Re: [PLUG] HP Laserjet 4M+ ... Toner

2023-12-20 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt
I have to wonder where they get the cartridges to drill?  Tonerbuyer.com
doesn't pay anything for the 98A cartridge and won't pay for you to ship it
to them, and Office depot makes you buy $10 in purchase per month in order
to qualify for $2 back in rewards for every ink or toner cartridge you
recycle, so in order to make it worthwhile you have to pile up 10 used toner
cartridges and take them into Office Depot, to basically get a buck a
cartridge back - in store credit - which will pay for maybe an overpriced
flash drive, lol.

The HP 4+ cartridge is old school and is actually held together by real
screws.  No drilling necessary, it can be disassembled, cleaned and
reassembled like a normal part.

I did ONE of those, once.  Discovering then the importance of a toner
vacuum.  But it printed out fine for a while.

Ted

-Original Message-
From: PLUG  On Behalf Of Keith Lofstrom
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 4:16 PM
To: Michael Ewan 
Cc: Portland Linux/Unix Group ; Portland Linux/Unix
Group 
Subject: Re: [PLUG] HP Laserjet 4M+ ... Toner

On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 11:15:01AM -0800, Michael Ewan wrote:
> It seems there are a lot of sources for the #48 toner, is "decent" the 
> problem?

Many of those are "drill-and-fill", without replacing seals and gaskets and
streaky drums.  After a second multihour strip-and-clean of my old HLPJ 4M,
I also (like Galen) gave my old machine to younger owner.

Besides toner, and slow processing speed, the 4M was a great machine - we
used to claim that it could print tee-shirts.  I currently use two HP4100N
printers with duplexers, with one spare, but face a similar "crappy toner"
risk. 

The risk is not as bad as my hp2605dn color laser printer, which has FOUR
toner cartridges that can leak, and a fan that can suck leaked toner into
the optical box.  That is a two hour teardown and rebuild, just to wipe a
bit of toner off the mirrors.  When it works, it makes BEYOOTIFUL color
images, unlike the Brother MFC-9440CN that I mostly use.  The Brother is
easy to fix and clean, but the images look like a child's crayon drawings.
Sigh.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom  kei...@keithl.com



Re: [PLUG] anybody have any 9-track tapes that need reading?

2023-12-20 Thread Ted Mittelstaedt
You might be interested in this - the useful stuff starts at 8:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh3OA3WMJng

For these, you have to bake the old tapes in an oven to read them, then run 
them through a cleaning machine.

There's a busy community that works at preserving the data from these.  Pretty 
incredible that they are still readable after 50 years.

Ted


-Original Message-
From: PLUG  On Behalf Of Russell Senior
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2023 5:12 AM
To: p...@pdxlinux.org
Subject: [PLUG] anybody have any 9-track tapes that need reading?

Hi all,

For the last couple decades, I have had a Fujitsu M2444 9-track tape drive 
sitting (rather heavily) on a shelf. Until, well, yesterday, I didn't have a 
convenient way of connecting to that tape drive to read/write tapes. Then came 
yesterday, and now I do:

https://github.com/RussellSenior/Pertec-Interface-Tape-Controller
(forked from another guy, and debugged over this last week)

Now, I have a tape drive, a tape controller, but ... uh, slightly embarrassed 
to say that I don't have any tapes that particularly need reading. Does anyone 
have any old 1/2-inch 9-track tapes that they need read? Even just for fun. Let 
me know, lol.


--
Russell Senior
russ...@pdxlinux.org