.
I did some thinking and came up with this solution:
New Ink Caps on my CISS
Those red caps are #8 Screw Protectors from the local building supply store. They fit nicely on the step at the base of the air inlet of the filters. It helped that the new filters arrived today as well. The caps ought to prevent evaporation of the ink when the printer is not in use. Of course, I will have to remember to remove them when I want to print something.
At the same time I ordered the filters (I ordered two sets so if I have to clean them again, I can just swap them out and keep printing while I did so), I ordered one of those waste ink bags from the guy in England that sells them on eBay. As soon as I get it installed, I will do several cleaning cycles. I hope this will be the last of that banding problem.
The Big Scan
The Epson 2400 scanner I got on the bay arrived today. Couldn’t wait to figure out anything or clean it up to try it with the 4×5 adaper. So out came a blaw neg, and scan away I did. Without further ado…
4x5 ngative scan downsized for the web
I did nothing to this scan but downsize it to 100ppi.
The radio slave trigger I have been waiting on arrived today as well. Sadly it does not seem to want to work with the Norman P808m power pack. It would with my toy flashes, or at least the Vivitar 283, but I specifically wanted it to connect the power pack & heads studio strobe to my digicam. I emailed the seller a quiry to see if he knows whether it is supposed to work with the Norman or not.
This also seems to be my week for medical stuff. I saw the neurologist today, I have to drive down to Charlotte for the dentist tomorrow, then the next day I see my therapist, and Thursday I get an MRI done. So I have the holiday week end off however.
Review of eBay Continuous Ink Supply System (CISS)
If you do much inkjet printing you probably have noticed those cheap, compared to the manufacturers’ ink cartridges, CIS systems on eBay and have wondered if they were any good. As mentioned in a previous post I recently obtained an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 printer on sale. When I checked the price of ink cartridges for it, I almost had a heart attack. The local Staples store, where I bought the printer, gets $23.99 each. That is a total of $133.94 + tax for a set, or $143.99.
So off to eBay I went. For $40.99 I got a CISS with ink. The seller has an excellent feedback rating but he was a bit slow in communications, shipping, and follow up. Not terribly so, usually responded in a couple of days, but there are lots of sellers who do better.
Photo of CISS from sellers eBay listing
When the unit finally arrived there was a lot of air in the lines. The instructions say to contact the seller if there was more han 20cm of air, there was definitely more than than in the black line and most of the other lines were close to that; so I sent off another email. That one was not answered at all; so much for after the sale service from that seller. I used instructions from the web for removing bubbles in the ink lines. That was kind of messy.
Mess made getting excess air out of ink lines
The above is an image of a print. My original photos of the installation were lost due to a stupidity caused loss of the raid partition they were in.
The installation into the printer was pretty straight forward after that. I, like many others, was not able to get the ink cover off without breaking the right side hinge pin. Well, I did not want a warranty on the printer anyway.
CISS ink carts in printer
How ink lines are run for the CISS
How does it work. Quite well actually.
CISS setup with test print
As you can see the test print of a color calibration image is pretty good. The two identical prints below were printed with the CISS and on the old Epson R200 respectively
Some small test prints
They show that the image from new printer with the CISS is sharper and very slightly warmer than the image from the old printer using Epson inks. I did not use the ink cartridges that came with the printer, as I plan to sell them to recover the cost of the CISS.
Of course none of this says anything about long term reliability, nor print life. As for reliability, if it only lasts one ink load it is far, far cheaper than using Epson inks. If it lasts longer than that, the seller is offering ink refill sets for only $25 which will reduce ink cost even more. Print life will not likely be as good as with the Epson inks, but then the real advantage of digital imaging is that you can simply print a duplicate at any time.
So, with only limited use, I think the CISS was a worthwhile modification. How I feel about it six months or a year from now you will have to wait and see. Health withstanding, I will provide those reports.
