A while ago I switched over to Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN 8). I'd avoided the beta for months and months and months because I often have problems with Microsoft's beta stuff and its just not worth the hassle so I thought I'd wait until it was all dandy and fixed and ready for release.
Turns out that its still a huge memory pig. At the moment it is using about 25 meg of ram. Due to the quirks of Windows though, if I minimise it, it drops to using about 4 meg of ram - but if I send it to the tray, it still uses about 25meg! Windows unloads an app's working set from ram if its minimised, so it seems like the developers missed a trick when sending it to the tray ... I'm guessing they are just making the form invisible rather than minimising it. See my blog is both educational and informative! :)
Anyway that all pales into insignificance compared to what I experienced the other day. Came back to my computer and thought things were going a bit slow (click for bigger image)...
Thats right - its using over 260 meg of ram, and 470 meg of virtual memory! Thats more than even Firefox which is well known for its memory leaks!
From my experience, you need to completely shut Messenger down and restart it every few days, otherwise it tends to go mad and do things like this.
From that post you can see that the ink cartridge is nothing more than a box with some foam in it, so I was confident about refilling it.
As it turns out it is pretty easy to do, and it works really well too. Here is what I did - please follow these steps at your own risk!
Remove empty cartridge from printer - an MP150 in my case.
Be careful not to touch or otherwise allow things to come into contact with the print head (thats the really inky long metallic looking bit at the bottom of the cartridge!)
"Pop off" the grey lid of the cartridge (see in the video in the post mentioned above) - you can use a vice or a G-clamp to do this. If you dont have either it might be worth trying to drill a hole through the "a" of "cartridge" on the label, but be careful you dont let any of the bits of plastic get in the cartridge.
Using a syringe and needle - like the one that you get with Tesco ink refill packs - push the needle down into the base of the foam and inject the ink.
Place the grey lid back on the cartridge, and secure with some sellotape. Make sure that you attach the tape horizontally on the cartridge - i.e. with the label facing you with the writing the correct way up, put the tape horizontally across the label and use about an inch of tape either side to attach to the sides of the cartridge. Make sure you do not tape it on vertically as you will cover up the gold-coloured contacts.
Place the cartridge back into the printer.
Having done this you can now simply unpeel the tape to refill again next time. Because the print head is integrated into the cartridge, you may find that after a few refills you will need to buy a new cartridge as the head may have become damaged or clogged up.
One side effect of this is the printer still thinks that the ink is low. From what I can gather, there is no way for the printer to actually know how much ink is in the cartridge, and it just guesses by keeping a count of how many times it has printed and how much ink it thinks it used each time. There might be a software work around for this - if I find anything I will make an update.
Ok so in my previous post I talked about StumbleUpon and a huge increase in hits I got from it having received a stumbling.
I was wondering how long the effect would last, and what the hits would be like afterwards. Turns out that what I blogged about before was pretty much it - nothing much else happened after:
As you can see I got about 3 days of high traffic, then it dropped off quicker than it picked up! One side effect though is that I am now getting about 3 or 4 times the average previous hits since the stumbling, and a slow trickle of referrals from StumbleUpon still. I appear to be getting more search engine traffic now too - this could be coincidence of course.
Its a bit of a strange profile - I can only presume that my site was temporarily on a "Whats New" type page for a little while, and has now slumped down to the usual listings.
For the past few months, I've created a couple of websites made purely for putting adsense adverts on. My first site was a bit of an experiment, and has been pretty successful (for what I wanted anyway - I doubt others would class it as a success) by making a quid or two a day in advertising which is exactly what I wanted.
So I thought I'd start a new site to get some more money as its so easy. As is often the trouble though, getting it noticed and getting people to visit it can be a problem. With the first site I traded a link or two, sneaked a link into Wikipedia here and there etc. Its only getting between about 50-100 unique visitors a day which is pretty crappy really, but the click through rate is amazingly high (we're looking at anything in the region of 5-25%!) so it works.
