Replacement Ink

Last year I bought a very nice photo printer, the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 because I wanted to be able to print professional quality photos at home.  Sometimes when I've had photos printed somewhere else, the coloring has been off or the brightness not to my liking.

Overall, I have been very happy with this printer. The quality of the photos is outstanding and I am able to make prints that are 19"x13".  The biggest problem with the printer, however, is the cost of ink.  The 3880 uses 9 ink cartridges, each of which cost between $54 and $60. While each cartridge lasts a while (holding 80 ml of ink), spending $500 to replace the entire set gets very expensive.  I would ask the kids "Do you really need to print this photo?"

 

I bought another less expensive color printer (Canon MG7520) for the kids to use or for when I don't need as high quality photos.   That solved one problem, but not high cost of ink when I actually do want to print.

There are generic printer cartridges for a lot of printers, but I couldn't find any for the 3880.  Well, I found some for $25 each, but when I attempted to add them to the cart, they were always out of stock.    But while I couldn't get individual generic cartridges, I find a few systems that allowed you to replace the OEM cartridges with generic refillable cartridges.  Some of those systems were quite expensive and required you to keep the printer lid open (which requires a little more modifications to the printer).  I managed to find a system made by Ink Owl on Amazon that was less expensive and

I bought a set of generic cartridges for $100 and a set of replacement ink for $228.  Each bottle of ink contained 250 ml, more than three times an OEM cartridge.  This makes the price of 80 ml of ink (a full OEM cartridge) ~$8.  If you spread out the cartridge cost over the 1st 3 fillings, it comes to $11 for the first three refills per color and $8 thereafter.  This is a huge savings.

Of course this is only a good deal if the ink looks good and doesn't cause printer issues.  Additionally, using this system isn't quite as convenient as popping in a cartridge.  Fortunately, most of the steps are only required the first time you install the generic cartridge.  After that, you only need to refill the ink.

Each OEM Epson cartridge has a computer chip which is required for it to operate.  This tells the printer when the ink is empty, and probably other things as well.  In order for the replacement cartridges to work, you need to remove the chip from a non-empty OEM cartridge and place it in the replacement cartridge.

Remove the chip from the replacement cartridge.  You can pry the plastic part in front of the chip with a screwdriver.  This exposes an area where the OEM chip will go.   The replacement chip will sit on top of the OEM chip and communicate with the printer.

Remove the OEM chip from the original cartridge.  I was able to pop it off easily with a utility knife approaching from the outside.

Place the OEM cartridge in the replacement cartridge and put the replacement chip back.

After you add the working OEM chip, you fill the cartridge with ink and then purge any excess air.

Add the correct ink using the syringe and needle (provided).

Purge the excess air by using the tool provided which attaches to the syringe.  You will need to remove the orange air plug and then puncture the plastic coating over the grey circle opening. Push the tool all the way in and draw out with the syringe.  At first air will come out.  When you get a stream of ink, you are complete.

You are then ready to insert the cartridges and run some ink cleaning and tests.  The manufacturer recommended starting with one cartridge.  I did that and all was well, so I replaced another two.

I had a problem with my fourth cartridge.  Everything seemed to go well with replacement Cyan cartridge until I put it in the printer.  The printer said that it was missing a cartridge.  After resetting a chips a few times, I finally called the manufacturer who promptly put in an order for a free replacement cartridge.  This confirmed what I had read about their excellent customer service.

As I was preparing to replace a different cartridge I realized that I had made a mistake.  I had used the replacement Light Cyan cartridge instead of the Cyan one.  Now I had a Light Cyan cartridge full of Cyan ink.  I was able to expel the ink, but I used some water through it to clean it.  I called back the manufacturer and told them what happened and I ordered a $10 replacement for the Light Cyan.  

I might have gotten away with having a little Cyan in the Light Cyan cartridge, but for $10 I really don't want to have some nozzle clog because I don't adequately dry the cartridge of the water.   I also could have lied when I called back and just said that I had meant to say Light Cyan to get a free cartridge, but it is only $10.  I'm not saying that my integrity doesn't have a price, but it isn't $10.  Well, not today anyway.  

TSA Precheck

Today I went for my TSA pre-check appointment.  The whole process is pretty simple.  After submitting an online application you make an appointment (or just show up) to get finger printed and photographed.

 In 1 to 45 days I'll know if I am approved and can sometimes get in quicker lines at the airport.

6th Grade Project

A few months ago, Aleena was assigned a science project.  She chose to make a Rube Goldberg machine, one in which  turning on a fan set off a chain of events that would result in the ringing of a bell.

She has been working on it gradually.  They had to turn in designs earlier in the semester.  Last weekend she went through the items that she needed in order to complete the machine.  When she started working on it this evening, I was pleasantly surprised.  It was not due until next week, and here she was showing some real initiative.