New Printer and Hot Swap Module
I bought an Epson Stylist Photo 1400 printer on sale last week. After doing a bit or research I ordered a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System) for it from eBay. Interestingly, while there is a lot of old information on CISS’s out there, there is very little current stuff that I could find. There are the big three, Ink Republic, Media Street, and Lyson with very expensive systems, and a lot cheap made in Asia systems, Back in 2005-06 the Asian systems were apparently pretty crappy. I would guess they have improved and the prices certainly gone down. The one I just paid for cost $40.99 with ink and free shipping. Which is a real bargain when you realize that new Epson 79 series ink cartridges cost $23.99 each locally and the printer takes six of them. I will put up a short review once I have used the CISS for a bit.
*****
I also have gotten a five bay hot swap drive module for the computer. Along with the two SAS drives, I believe I mentioned previously, it gives me two fast drives for the OS, and the existing three 500gb SATA drives in a RAID-5 array for data, all hot swappable. Unfortunately I seem to be having a bit of a problem with the hot swap module. One of the LED’s is not working properly. I may have to send it back for a replacement. The module is a Norco SS-500 I bought from newegg.com. It seems to be very well designed, but somewhat lacking in quality control like a lot of products these days. I want to do a couple of more checks before I actually start the RMA (Returned Merchandise Authorization) procedure.
Once this is all sorted out I intend to make the SAS drives my boot drives giving all Windows and software access a pretty good boost in performance as the SAS drives are 15000 rpm SCSI drives in a hardware RAID-1 configuration. I guess I should mention that the drives are all working fine in the hot swap module, it is just one LED that is not working properly.
ADDED: Checked out things some more and the H/S module seems to be OK. Apparently the LED’s do not work with SAS drives. I wonder why they say it is compatible with SAS drives right on the box?
REVIEW: Chinese Laptop Battery from eBay
Ever wonder about those cheap laptop batteries on eBay?
Well I needed a new battery for my old IBM Thinkpad X24 Notebook, so I ordered one listed as a
4.8A LAPTOP BATTERY Fr IBM ThinkPad X20 X21 X22 X23 X24
Seller: manufacturerbattery2
(NOTE: I do not give a direct link as that will not be useful after awhile)
But first I sent them and email asking them to confirm that it was a 4800 milliamphour battery. Their response was,
Dear graywolfphoto,
Thank you for your inquiry.
Our this model of battery is 4800mah.
6 cells and a half year warranty, if you receive the battery in a month, it
has some quality of problem , i can replace a new one to you.
Our battery of quality is reliable, so you can trust it.
Meanwhile i will try my best to service for you.
I will ship battery usps (postal service)
Feel freeo contact with us if you have any request.
My email:sell@yock-asia.com
Have a good weekend!
Best regards.
–manufacturerbattery2
So after 26 days I receive it in the mail. The first thing I notice about it is that Chinese Plastic Smell. The second it that it does not fit quite as well as the factory battery being just a bit tight and requiring a bit more force than I was really comfortable with to snap it into the laptop. It very clearly says 4800mah on it. So I plug it in and let it charge for 24 hours (Yes, I know the charging circuit shuts off long before that, but they always tell you to do that). Even after 24 hours the charge light is still blinking.
A bit of an aside to explain how the Thinkpad’s charging circuit works with the factory battery. The LED shows green above 80%, Amber below that. Charging it shows Amber up to 80% then blinking green until fully charged. At 98% it drops to a low trickle charge until completely charged when the LED goes to a steady green. These, by the way, are Smart Batteries and and this is all determined by the onboard computer.
Next I setup a Calibrate battery profile that simply does nothing, allowing the laptop to run down continuously until the battey shuts it off. Then I unplugged it and waited for it to shut off. Which happened 2.5 hours later. That was not much more than the factory battery was still doing even though it was down to 50% of capacity. However I was not too worried about that as you usually have to do a few calibration runs to get a new battery and the laptop into calibration and giving the full capacity of the new battery.
