Re: ot Printer found with time set for Atlantic Ocaan

On 1/2/2022 11:49 PM, micky wrote:
> In alt.home.repair, on Sun, 2 Jan 2022 15:50:16 -0800 (PST), Marilyn
> Manson <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Saturday, January 1, 2022 at 11:04:58 PM UTC-5, micky wrote:
>>> Not a question.
>>>
>>> I found on the grass between the sidewalk and the curb, in front of a
>>> house, a printer-copier-scanner-fax.
>>>
>>> It looks pretty nice except there is a powder bigger than flour and
>>> smaller than salt, and light brown, in the input tray. I'll clean it
>>> off so it doesn't get in the mechanism. Maybe it did already and that's
>>> why he's throwing it away.
>>>
>>> But the reason I'm posting is I connected some house current and the
>>> date/time in it was 3 hours later than here. I'm in the Eastern Time
>>> Zone and I think anything 3 hours east of here is in the middle of the
>>> Atlantic!
>>>
>>> Well, except for Greenland and Brazil,
>>> and probably French Guiana and a little Suriname
>>> It just misses St. Johns in Newfoundland and Labrador.
>>>
>>> Maybe he came from Greenland.
>>
>> Laser or ink-jet?
> 
> Ink jet.  It's very nice, HP OfficeJet 4360.
> 
> this is why I asked in another thread about electrostatic rags.  It has
> in the paper tray a lot of powder and I wanted the rags to get it out of
> the corners and crevices.  But I got impatient, and Cindy says it's a
> gimmick anyhow, and in my own rag box I found a flannel sleeve from a
> robe I never owned. It's red with greyish frogs on it. Where did I get
> that.
> 
> I cleaned some but had to remove the paper tray.  It took more than an
> hour and I didn't get absolutely everything.  I used jumper wires to
> connect the power, and by golly it works.  One of the reviews complained
> he had to get within 3 feet of the wifi to connect, but mine did fine
> from more than 30 feet.
> 
> Also, I haven't tried but it also lets you print directly from your cell
> phone, and probably to scan into your phone.  Plus get this, you can
> register at HP for an email address for the printer, send an attachment
> from anywhere and it will print that.  I suspect/hope the PC doesn't
> even have to be on if the printer is wifi connected to a router,
> although I'll never have any use for this.  If you're a traveling
> salesman, or someone who travels for business and wants a paper record,
> it would be great.  Any other uses?
> 
> 
> The big problem seems to be the cost of the ink.  They are about $37 for
> a black and a tri-color.  Unlike the Espson and the Brother I have,
> which I was surprised to see work fine with cruddy 3rd-party ink, HP is
> really insistent on their ink.  One of the printer utilities with 6 tabs
> includes warnings about ink in 4 of them, encouraging notifying t heir
> fraud department if you end up with counterfeit cartridges.
> 
> Another tab has a way to keep your cartridges from being used in another
> printer.  Were people stealing cartridges?   But at least you can print
> with only one of them if you take out the empty one.
> 
> You can buy an ink and syringe set that costs only 18 dollars and they
> say is good for 5 or 10 fillings, probably 5 because there was something
> about air being left in the cartridge, but that's still 1/10th the
> price.  However if you let the cartridge get empty, it knows about that
> and cancels itself.  You have to refill before it gets empty, and even
> then I think it threatens  you that the level indicators may not work
> after that.
> 
> 
> But the other problem is that I'm connected to the PC control panel, the
> ink level indicator, probably printing, but not for scanning. It won't
> scan (and this one has no SD slot in it so it can only scan to the PC,
> not to memory).  When you even start to scan it says I'm not connected,
> and eventually it hints that I should register with HP!   I wonder if
> this is so they can send you threatening emails if you use bad ink
> cartridges.   But even registering didn't work yet.  I'll see if it
> works after restarting the PC and the printer.   One of the instructions
> for something (not this) was to unplug the printer for a while. (For
> this they wanted you to uninstall everything, at 3 places, and reinstall
> it all. Maybe later. (and of course I already have a good Brother
> all-in-one. )
> 
> Another annoyance is their stupid webpages that have one or even two
> pop-up boxes that interfere with reading the page, and they show up
> every time for every page, even I think if you looked at the tab before
> and it reloaded when you came back.  I wrote to them last year when I
> got an HP computer about how annoying this is but they haven't changed
> it.  I wrote a firmer message this time.
> 
> Also installing  the software looked simple, one big .exe to do
> everything, but then they came up with something else and I think a
> second thing.  One was software from MS.  It was confusing.
> 
> (I had to install on the laptop software for the Brother printer, and
> that really was simple.)
> 
> This printer may predates win10, but i'm sure that's not the problem.
> 

For vacuuming laser printer toner, they use a vacuum for the purpose
that has a hepafilter for the collection bag. If you use a conventional
vacuum cleaner, the bag can leak enough particulate, for you to end up
with toner dust in your lungs.

For unknown powders, you do run some (tiny) risk. There are some
really obnoxious powders someone could dump all over the place. For
example, when policemen go into a drug house, sometimes they're overcome
by carfentanyl residue and have to be carted out and given more than
one application of naloxone. Carfentanyl is the material known to be able
to "sedate an elephant", it doesn't take much to leave you on the floor,
sedated and soon to be dead. They need to wear gloves at a minimum,
when in there. If they know the house will be "bad enough", people
go in with self-contained breathing gear.

The printer might have been pulled out for a "failure to pay rent",
rather than being removed because it wasn't wanted any more. We've all
seen apartments with sofas and chairs on the lawn, from evicted tenants.
The tenants never seem to pick up the furniture, which suggests it could
be rental furniture and actually owned by a store.

While the powder might be recognizable (toast crumbs or cracker crumbs),
there is a world of possibility. Nobody thinks of the waste removal people
and they could leave just about any "chemical challenge" on the side of the
road.

Not everyone is your friend in society.

    Paul