A collection of snippets from this week’s life with tech…
Ink cassette/cartridge issues with a Canon Selphy photo printer
My son has a Canon Selphy CP780. It’s been great for printing the odd 6×4″ photo on demand but it recently started playing up, struggling to feed paper and then complaining that its ink cassette needed to be tightened. I couldn’t remove the cassette (it was stuck) – but this YouTube video helped:
Unfortunately, even after releasing and replacing the cassette with a new one, I was getting errors to say that it was empty. With quite a stock of paper and ink in the cupboard (enough for 72 prints, I decided to replace with the latest model: Aldi had a CP1300 on offer for £89 this week but that offer has now passed – you should be able to pick one up for around £99 at John Lewis (and elsewhere).
A new 4K monitor
I’ve been wanting to get a decent, large, high-resolution monitor for photo editing for a while now. The Mac Mini that I use only supports 1440p (2560×1440) but Picture In Picture/Picture By Picture (PIP/PBP) capabilities would be useful to also display 1080p (1920×1080) output from another PC and both my work PC (Microsoft Surface Pro 3) and personal PC (MacBook) can output at full 4K/UHD (3840×2160).
I considered a 28″ Samsung 4K UHD monitor (LU28E590) – currently about £289 – but the reviews suggesting lots of customers with faulty screens. Then I saw a newer, 32″ model: the U32J590, giving me a newer model with a larger panel for £379.
Initial impressions are good – and a former colleague asked me to send him a pic with two documents side by side at 100% – looks like this could be a useful work tool!
Continuing the fit out of my new office in the #LoftConversion with a new monitor: 4K; more pixels than I know what to do with! pic.twitter.com/Rx4e8605i1
— Mark Wilson ???? (@markwilsonit) October 17, 2018
Hey Tim, picture and screenshot as promised. Seems to work pretty well – nice experiment! pic.twitter.com/iusILDsDJb
— Mark Wilson ???? (@markwilsonit) October 18, 2018
Finding digital copies of Ikea product instructions
My recent loft conversion means I have bought a lot of products from Ikea recently. Generally, I keep a digital copy of the assembly instructions and get rid of the paper ones but sometimes they aren’t easy to find on the UK website. Then I found a trick:
- Take the URL from a working document – for example https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/doc/assembly_instructions/best%C3%A5__aa-1402080-9_pub.pdf
- Look at the paper document that you want a copy of and look for a code on the last page – for example AA-1402080-9.
- Edit the URL from step 1, and you should be able to find the document you are after, in this case https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/doc/assembly_instructions/best%C3%A5__aa-1402080-9_pub.pdf.