Well, not exactly.  I was helping her for a while and asked when it was due.  "Tomorrow" she replied. I was very much less than pleased.  I helped her work on it for a few hours until we finally completed it.  Fortunately, it worked after a few minor adjustments.  

At 11:12 p.m., 2 hours past her bedtime, she is waiting for the video to upload to her Google drive for turn in.  She wanted to edit using iMovie, but it wouldn't open because it was incompatible with the installed version of the OS.  So we had to wait 15 or 20 minutes while upgrading the OS and iMovie. Priceless. 

She takes it to school tomorrow, but it is okay if it doesn't work at the school because she filmed it working here.  

Our Window Tale

On January 30th of this year, a maintenance crew was working on the hill behind our house and struck a rock with a weed whacker.  The rock flew over our wall, striking one of the glass doors on the back of our house.  

We had seen the maintenance workers on the hill earlier, but  I was gone when the actual event happened, and Tim was upstairs taking care of a sick Aleena.  Tim thought that I was home at the time, so she didn't come down to investigate when she heard the sound.

The outside pane fractured, although it remained in tact except for the small hole where the pebble entered.  The interior pane was unblemished.  Although it is not evident from the photo, the resulting pattern from the fracture was quite attractive, and I would have been tempted to leave it that way were it not for the fear that it would collapse every time I closed the adjacent door.  

I contacted the home owners association (HOA), who told me that the city is responsible for the maintenance of that area.  When I contacted the city, they pulled the relevant records and told me that it was the HOA.  In response to my follow up email, the HOA agreed that their subcontractor was responsible for the maintenance, but that no-one had been doing maintenance on that day, and that in any case, they were forbidden from using weed whackers in that area.  

Finally, after several back and forth emails (in which I informed them that my wife and I had seen the landscapers that morning), the landscaping company agreed to pay for the damage as a matter of good will.  A month later I looked out my window to see the landscapers back out there clearing the area with their weed whackers.  I didn't say anything to them, but made sure to take plenty of photos in case the offer to pay fell apart.

It turns out that getting the company to agree to pay for the repairs was much easier than getting the repairs done.  We had someone from the home builder come over to help us.  Their guy informed us that because of the way the door was constructed, we could not merely replace the glass, but rather would need to replace the entire door.  They made some calls for us and we found out that they could no longer get the door.  Shortly after this happened, I injured my knee and the window went on the back burner for a while.

When we started back up again, continued to have problems finding someone to fix this.  We couldn't find a way to actually get a new door.  We got in touch with the actual manufacturer who told us that it was too small of a job and he wasn't interested in pursing it.  We had glass companies come out, promise to give us an estimate, and then never deliver.  I know that I could have been more diligent with them and continued to follow up, but it was a combination of frustrating and non-urgent.  If both panes had broken, I would have pushed harder.

Finally, in October, Tim had a handyman over to look at remodeling the kids closets.  She asked him to take a look at the door and give an estimate.  He said that he could fix it for $1,250.  Not really in the mood to spend a lot of time finding a second estimate, we had him do the work.  They actually cut out a section of the door just outside the edges of the glass, replaced the glass and patched it up.  They did a great job and it is very difficult to tell which door was repaired.  

Door now repaired, I turned to trying to get reimbursed.  I was a little concerned that the "goodwill" offer that was promised back in February would have evaporated when they saw the $1,250 bill and that we did not have multiple estimates.  I emailed the HOA who in turn forwarded the information to the landscaping company.  The agent told me that they would send out a check.

Weeks went by and no check arrived.  They hadn't told us that they weren't going to pay, they just hadn't paid.  Four weeks after I sent the invoice, I followed up with the HOA.  She told me that the landscaping company was waiting for an address, and that she had just forwarded it to them.  The check would go out by the end of the week.  Sure enough, on Friday the check for $1,250 arrived.   The only problem was that the check was made out to Brian, while all of my accounts use my legal name of Edward.  In the past this sometimes, but not always causes problems depositing checks.  I deposited the check via mobile app into our investment account and it seems to have worked.  If not, I'll have to go to see if I can resolve it personally at the bank.  I don't want to have to ask them to issue a different check.  

When this all started, I thought the hard part would be to get paid, not getting the repair itself done.  

Car Battery

With my wife gone overseas for 2 weeks with another 2 before her return, I am "enjoying" my time with the kids.  After looking at the mess that was the house this morning, I had to explain the impending consequences of grounding.  Beating is out of the question, unless my wife extends her trip another few weeks.  Kidding, sort of.

