Skeggs.org

Colour laser printers have a lot of benefits over inkjets, but the latest models have computer chip enforced toner contracts (so you can only buy expensive “genuine” toner). I picked up a Samsung CLP-300 2nd hand for $20 that allows generic toner. Low cost non-OEM cartridges are $20 per set on ebay delivered for 3 colours + black. This particular model, and it’s network enabled sibling the CLP-300N, suffer an annoying paper feed bug that means they are readily available for sale 2nd hand. The pick-up roller gets dirty/worn, and the paper feed fails, often sporadically. This link includes some instructions for fixing this error, and I’ve reprinted the key section below:

1- turn off and remove power cable;
2- remove paper drawer;
3- remove image unit – don not let it under sun light. cover it.
4- put the printer upside down;
5- look at the axle of the big central rubber roller:

5.1- you will see both sides have a plastic balancer and locker.
5.2- left one has a small “finger” that locks it from slide.
5.3- take your cellphone and do a photo of the present position of the axle and the pieces as you will need to remember it after.

6-light and carefully, lift this small finger from the axle and slide the locker half inch to the center;
7- after this, you have the axlee in a so so free way. You can move (rotate) it, if you lift and free the inside gear at left end;
8- at the central drum, there is two locks, one each side. If you release them, you can remove a type of a plastic shell with the rubber belt attached to.
8.1- to unlock the shell you need to rotate the axle and position the locks in a convenient way. So, rotate it again, and so, remove the shell.
9-I removed the rubber belt, washed it with water only.
when repositioning the belt on the shell, observe it and put in a different position, as the slick area fits inside the shell, so a new surface is out.
10- mount it a reverse order.

The pick-up roller itself is available as a spare part on ebay from around $9. Search for clp300 roller.

A 10 minute fix makes these good as new.

I also came across the service manual. It can be downloaded here.

So Bankwest offers the headline rate of 10% interest on their kids saver account. I’ve got kids who are of the age to get pocket money, so I chaecked it out.
There are some terms and conditions. Basically, you only earn 10% if you make deposits and not withdrawals, and only if each month you deposit between $25 and $250. After 12 month, the account resets to $1 (and the balance is shifted to a lower rate account).
You can’t start with more than $250, and you can’t deposit more than $250 a month.
So what looks pretty nice to start with, 10%!!, actually is somewhat less. If you had $3000 and trickled it in to the account to make the $250 a month maximum deposits, the total interest would be $167.56, or about 5.5%.
Of course, there is no reason you couldn’t keep that money in a higher rate saver account before you deposit, but most also have withdrawal penalties. If you used ubank for the balance, it would pay 6.0% on the declining balance. If you started with $3000 and transferred it into bankwest $250 a month, after a year ubank would pay you $82.50.
Obviously, both these deals are predicated on marketing – you will be ill disciplined in your payments, and once you have an account you will go on to use them for loans/mortgages/credit cards etc.
But if you are smart and organised, you can get a pretty nice return, a touch over 8%, or $250 interest a year on $3k. For me, I’ll be trying to scratch up $3000 to deposit in a kids name and see if we can achieve the rates suggested. I’ll post in a year or two to report back.

I purchased a nifty little laptop last month, and could find no review on the web, so I thought I would remedy that.

First up, my requirements. I need a notebook light enough to cart around on the train (I have a long commute) but with a big enough display to be able to do some work. A requirement I didn’t realise until last year is I need a Directx compatible video card to play a few undemanding games (Humble Bundle, I’m looking at you).

These were pretty well met with my BenQ u121, but it’s 11.6″ screen was on the smaller side, and the graphics chip was not up to scratch for the games I want to play once in a while (it did have awesome battery life and was super light).

I saw the ‘thin and light’ notebooks emerge a couple of years ago, and suspected one would be in my future – they have the feature set of past top of the range portables (I’ve had several Toshiba Porteges) but much less expensive by shipping a value processor.

The Gigabyte m1405 is one of these. You have probably seen Gigabyte before as a supplier of motherboards and other PC ‘guts’, but they seem to be new at complete laptops. The m1405 has a core duo chip, a generation behind intel’s current “i” family, but quite speedy compared to netbook Atom chips I had been using. Mine shipped with 2Gb of ram in a single DDR3 SODIMM, but there is a second slot free to install a 4Gb chip, which I expect to do soon.

The 320Gb HDD is on the smaller side, but it is a standard esata, so can be upgraded later if it gets cramped. Note it has some odd partitioning – there is a Windows 7 32-bit install, a separate Win7 64-bit install and a third partition for data. This is to allow you the choice to boot into 32 or 64bit windows, should you need to for compatibility reasons. Except for an old laser printer, everything I have tried has been fine in 64bit, so I plan to scrub the 32bit partition and reclaim the space.