However, I was still worried about that blinking LED never going out. I emailed the seller about that and they told me to download a copy of batterymon.exe from the web, and send them a screen shot of the battery information from it. In the meantime I had done another discharge/charge cycle. That time the battery went four hours (note that is at an idle with nothing running on the computer). That is about what I expected.
With batterymon.exe running here is the info shot from the next run,
Things to note are the Design Capacity, Full Charge Capacity, and Current Capacity, this will be interesting later on. You will also notice that the battery is discharging at a rate of about 11 watts.
I noticed on the discharge chart that the battery shut down at about 15%, but the notebook shut off before I could get a screen shot. For the next run I set the computer to hibernate at 3% and it managed to do that so I was able to recover the chart that time.
In that screen shot above you can see where the battery cuts off at 12-13%. The discharge rate is higher in that run because I got impatient and did repeated virus scans to simulate normal usage which gave 2.5 hours which is not too bad for and older notebook of this type.
Next we look at the battery supposedly fully charged.
Now, wait a minute, that looks strange.
Yes, it does what we are seeing here is the battery cutting off charging at about 91%. Furthermore, it had been trickle charging from 80%. Something stinks in Denmark, err… I mean China.
Lets look at an info shot.
Here we are seeing the battery after three cycles. It says 100% charged, zero charging rate. But compare the capacity ratings to the first shot.. Yes Design Capacity is down from 5240 to 4804 milliamp hours, and Full Charge Capacity is down from 4229 to 3876mah. Current capacity is also 3876. I figure that the SMART BATTERY is learning that that 91% above is full charge. If this keeps up the capacity will go down with each charge cycle. Let’s look and see if it does.
This is after another cycle. Note the capacities. Design and Full are the same as in the previous cycle but Current Capacity is down from 3876 to 3645. It shows 94%, but notice the Charge Rate is Zero so it is for all intents and purposes fully charged.
At that point I stopped cycling the battery as I am going to have to get what use I can out of it. I figure that will be about six months which coincidendently is when the warrenty ends. What does the seller, who appears to actually be Yock Batteries, the manufacturer, say about this?
Dear sir,
Our engineer saw your pictures , he said the battery can discharge and charge normally.
So we think you can use our battery well.
If you have any request, please email to me.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards.
So why do they not have a lot of negative feedback (I did give them a negative)? Most likely because all most buyers notice is that it charges and discharges which it does quite well, by the time the poor programming of the onboard computer causes the battery to die it is too late. Being a tech, when the run time gets low enough to be annoying I will take the cells out of this and put them into the old battery case and use the factory electronics. That means I think the actually cells are OK, it is the implementation that is bad. Probably just the programming.
CONCLUSION: Pass on these.
NOTE: It isn’t buying direct from China that is bad, it is buying a Yock battery even from a local dealer.
ADDENDUM: (7/25/2008) I ran another cycle, and as I expected batterymon now shows fully charge to be 3645mah. That is only 3/4 the capacity they claimed and I expect it to get worse.
Hibernation Problem Solved
Ah well, I solved the hibernation problem on the Thinkpad. Turned out to be an older application that did not live well with Thinkpad Power Manager and SP3. I have no idea what I am going to replace the application with, I do not think it has been updated in several years.
I ordered a new battery for the Thinkpad from eBay. It is on a slow boat from China, no telling when it will get here.
I also ordered a UPS from eBay. It is a used APC SmartUPS 1500 without batteries. It should be here in a few days. I will have to order new batteries for it. I am having a hard time figuring out what the difference is between a $60 set and a $200 set. Well I do know that some of them are preassembled battery packs, and some are just a couple of batteries, but is there a real quality difference between the cheap ones and the expensive ones? Also one has to watch the shipping charges on something like that as they quote between $17 and $50 for UPS Ground. Strangely it is not the closest places that are the cheapest. I guess something in the middle range ($100 shipped) is probably the best bet.
So much for the lunch money George sent.
