Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts

Monday, April 21, 2014

The kind of support we've come to expect from HP, with Heartbleed bonus points

So, I'm trying to scan a couple of photos to my Mac. My HP 8600 provides a webpage that shows me the features on my multifunction printer/scanner/fax.


When I click on Start Scan, I'm brought to this page with this message
You cannot use this function because it has been disabled. For more information, contact your network administrator or the person who set up the printer.
The ever-helpful user guide offers this guidance:

If you are unable to open Webscan in the EWS, it might be turned off by
your network administrator. For more information, contact your network
administrator or the person who set up your network.
Nowhere in the manual does it tell the afflicted network administrator of this home-office setup what said administrator should do to remedy this situation.
Bonus
After a bit of searching via Google, I learned that the network administrator must go to the Administrator settings page and enable Webscan.
Double-Bonus
To get to the Administrator settings, you must open a secure page that is not secure. They even tell you that this will happen.
If you click on OK and if you've turned on certificate checking, as you should, you'll see this message:

Using the Google Chrome browser, if you use https everywhere, as you should, you'll get this message:

This site's security certificate is not trusted!

This is not quite reassuring in the days after Heartbleed. HP has issued a bulletin regarding Heartbleed's effects on some of its printer products, but nothing yet about the HP 8600.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Bought my last HP printer

HP is using WSD ports when its networked printers are configured on Windows 7. (There may be more details on this, but this is as much as I've found.)
The trouble is that, for some machines in some environments, the service that resolves these virtual ports into an IP address will often fail and so the print jobs just sit in the queue. Changing the printer port to an IP port fixes the problem. You then have to make sure that your printer is set up with a static IP address.
This is just the latest in a series of problems that I've had with HP printer software. I also Epson and Brother printers; none of them have had anything like the kinds of setup woes that HP has inflicted on me.
In other words, bye-bye, HP.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Page left blank

I thought that we were done with this.

For years, in technical manuals, we'd left a blank to make the pagination work out properly. Standards and conventions dictated that the first page of a chapter or section should be on a right-read page (recto). If the previous chapter ended on a right page, we'd need a filler.

Somewhere along the line, people got worried that someone would think that something had been left out of the manual. To make sure that we dealt with that hypothetical catastrophe, we started putting "This page intentionally left blank." on blank pages that were, thus, no longer blank.

Fast forward a couple of decades. Few people care that technical manuals have chapters starting on a right-read page.  We're also more conscious of dead trees.

I was wrong. Google Ngram, which scans books for occurrences of pa phrase or keywords, shows that we've been increasing our usage of this tree-killing practice.


So, I guess I should be surprised to find that UBS sent us a four-page Form 1099 with printing one side and this on the back:

UBS "This page intentionally left blank."

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