Author: c_good

The Person Doing the Job Is As Important As the Job

Is It the Tool, Or Is It the User?

It’s as important to use a tool which fits the person doing the job, as it is to use a tool which fits the job.

I started this blog for a number of reasons. One of them is to get more familiar with WordPress in its current form.

And I have found I like the WordPress post editor for editing. I hate the WordPress post editor for composing. It’s not local, it’s hosted on a server somewhere, so sometimes there is a slight delay between me typing and the letters showing up on the screen. At times this is maddening.

More frustrating is trying to navigate between paragraphs using the keyboard. Sometimes the arrow keys work great in the post editor. Sometimes the arrow keys don’t work at all, even when I know there is more text to see if I could just get the screen to keep scrolling down.

I’m By Myself, So If It Works For Me, Then It Works For Me

The last couple of weeks I’ve started composing posts in a program that runs on my computer. No internet connection needed, navigation in the document is simple. Then I cut and paste it into the WordPress post editor and finish editing there.

That works much better for me.

I am sure there are writers out there who love the post editor. And that is the point of this post: sometimes who is doing the job and using the tools is as important, or even more important, than which tools are being used.

This is part of a larger theme I repeatedly see, confusing the How with the Goal and the Why. If my Goal was to learn how to use the WordPress post editor, inside and out, then using a separate program for composing would be admitting defeat. If my Goal instead is learning how to use WordPress efficiently, and it’s more efficient for me to use a separate writing program for composition, I think that’s fine.

What If It’s Not Just Me?

Writing this, I have newfound sympathy for someone supervising a group of creators. Yes, as long as each person gets their part of the job done, then how much do tools matter? But if they have to work together, they’ll need a common framework to talk to each other. If it’s expected that absences can be covered by co-workers, then common tools are essential.

Am I Looking In the Wrong Places?

For tasks such as editing photos or video or graphics, I see many tutorials on how to set up workflow. I don’t see nearly as many tutorials for how to set up workflow when it comes to writing, or to blogging. I’m not sure if I’m actually seeing a lack, or if I’m not looking in the right places.

Error 79 on HP Laserjet M251nw. I changed the document scaling.

Spoiler to the story is in the title.

I’m not going to tell a three-page story full of angst, drama, and existential musings, when my solution was “I changed the document scaling and it printed.”

I am going to rant a bit about what happened before I found that solution.

The beginning of the story

More formally, the full name on the printer is “HP LaserJet Pro 200 color M251nw”. I bought this one used several years ago. The previous owner did not like how much the toner cost.

I was printing out a multipage document. I saw error code 79, firmware error. This sounded bad. The printer said to turn it off, turn it back on, try to reprint the document. I did. I still got error 79.

Multiple websites later, most of them recommended power cycling and trying to print again. I had already tried that.

The red herring: A surge suppressor???

At least one website said to disconnect it from any surge suppressor and plug it directly into the wall outlet. I was dubious, thinking that 1) I cannot see any way there would be enough line drop, current limitations, change to voltage waveform, change to line characteristics, or anything else I could think of which a surge suppressor would create which would prevent a previously functioning laser printer from continuing to function, and 2) if for some reason the circuitry is so tender and so balanced on knife’s edge that a surge suppressor does prevent it from functioning, and it got through HP’s design, design review, and QA teams like that and was still released, I would doubt all HP products forever after.

No, the surge suppressor had nothing to do with it. I have no reason to doubt HP’s products. I have no idea why that website said a surge suppressor could the cause of the firmware error.

What no one suggested (no one I saw, anyway)

After more troubleshooting, none of which I saw recommended on any of the sites I looked at, I narrowed the problems down to one page. It was one page, out of dozens, which caused the error 79 to show up when I tried to print it.

It was a PDF page, original scale 8.5″ x 11″. The page was a scan of an older document printed before laser printers existed. I had set my PDF reader to automatically scale to page margins or printer margins or something like that. It came up with a scale percentage around 99%. I changed to a custom scale, and reduced it to 97%. Then it printed fine. No errors, no problems.

I fixed the error, in that document, on my printer, by changing the document scaling. I have no idea if that will work for anyone else.

Great Power Brings Great Responsibility

Yes, it’s trite. It’s also true.

Not having to do repetitive routine tasks by hand is one of the benefits of technology.

An obvious example is using a spreadsheet program to create and calculate spreadsheet numbers, instead of having to write everything by hand. And then not having to rewrite everything by hand because one of the starting number changed.

A less obvious example is being able to model unsolvable math problems. Back in the 1990s I was told there were heat transfer problems which engineers and mathematicians had not been able to solve with calculus. Those same problems could be solved by a computer program modeling heat transfer over thousands and millions of small volumes.

However, with great power comes great responsibility.

That same computer will do other things we ask it to do, like delete every file we have. There was an article in The Register, “Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid.” It was published on April 14, 2023 and written by Simon Sharwood. It is part of The Register‘s ongoing “On Call” series where readers write in with stories of tech problems they’ve had to fix.

Even more enlightening than the story was the comments section. There were quite a few comments in there about former co-workers who had written something “simple” which had very not-simple repercussions.