It does not compute!
Or only part time.
I have continued to have to tinker with both the workstation and the laptop. That is not all bad. First I upgraded the X24 Thinkpad with an 60gb 7200rpm drive. I also ordered a higher speed version of the wireless pc-card I have in it, but it arrived DOA. I will have to wait on the refund before I can try and find another. It needs a new battery as well. Then I upgraded the workstation with a pair of Opteron 870 processors. All from ebay, the boonie dweller’s friend. So much for that stimulous payment check.
I have had some more problems with the hibernation on the X24, as of now I am pretty sure it is either AVG 8.0 or Spybot Search & Destroy causing it. One of them seems to be shutting it off so they laptop can not shut down on them and not turning it back on when it is done scanning. Do I really need them? I used to upgrade and run them once a week, and felt I was well protected from malware. Somehow they have taken over all my computers; and the workstation is the only one that is not brought to its knees by them. I guess it is back to manual scans.
Today I found a pair of Baby Advent II speakers at the local Goodwill Store. Eight bucks and they work fine. Baby Advents are nice bookshelf speakers from the 70-80’s. Definately decent sounding. I had a pair back in those days so there is a large element of nostalgia involved in finding them.
I have also moved up in the digital photography world. The local Staples Office Supply Store had a sale on PNY 2gb compact flash cards so I bought one. I do not really need all the extra space but the 266x speed is nice.
Golly, I sure have spent a lot of money this month…
On a non-monetary front I have been playing with nLite a freeware program for customizing your Windows Installation CD. It makes it easy to slipstream in the latest Service Pack. It also lets you set up an unattended boot and walk away install. Most of us do have better things to do with our time than sitting in front of our computers answering Microsoft’s questions. It also allows you to customize things a bit, saving most of that time you spend after installing Windows setting it up to work the way you like it to work. Definitely worthwhile for the power user in us. Highly recommended.
More than it is worth
Better late than never. I wrote this back at the beginning of the month but apparently hit “Save” rather than “Publish”.
Well the Thinkpad is working right again. Only took 30-40 hours for me to fix it. If I figure my time is only worth $10/hr I have put $300-400 into a computer you can get off eBay for $200.
Seems hardly worth it, does it? But wait, a lot of that time was spent learning new stuff, and a lot of it was actually fun. And since I ran PC Check on it I know the hardware has a clean bill of health. So it is probably worth getting it a new battery, a larger hard drive, and maybe a faster wireless card. Also it now has XP Pro SP3 installed.
What was the problem? Well it turns out that the APCI is not in the BIOS, but is only a driver in software. It became corrupted somehow. For some reason it would not reinstall and I wound up wiping the drive and doing a new install.
That brings me to another pet peeve. Every time I do a new install I have to spend a couple of weeks getting things setup back to the way I like them. So part of this time has been playing with nlite trying to set up a CD to install windows already configured the way I want it to be. So far, 4 tries, it is not there yet. I have been running the trial CD’s on the C: drive. That is an old 40gb WD that has the 32 bit XP on it. The 64 bit system, my main one, is on a 40gb partition on a 320gb drive, the rest of which is the archive partition.
Once I get a set up that I can live with, I will look into fixing it so I can put My Documents and Programs on a separate drive, so an OS upgrade/reinstall will not affect them at all. Just think what it would be like to be able to do a clean install without having to reinstall a single program. A hackers concept of heaven, I am sure.
Computer again
I have for the time being given up on making the old computer into a NAS server. Seems that every time I try to connect the 320gb hard drive, it reformats it as 137gb. I thought it was the older OS I was trying to use as one of my boot options; but no, it seems to be a BIOS problem. That kind of upsets me as I would not have bought the PATA drives if I knew that in advance.
I do have the dual monitors working on the new system now. Using my 19″ Hitachi and an old Goldstar I had taking up space in a closet. I know that this is hardly the most up to day setup; but it is a big step up in convenience for me, especially with Photoshop