This 32/64bit dual personality could be quite handy, though, if you have something you need to run under 32bit regularly. Another curious feature is the USB/eSata port on the right side. It accepts either cable, although I have yet to use it with an eSata drive. The system also powers the USB ports while asleep, allowing a phone or ipod to charge, even if the laptop is unplugged (you can configure a lower charge percentage when this will stop, say 50%, so your phone won’t drain your laptop if you mistakenly leave it charging via USB but not plugged into the wall).

Nice to have features are 3 USB ports (but all on the right side, urgh!) HDMI and VGA out, SD multi card reader, 1.3mb webcam and a fingerprint reader. I’ve been using the last for my Windows login (as opposed to no password) and it is fairly reliable once you have learnt the speed it likes to read at.

Battery life is a little over 3 hours with a 3G wireless stick in use, and the unit is a nice, light 1.6kg – not bad for a 14in screen and built in DVD writer.

There is a slot and internal antenna for a 3g wireless modem, but I haven’t played with this, similarly, there is a second battery available to replace the optical drive, but the only source I have found so far wants $150 for it, so I’ll pass. The accompanying documentation and original press releases show a nifty docking station which in meant to hold an nVidia graphics card – the idea being you can play demanding games when you are docked to a bigger monitor. I like the idea, but as far as I can tell, the device never got released to retail (correct me if you find one!).

In the box comes a fake leather slipcase and a screen cleaning cloth (the screen is shiny and does pick up prints). It has a 3.42a 18v 110-240v universal power supply, the same type used by BenQ and Acer laptops we have around, and readily available as a non-OEM purchase for about $20 on ebay. The outer case has a bright red metallic surface on top, with sort of a brushed matte finish – quite attractive, but a matter of personal taste. The underside is matte black plastic and the screen and keyboard bezel are brushed aluminium. Build quality is good, and the unit feels solid, but the aluminium bezel is not precisely flush around the base so it flexes a little bit. Not a big drama.

The keyboard is fair. It is close to full size, but the keys aren’t raked at an angle, they all sit flat, and they don’t have much travel. There are real home, pgup and pgdn and arrow keys, a pet hate of mine is when these are lost to function keys.

The built in speakers are quite good, as these things go, and boast some sort of THX signal processing. The result is they are loud enough to use for watching a DVD, a feature not always good enough on many notebooks.

Overall, I find this a great laptop, and extremely good value. I could be convinced to add a second battery if the price was more reasonable, but the current power is adequate. It is pretty snappy with Win7 and the plethora of little value add features make it a nice versatile machine. The screen is nice and large for a very portable machine.  I got mine at http://www.onlinecomputer.com.au for about $500, but I have seen them since for $50 less on Catch of the Day.

So my new netbook is a BenQ u121. It has a lovely 11.6″ screen, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD and great battery life, all in a 1.3kg package. In a step forward for the environment, it also uses the same power supply as my old Acer netbook, so I didn’t need to buy an extra one (19V 3.42A)! A bargain at $399.
In Australia, these machines don’t come with 3G installed, as they do in some markets, but under the sticker that says removing it voids my warranty is a mini PCI-E slot laying empty along with two antenna pigtails. Talk about taunting me.
The problem is, there is almost no information about making use of it. I followed some tips from a forum around installing a 3G modem on an Acer netbook, and figured I would give it a go.
A trip to Ebay got me a second hand Option GTM378 3G modem – it does HSDPA at 7.2Mbps on a bunch of network frequencies, including the Voda/Optus and Telstra ones. $50 and a 7 day airmail trip from Hong Kong and it was mine.
Plugged it in and XP recognises the device. Pointed it to the drivers downloaded from Option’s site (version 4.0.17.0) and … nothing happens. Installation fails with a message stating appropriate drivers couldn’t be found.
Very aggravating. I spent several hours searching and trying different things, to no avail.
I even emailed Option support, although they publish no contact details and claim to offer no end user support, just OEM. Needless to say, no reply.
Eventually, I tracked down an older driver – version 3.313 and like magic it works. So, thumbs down to Option’s support and website for providing the wrong drivers, but a big thumbs up to BenQ for supporting on board 3G!

Old manual focus lenses are super cheap, and very compatible with current Pentax digital SLRs.
Because the CMOS sensor in digital SLRs are not as larger as a 35mm film cell, you end up with the lens delivering 1.5x the focal length it would on a film camera, which is kind of nice on a telephoto lens, but a hassle with wide angle.
Anyway, some old Vivitar lenses won’t fit on new Pentax digitals, the little guard for the aperture pin is too wide. I got myself a very cheap ($20!) Vivitar 70-210mm zoom off ebay, and needed to trim down the guard so it would fit.

7) All done. Here are some snaps showing the zoom range:

For more details on using manual lenses with Pentax digital SLRs see here.