But with the new site I've not really done what I did before. I was getting a small dribble of search engine traffic, but it was only about 10 uiques a day. So I decided to submit it StumbleUpon to try and get some more traffic. That was a day or two ago now - today I checked on the site's webalizer stats and was pretty damn surprised by what I saw:
As you can see, thats some pretty mental growth in hits. Yesterday I got 1277 uniques; so far in the first half an hour of today I've got about 40 uniques which works out at about 1900 uniques multiplied up. But is this ethical? Well who knows - I'd argue that its more of a "grey hat" method - I'm not gaming the system, the site is genuine and there is no hidden tricks or anything.
I've got no idea how long this will last - will it just dribble off into nothing after a day or two, or will it carry on? I'll post an update on this blog at some point in the future when something interesting happens!
Near enough every blog you visit, every web site you visit, pretty much anything you visit on the net these days is advertising their own RSS feed.
Anyone would think people actually use RSS!
Ok so there are the hardcore bloggers, maybe a few professionals who are super-keen on keeping up to date with the goings on in their industry, but how many common or garden internet users actually care about RSS? According to a Yahoo! whitepaper, only 12% of internet users are even aware of it, and only 4% actually having knowingly used it - i.e. have actually subscribed to a feed.
I will be the first to admit that RSS is damn great for what it was designed for - sites like My Yahoo! or My MSN where news content is "syndicated" - i.e. news sources are pulled together from various sources onto one page. According to that whitepaper 27% of internet users take advantage of such sites. Thats great - RSS is doing its job and people don't even know about it.
But why are people still saying that RSS is "about to go mainstream" and how it is going to "revolutionise the net"? I am totally unconvinced it ever will, and here is why:
Crap software. There are loads of RSS readers out there and 99% of them are shite copies of the basic "three pane" email client view. What is the benefit of using them? What compelling reason do they offer other than maybe sorting, searching etc? To be fair there are some interesting things like RSS screensavers, but then you can actually use them or the screensaver turns off!
Information Overload. People are already complaining that their lives are plagued by too many emails that they will never get the chance to read. How will having 50, hell even just 10, RSS feeds all sitting there full of even more cruft for you to read through help with the constant nagging voice in the back of your head telling you to "check your emails", other than changing it to tell you to check your feeds now too?
Its dull! So you can sit there and read about things from your favourite author or website in a plain, boring three pane email client ripoff like we used to do (and maybe still do) with usenet and ancient BBSs in the "old days". Or maybe like me, you like going to the bloody websites! I like to visit the site and really "get" the whole experience of the visit as intended by the author - they spent a lot of money or time (or both) creating the site to best reflect their personality, their style, their content, their ethos - damn it I want to experience it! We are at a point in the internet where a genuine "multimedia" (I hate that word!) experience is coming of age with embedded music, videos, interactive animations, and stunningly attractive (yet still accessible!) web pages, but people think that we would rather just ignore all this and read a boring text RSS feed? Madness!
If its not dull, its full of HTML! So I said that sometimes its dull - some people have addressed that problem by using HTML in their feeds. For obvious reasons sending the HTML along with your content sucks. So you can either have dull and boring text in your feeds, or you can have partially formatted feeds with limited HTML capabilities that breaks a lot of software and devices trying to use the content!
Clearly there is no sense in boring RSS readers. However, one of the main arguments I have heard from RSS users (some of those 4%!) is "It [RSS] saves me time instead of visiting all those sites!" - fair enough, but with Firefox you can open all of the sites simultaneously into separate tabs with a single click if you have book marked them...
I think what they really mean is, "I get notification if there is a new post at a website without having to visit it." - OK, now we are talking!
Maybe what we really need is a new, lightweight alternative to RSS - something where the entire article is not pumped into a RSS file, and where there is specific and strict consistent use of attributes to better allow for machine reading and where it is actually viable to use this sort of thing on a mobile phone or a PDA? All this new format would need to do is provide details of new content (i.e. title, short description, date etc), and where it came from/is available using a URI, so a user can still subscribe to a feed and simply get small, efficient "pings" from a website when it has been updated. It doesn't even need to be XML!
