Status-Q

This post is here purely to help those who are Googling for a solution to this problem. Everyone else please ignore!

If you have an HP all-in-one 3300-series printer/copier/scanner, and it starts saying “Scanner error power off->power on”, but powering off and on doesn’t help, then you really need this page. Many thanks to all who posted there!

Basically, you power off the printer and unscrew the screw which allows you to remove the small piece of glass to the left of the main scanning glass.

Using some needle-nosed pliers through the opening, grasp the drive belt and use it to move the scanning head across from the right hand side of the scanning area to the left, until it’s right under the opening. At the bottom of the wide slot, there’s a mirror, and it gets fogged up with something.

Shine a good light in there and use dry Q-tips to give the mirror a good clean. Then reassemble everything and turn the printer back on. After a little warm-up, you should get the ‘Ready’ prompt again, and your heart will be filled with joy.

The whole process should only take about 5 mins. There may be other things which cause a ‘scanner error’, but this fixed it for me and, it would appear, for many others.

I wrote before about Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon. This regular feature of his Prairie Home Companion show is available as a weekly podcast here.

The Jan 5th episode was a very good one, I think, and if you’re not familiar with GK’s genius, I recommend grabbing the MP3 file.

There are some quite surreal images in this set on Flickr.

I don’t know how he does them, whether they are mid-jump, or clever photoshopping, or airbrushed-out supports, or a combination of these, but they’re remarkably haunting…

The most pessimistic official estimate for the total number of deaths that might have resulted from the Chernobyl disaster, both directly (56) and indirectly through the fallout in the surrounding area, is about 9000. That’s very large.

It’s also about the same as the number of people who die in Chinese coal mines every 18 months.

Sources – here and here.

Harry Lamin, a British soldier in WW1, wrote letters back to his family at home. Now, exactly 90 years on, his grandson is publishing them as a blog, in real time. It’s been quiet for a couple of weeks because letters only come occasionally and the last one was on Dec 30th, 1917.

Now… as then, of course… nobody knows if he’s still alive.

It’s a brilliant idea. More information on CNN.

Ah, that’s nice… a Google search for ‘quentin’ has me back on page one again. Something that hasn’t happened for some time, mostly since that Tarantino fellow became rather popular.

It just goes to show that the level of ability one needs to achieve fame these days is just proportional to the popularity of one’s name!

🙂

I have a kind aunt who sends us a box of chocolates every Christmas, and they are much appreciated. But as I munched away tonight (with a reckless disregard for my waistline) I was troubled again by a question which has bothered me before. It’s this:

Why are there so many nutty ones in the box?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like nuts. I like chocolate. I even quite like the combination. But the chocolates with almonds, walnuts, hazelnut praline or whatever are so clearly inferior to those based on fruit, caramel, coffee or liqueurs that I wonder why they always seem to form such a large part of the selection on offer. I would simply put this down to personal preference except that everybody else I’ve ever asked about this feels the same way!

So who is it who decides that so many of the chocolates in the average box should be nutty at the core? Are there hordes of secretive chocolate-nut lovers out there? Those who, on opening a new box, spurn the strawberries, but quiver with anticipation when contemplating the myriad delights that praline has bestowed upon us? Come out of the closet and let us know! You’re among friends here. Or are nutty chocolates much cheaper to manufacture? Perhaps it’s a conspiracy of nut-producers to dispose of nuts which for seem reason don’t make the grade elsewhere in unsweetened form?

Until this mystery is solved, I shall have to continue to be the noble husband, consuming chiefly those nut-based chocolates discarded by my beloved. It’s a tough job. All, however, is not lost, because I’ve discovered that Waitrose sell small tubs of delicious dark-chocolate-covered apricots, which go a long way to helping restore the balance of my carefully-controlled chocolate-based diet.

Intriguing global stastistics.

Thanks to Simon for the link.

I was working away at my machine, vaguely conscious of noises outside, and as the whistles and bangs became louder I started to wonder what they were. After a fairly short pause, I realised that today was New Year’s Eve, but by the time I’d cottoned on to the fact, we were already into 2008, here in the UK, at least.

Ho hum. Definitely still a bit jetlagged.

Happy New Year everybody! Hope you have a great one.

John has returned to the topic of hats, an important one as the temperatures plummet. We had a little to and fro about this a while back… Golly, it was four and a half years ago…

One question I raised then, as yet unanswered, is why the term millinery, describing women’s hat-making, seems to have no male equivalent. Still a mystery… though I do now know that the word comes from ‘Milan’. Perhaps the early artisans of male headgear were in a location with a name less suitable for such adaptation. Luton, for example, used to be a big hat spot, I gather, but perhaps didn’t inspire the same fashionable frisson…

Well, I have a new hat-related question for you now: What’s all this about losing half of your body heat from your head? Or two-thirds, or three-quarters? Is this an urban myth?

I’ve heard variations on this theme all of my life, and often wondered whether one would really be comfortable walking around naked in mid-winter as long as one was sporting a decent balaclava, as this would seem to imply? I have not yet put it to the test.

And, given that your head is only about a tenth of your body’s surface area, if you were really going to lose two or three times as much heat from it as from the rest, each square inch of head would need to be radiating twenty or thirty times as much heat as a square inch anywhere else, which seems unlikely.

But perhaps you do lose most of your body heat from your head because, well, the rest of you is normally well insulated by clothes, so where else could you lose it from? I imagine I’d lose rather a lot of heat from my left clavicle too if I decided to adopt a daring mid-winter off-the-shoulder look.

All most mysterious, and I’ve always suspected it of being an old wives’ tale — probably brought into play when the story that a swan can break your arm with one beat of its wing no longer has sufficient impact. My minimal web searching would suggest that in most normal circumstances the head loses heat at about the same rate as everything else, but that the flow of blood in the scalp is not varied to the same degree to compensate for temperature, so under certain extreme circumstances, such as when exercising vigourously in very cold weather, you may lose a disproportionately large amount from the head.

Anyone have more authoritative knowledge about this?

In any case, being somewhat follicly-challenged, most of my hat-wearing is for the purposes of keeping off the sun, rather than protecting me from the biting winds. After my rather chilly walk home tonight, however, I may decide to branch out a little. Perhaps I’ll try that balaclava experiment…

My friend Neil Turok has won a 2008 TED Prize. Splendid news.

More info about Neil and the other prizewinners here.