We all pile into my car this morning and it wouldn't start.  Just really enhanced my mood.  Fortunately my wife's care does so I am able to go get the kids to school.  When I returned I decided to try to charge it with the little Anker charger that I bought a few months back.  After unsuccessfully trying I read that it only charges engines up to 3.0 liters.  My 3.5 liter engine was too much.

Just last week I had canceled my Mercedes MBrace subscription, which for some reason I thought was the service that included roadside assistance.  Off to Walmart to pick up some jumper cables.  After several attempts to jump start my car, the only result I could achieve was a very brief and unsatisfying set of clickings. 

I called the dealership who informed me that much go my ignorance, I was still covered under Mercedes roadside assist.  I guess my driveway is on the side of a road (or a rather minor street). Technician arrived in under an hour and ended up replacing the battery.  

I guess all is well that ends well. 

Back

We'll see how long I keep this up this time.  Easy to start blogging, but not always easy to keep it up.

Five & a Half and Counting

We have been in Thailand over five and a half years now, and our time here in the land of smiles is almost at an end.  This summer we move back to the United States.

In some ways it seems like we have been here such a long time.  We've been here longer than I was in high school or college (thankfully).  Jacob was a second grader when we arrived, now he is completing the seventh grade.  Nalin was a first grader and is now a sixth grader.  Aleena was not even three years old when we moved here, now she is eight.  She's spent about two-thirds of her life living here.

Sometimes it seems like we haven't been here as long as we have.  It doesn't seem like it was five years ago that we just arrived.  I'm sure the next few months will go by quickly.





This is a photo of Tim and the kids a few months after we moved to Thailand.

This is a photo from a month ago.  They have definitely changed.

House of Cards

I recently finished the Netflix original series, House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. Spacey plays the majority whip in the US House of Representatives (3rd in line), who ruthlessly pursues power. House of Cards presented a compelling story about power politics in Washington.

 Instead of releasing an episode of the show each week, Netflix made all episodes available at once. I think that this is a great model and is how I would prefer to watch serialized dramas. Of course, I could do that for every series that comes out by not watching any until they are all released, but I usually don't wait to do that.

The Kids

1st Bowl Game

The 2013 Rose Bowl was not only Jacob's first college football game, but was also mine.  I've been to a many professional football games, both as a Bengals's season ticket holder and earlier as a food and novelty vendor, but I had never been to a college football game.

I knew that I wanted to take Jacob to a football game or a basketball game while we were in Southern California.  I was considered the San Diego Chargers game against the Oakland Raiders, a Lakers or Clippers game, and even USC basketball games.  Those were just another game in each of those teams seasons, while the Rose Bowl seemed a little more special than the others.

One thing that struck me was how much calmer the fans were at the game.  The fans were cheering their team, but it wasn't nearly as loud or crazy as a Bengals game.  There were only a few times in the game where the fans stood up.  Maybe it's just that Southern California laid back vibe.

The guy who sat next to Jacob told us that he had flown in from Minnesota earlier that day, and that it had been minus 17 when he left.  I think it was 60 or so degrees during the game, so that is quite the temperature change.

More Vacation Trip Photos

Beach

Of course we had to spend some time at the beach while in Southern California.  It was a little too chilly to get in the water, but we stopped by beaches at Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach.  I really enjoyed the rock formations around Laguna.

Hurray for Hollywood!

On their last day in California, Tim and I took the kids to the Hollywood Boulevard to see the sidewalk of stars.  In addition to the stars on the sidwalk, we stopped by Grauman's Chinese Theater to see the celebrity handprints in concrete.

We decided take one of the open bus tours through Hollywood and Beverly Hills.  In addition to the celebrity homes, we saw David Faustina (Bud from Married with Children) and a couple of housewives of Beverly Hills.  Nalin was very excited because she saw Justin Beaver's house (from a far distance).  While Nalin is not a big fan of Justin Bieber, her friend Skylar is a huge fan.

After the family left, I was actually able to get tickets to a taping of the Jimmy Kimmel show.  It was fun watching the taping, although I'm not sure that I would want to do it very often.

Christmas in the States

Our Christmas vacation plan was to visit New Zealand this year since it is a lot shorter flight from Thailand than from the U.S.  With our decision to consider moving to Southern California when we go back to the U.S. this summer, we decided that it would make more sense to spend some time there to see if we really like it.

The holiday was a combination of house shopping, site seeing and family time.  We rented a house for five weeks in Huntington Beach, about a mile from the ocean.  I was there the full five weeks, but the family the middle two and a half weeks.  The reason that I went early was to scout out some locations before the family arrived, and I planned to stay afterwards in case we found something and I needed to be there to wrap things up.