Maybe the world is trying to tell me something. It seems for the past few weeks everything has been happening to try and stop me from exercising.
For starters, a few weeks ago I had an operation which meant that for a few days I could barely even standup let alone get to the gym. And because I was in so much pain, even just walking around the shops and stuff was a struggle so I just sat around doing nothing except grimacing and calculating when I was ready to take the next round of medication.
So anyway after a couple of weeks I was well enough to start going to the gym again. This went well for about 4 visits spread out over the last week or two. Yesterday I tried to get in and the barrier refused to move to let me in when I swiped my card. Sometimes it does this so I tried again - same thing. Slightly embarrassed I asked the guys on the desk what was going on and it turned out my gym membership had run out the day before. Because I don't know where I am going to end up living or working any time soon I decided to wait before renewing the membership - I dont want to pay £700 for the year then find out I am living and working miles and miles away. Apparently I cant even use the gym on a pro-rata basis either, so no more gym for me for the time being.
So anyway we get to today. Quite a nice day - sun is out but not too much, its warm but not too hot. "I know," I thought to myself "I'll get the old bike out and go for a ride!". So, after pumping up the tyres, I am back on a bike for the first time in years. It was actually kinda fun in a way - nice and calm and relaxing. I did a quick circuit around my local area and was on my way back when - right as I was turning right across a fairly busy road - the chain snapped. It didn't come off, or slip - it fucking snapped. So no more cycling for me either!
Oh and whilst I was writing this blog I just found out I got onto the graduate scheme I applied for at one of the world's best know IT companies so yay!
We recently got a new multifunction printer - the ones with the built in scanner which can do photocopies. It is a Canon MP150 - its a really good printer and does great copies, but it seems to use up ink pretty quickly. There doesn't seem to be any 3rd party cheap alternative replacement cartridges available for it though.
With our previous printer (also a Canon) you could just squirt some replacement ink into the cartridge where it would mate with the print head inside the cartridge tray in the printer. But because the cartridges for the MP150 have the print head integrated, they cant be refilled as simply, and they are more expensive too!
So it was time to look inside and see what was possible!
Ok so here we go - one empty PG-40 cartridge just so we all know what we are looking at:
The casing is made of PPE plastic, and is easily cut with a simple hacksaw. I decided to try and cut a cross section down through the middle of the cartridge to see what sort of ink reservoir we were dealing with:
As you can kind of see in the second picture above, there is a foam filled void taking up most of the cartridge with no internal compartments or bracing. The lighter grey rectangle is a small patch covering the wells down to the print head. Based on this it would seem like it would be possible to refil this cartridge by simply drilling a hole anywhere on the top and sticking the ink in through there.
However, upon closer inspection of the top light-grey coloured lid I discovered what appears to be a small vent, or perhaps the original filling hole. Unfortuneately I cut right through it but you can see quite clearly where it was on the picture below:
As it turns out, this hole is directly above the "a" of "cartridge" on the label so its easy to find. Its a pretty narrow hole, perhaps less than 0.5mm so unless you have a hyperdermic needly it might be awkward to refil using this hole. However, it would make a good pilot hole if you are planning to drill into the cartridge - an alternative place to drill would be on the small "dimple" visble towards the right of the above image.
One word of warning though - if you are drilling beware of swarf. I got a lot of it when cutting this thing open so there will be some when drilling, which may eventually work its way down through the foam to the print head.
As an alternative to drilling, you could try removing the top of the cartridge altogether. This seems to be fairly firmly glued down, but I think I've found a simple trick to pop the lid off if you have a vice or a g-clamp handy. There is a "lip" on the lid of the cartridge, try and get that between the jaws of a vice and then very gently tighten. When I tried this on half of the shell, it popped right off no problems - have a look at the video below for an example:
I haven't tried it with an intact cartridge but I suspect something similar will happen. Have fun!
Thats right - its using over 260 meg of ram, and 470 meg of virtual memory! Thats more than even Firefox which is well known for its memory leaks!
