December 2023

There were 13 posts published in December 2023 (this is page 2 of 2).

Getting my HP printer to print black again

I recently bought some 902XL black ink cartridges for our HP Officejet Pro 6978 printer. After putting a new one in, the printer would not print in black – all colors worked fine. I ran the “Clean Printhead” and “Align Printhead” commands, no luck. I checked to see that the “vent” on the top of the black cartridge was uncovered (it was). I then starting doing general searching on HP forums and YouTube. I found a video that talked about using wet paper towels to clean up dried/excess ink on the bottom of the print carriage. I did that, then ran the “Clean Printhead” command twice, and was FINALLY able to get black ink text on the test page – whew!

Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!