After we arrived, we discovered that Nalin's idol and obsession, Ariana Grande, was performing at the Pasedena Playhouse's performance of Snow White.  Tim took Nalin and Aleena to the show, and waited with them after to get a photo and autographs.  This was a huge deal for Nalin.  She told us before we left that she would meet her idol on the trip, but we cautioned her that the chances were very unlikely.  Perhaps she has a bit of her mother's luck, because it worked out for her.

On New Year's Day, Jacob and I went to the 2013 Rose Bowl to watch Stanford battle Wisconsin.  The Rose Bowl Stadium is a fun place to watch a football game.  The San Gabriel Mountains provide a gorgeous backdrop for the stadium.  The game was competitive until the final few minutes as Stanford forced a turnover to secure the win.  Fortunately Jacob is thin, because we were in bleacher seats and the two rather beefy Wisconsin fans were taking up their seats and most of mine.  

On the whole we probably spent seven or eight days looking at houses in Irvine and the San Diego area.  The housing market in Southern California is experiencing a shortage of inventory (not a lot of houses for sale), which made looking a bit more challenging.  One thing is for certain, the houses in Southern California are much more expensive than back in the Midwest.  Yeah, I know, no surprise there.

Home shopping with the kids can be a challenge.  As we entered just about every house that we looked at, Nalin would exclaim in a loud and excited voice, "this house is great, we have to buy this house!"  She would then proceed to run up to find "her" bedroom in the house.  A few days we left the kids at home and shopped by ourselves.  It was a lot easier to talk to the agent without the constant "dad, come look at this" or "mom, I want this to be my room."

Of course, it seems like no trip is complete without a trip to an amusement park or three.  This time we visited Disney California Adventure, Legoland and Six Flags Magic Mountain.  We visited Disney on the day after Christmas, and it was packed.  It was cold and a bit rainy on the day we visited Six Flags, but the lines were extremely short, and Jacob and Nalin loved the roller coasters.  It is nice to walk on some of the biggest attractions with no line at all.  Legoland was also bereft of a crowd, making the park a lot more fun.














We also visited the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which was a lot of fun.  I splurged for preferred viewing for the cheetah run, and was rewarded with some pretty nice photographs.  The good thing was that we were very close and we had an unobstructed view.  Being that close actually made it more challenging to focus on something moving so quickly.  In order to get some nice shots, I focus locked on a spot that I knew the cheetah would pass.  As it approached the spot, I held down the shutter release ( I was in burst mode) to get as many photos as possible.  It worked, as they ran the cheetah twice, and I got one or two nice photos for each run.

A Convert to Shutter Speed Mode

When shooting photos in shutter speed mode, you control the camera's shutter speed, while your camera selects the appropriate aperture in order to get the proper exposure. Photographers would often shoot in shutter speed mode when covering sports, because they want to freeze the action.

While I've known about shutter speed mode and its uses for quite some time, I never used it very much. The reason is that depending on the lighting conditions, the camera may not find an aperture long enough to properly expose your photo at the shutter speed you desire. This can lead to underexposed images, sometimes severely underexposed. Instead of shooting in shutter speed mode, I would shoot in aperture mode. I would often shoot at the largest aperture, reasoning that a shutter speed faster than I desired would not hurt when trying to freeze the action. If I found that I couldn't get the desired shutter speed at the largest aperture, I would increase the ISO settings. Increasing the ISO makes the camera's sensor more sensitive to light (at the expensive of noise in the photo), which allows you to shoot with faster shutter speeds.

Another feature that I never really made use of was the Auto ISO feature of my camera. My Canon 40D had an automatic ISO feature, but its range was 400-1600. I found that when I used an ISO of 800 or higher, the images from the 40D had too much noise. Since the actual usable range was so limited, I never used the Auto ISO setting on the 40D.

Although my Canon ID Mark IV and Canon 5D Mark II handle noise much better than my 40D, I never really used the Auto ISO feature with them either. This was really a bad idea on my part, because not only do the camera's show much less noise at the lower ISO's, they also have a much larger range of ISO's covered by the Auto ISO setting.

When I went to shoot some of the BBSA baseball games today, I decided to set my camera to shutter speed mode (TV on Canon) and select the ISO to auto. By doing this, I could control the camera's shutter speed, ensuring that I could freeze the action, and the camera would pick an appropriate aperture and ISO to get the correct exposure. I was very happy with the results. Instead of having to worry about changing the ISO when the lighting might change, the camera did it for me. I was very pleased with the results. I need to do some research, however, to understand better how it balances between the aperture and ISO.

Next time I am going to try to shoot in manual mode with the auto ISO set. This would give me control of both shutter speed and aperture, with the only setting picked by the camera the ISO.

Recently, I've also gone back to shooting outdoor sports in JPEG mode. This is one of the times where the advantages of RAW are outweighed by the faster frames per second and smaller space taken on the hard drive. The only downside is that I need to make sure I change the settings back when shooting something else.