I spent most of Sunday trying to sort out a super weird error.
I was trying to get some info back off a dead disk (and the DVD back-ups are showing errors too – grrrr) so I added the dead disk as a slave off my desktop.
It took me a couple of attempts to get the jumpers right on my main disk as it was ambiguous about which setting to use for master, and whether that setting would limit total drive capacity to 32GB. So after a few reboots I get the bootloader screen that says loading windows, but then bang!, BSOD with the error 0x0000007B Inaccessible_boot_device and a load of advice around disk management, viruses and hardware conflicts.
My first thought was I had booted off the dead disk, so I removed it but got the same error. Now my dead disk was poisoning others!
Lots of frustration followed, taking the disk out and checking it in another PC, flipping jumper and bios settings, as that had been the last things I touched, but eventually the system booted fine. Hmmm. No errors to be found on checking the disk.
Later, I decided to try a final time to get the data off that dead drive. I knew the jumper settings now so it would be fast. I plugged in the dead slave again, hit thepower, both drives show up fine in the BIOS check, but BANG! 0x0000007B Inaccessible_boot_device.
The conversation went something like this “I thought you had fixed that computer” “I did, but now I’ve fixed it a little bit more and its broken again.”
Removing the slave didn’t fix it this time, nothing would, but the disk checked out fine in another system.
Eventually, I decided to pack it up and come back to it. I slid the drive back into the chassis, which requires taking out the system RAM,and gave it one last flick of the switch – SUCCESS! I discovered that the IDE ribbon must have a dry joint somewhere. When it was twisted with the drive not in the chassis – like when I was trying the dead slave, the contact is good enough to load the MBR, but dies straight after. Very non-intuitive. So it might be worth eliminating hardware as a potential failure if you hit this error yourself.

Got hold of a Telstra Monitor 420 answering machine from a garage sale like we did?
It is pretty straightforward to operate, but I really wanted to increase the default number of rings before it answers.
Ingram Micro does the tech support for them on 1300 369 193 (in Australia) and they were good enough to send me a copy of the manual in PDF.
You can download it: Userguide_M420.

The senate is looking at the proposed access card, which with a name, photo and signature is likely to become ade facto ID card. It is poorly thought out, rushed and mismanaged. Here is my submission to the inquiry.

Dear Committee Members,
I am writing to express my opposition to the Access Card in it’s proposed form.
Firstly, the card is costly as budgeted, and offers limited scope for
fraud savings in even the most optimistic projections.
Previous experience locally and internationally shows such complex IT
projects are extremely prone to budget overrun.
Secondly, the rationale for the card is unclear. The claimed benefit
of reducing 17 cards to one is nonsensical, since some of the 17 cards
are exclusionary nobody will see a benefit of that scale. For the vast
majority, it will replace a single Medicare card, and offer no
advantage. Additionally, the administrative costs and hurdles to
issuing the card are likely to negate any overall benefit.
If there are really too many entitlements cards, replace 16 with 1,
and leave the bulk of people with only a Medicare card unaffected.
Thirdly, the inclusion of a signature and photograph on the card face
will encourage its use as an ID card, even if laws prevent its demand.
Those reluctant to provide the card to a voluntary request will be
stigmatised as potentially somebody with something to hide.
The inclusion of card face photo and signature does not appear to
further any aims of the card as stated, and seems ripe for it to be
abused. Should the card proceed I strongly oppose the inclusion of
this information on its face.
Fourthly, the minimal analysis conducted to date provided
recommendations from Professor Fels group that have only partially
been accepted, there is a need for more considered analysis and a
commitment to implement any recommendations.
Finally, I object to the haste, lack of adequate consultation, poorly
articulated scope, secretive approach to process and the amateurish
approach to date in managing this project. A project of such scope is
extremely serious, complex and far-reaching. To attempt to deliver it
in the haphazard way demonstrated to date is seeking failure and
increasing risk.
For these reasons I urge the committee to recommend:
- A careful, transparent and thorough review of the proposal,
including consideration of alternatives.
- A reduced scope for the card to maximise chances of success should
it proceed, including consideration of removing medicare card
replacement from the scope.
- Release of budget and analysis documents currently kept from the public, and;
- removal of photograph and signature information from the card’s face.
Yours Sincerely,
Michael Skeggs
242 Leura Mall
Leura NSW

Andrew plays guitar. His band has been spending an astonishing amount of time and money putting together a pretty schmick album, Big Day Tomorrow.
Check out their new web-site:
http://www.joshorange.com/

I just spent ages trying to work out what the feature
“ETR” is with a car stereo.
It stands for eletronic tuning radio, but it was a bugger to find.
Here are some meta search key words to help any other poor person find this a bit easier:
AM/FM ETR/PLL car audio stereo tape cassette CD ETR means, ETR stands for eletronic tuning radio