A few interesting things cropped up rather than the blockbusting, dazzling, once-in-a-lifetime discovery that I keep hoping for.
1. Video in MediaPlayer in Haiku on EeePC 901
A guy in the Haiku forums is helping an awful lot with this (we're pm'ing too). Up to now, he's provided me with new versions of avcodec and avi_reader to replace what I had in /boot/beos/system/add-ons/media/plugins/. This caused a video window to open up when I tried an .avi file in MediaPlayer, which had never happened before, although the video still didn't play (although sound, as always, was fine). Seems I now need some function to provide overlays. Let's wait and see what develops.
2. Trying to resurrect my very old Epson Photo Stylus 830
This printer is almost 7 years old. Unfortunately, it's been little used and, indeed, has lain idle for at least 9 months due to a broken catch on the black ink seat on the print head.
However, I found I could reasonably repair this with a carefully sculpted small soft-wood peg which then kept the ink seat lid positioned where it should be in a closed position. To my surprise, after I did this, everything seemed to work fine apart from --you guessed it-- nothing printed. Now was this due to blocked ink passages or no ink at all?
Certainly shaking the ink cartridges didn't give the impression that any ink was present. Nevertheless, I tried to clean as much as possible with first water and then IPA.
One problem at this stage was that the printer just kept going ad infinitum as if a whole queue of jobs were lined up. So how to cancel them all?
I found the answer in this thread in post #7 and it just involves going to
http://localhost:631/printers
where a number of maintenance options, including job cancellation and test page printing are available. Strangely, not all work including "Clean print heads".
Also useful is (in Ubuntu)
System>Administration>Printing
where printer configuration is available as well as maintenance jobs but not, strangely, cancel jobs.
In any event, although just a little coloured ink printing was achieved, it does seem like the cartridges are empty so I'll have to splash out for at least a black one on Monday.
Interestingly, I've never printed from my EeePC 901 so assuming I can get the printer to burst into life again on Monday, I'll try that out.
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