Technology is great and saves a lot of time, but only if it’s used responsibly and wisely.

Useful Sites: The Wood Database. Using Wood Is a Technology Too.

The Wood Database is a great source of information about the mechanical properties of different types of wood. It also has many articles about wood. They’ve broken down the articles into the following categories:

  • General Information
  • Identifying Wood
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Separating Specific Woods
  • Health and Safety
  • Reference / For the Shop
  • Working with Wood

Have You Decided What Your Intent Is?

I was looking at some purchased patterns today. None of them really fit the purpose I want to use them for.

I realized I’d look differently at the patterns depending on what I was trying to achieve:

  • Do I only want a pattern that looks nice, done and move on to something else?
  • Does my purpose require specific properties like right angles on two edges, or it looks nice when mirrored?
  • Do I want to look at the pattern as a starting point to make my own patterns in the same style? And that means I’m looking at aesthetics?
  • Or do I not really like the design, but I like the way it was constructed and I want to learn from that?

The first two points apply if it’s just a hobby project. But I ever want to look at that craft as a way to make money, I’ll need to think about the second two points too.

Useful Site (for examples): Banjo Ben Clark

The site is BanjoBenClark.com.

No, he doesn’t teach anything about technology or programming or web design. He teaches guitar, banjo, and mandolin.

The site itself is one of the nicest to look at and best organized with respect to menus, that I’ve seen in a long time. Almost every time I look at it, I find something else learn from looking at how it’s organized. I also learn a lot from how he’s leading people to it from his YouTube videos.

How It Fits Together, How It Moves

It’s just as important to figure out how things move together, as it is to figure out how they fit together.

It’s also a lot more difficult. When things aren’t moving correctly, it’s easy to see. My computer doesn’t boot up, my kitchen appliances don’t work, my sewing machine doesn’t sew. These are all things that happen when things don’t move together correctly.

Intended movement isn’t usually shown in user manuals or service manuals either. I suppose in some cases it might be a trade secret. In other cases it might be something difficult to document. Seeming odd or arbitrary troubleshooting in user and service manuals often seems to be focused at getting parts aligned to move the way they’re intended.

Timing in software is an entire other black art.

So much graph paper: Incompetech

There’s more types of graph paper than I realized existed, free to download, at Incompetech.com.

I already knew polar graphs existed, but it’s nice to find a place to download those. Polar graph paper isn’t typically stocked at your local office supply store.

Also, there’s accounting ledgers, and paper for writing music too.

It’s a very handy site.

Slowing Down to Speed Up, Writing Edition

I listen to some small business and entrepreneur podcasts. One of the phrases I frequently hear is “slow down to speed up.”

I’ll be honest, I typically hear that right before the host explains why they fought that idea when they first heard it, before having to learn it the hard way. And by “hard way,” I mean by repeated painful experience. Anyway, I’ll get back on topic.

Slowing down to speed up also applies to writing. I used to wonder why there were so many different types of notebooks and stationery. For that matter, why were there so many different types of accounting ledger books?

In both cases, writing something down and then rewriting it somewhere else in a different way helps focus the mind.

For writing, I’ve seen guidelines which say there is a creative mode which runs fast and often a bit too free, then there is the editing mode. These are different parts of the brain, and trying to switch in and out of editing mode while ostensibly being in creating mode doesn’t work that well.

I’ve tried that with writing and it does work. I’m still not fully in the habit. But each time I get a little bit better are remembering to let it flow first and then go back and correct later.

I’m also finding it helps to do that with money. I don’t write down every cent of every transaction, but I’m starting to create a list of regular expenses, pulling the information from multiple other places it’s recorded. And it is helping me focus on what I want to keep and what I’m fine letting go.

Why am I writing this on a blog about making technology work for you?

Technology has created so many time-saving services, it’s erased the friction which used to exist. So we all, myself included, want to let the apps and programs and whatever do it all for us. When we do that, we convince ourselves we’re going faster and faster. But we’re planning and considering less and less.

A re-read and rewriting of a good idea is better than writing it hurriedly fifteen times. And it will be fifteen times because we’re moving so fast we forgot what we already wrote.

An inventory and accounting of what classes and guides and books have already been purchased is better than purchasing more variations of the same thing. But it’s faster and feels faster to just buy more of what has already been purchases.

Slowing down to go faster is a real thing.

Useful Find: E-Paper Typing Tools

Yes, I know I just wrote a post on not buying things I don’t need.

In case I ever need this, I’m going to write it about it here.

The original article I found is “ReMarkable emits Type Folio keyboard cover for e-paper tablet”, by Liam Proven in The Register, dated March 16 2023.

I’ve seen articles about tinkerers buying or repurposing e-paper displays (I think I’ve also seen them called e-ink displays) for their projects. This article describes some of the first commercially produced items I’ve seen with e-paper displays. There are several mentioned. If I ever get one I’ll probably go with reMarkable, but I’d have to be writing a lot more than I currently do before I could justify the cost.

Digging around I found another article on The Register by that same author on writing tools. I agree that the biggest obstacle to writing on most tablets is the lack of a keyboard. The articles are “Where are all the decent handheld scribbling tools?” Part 1 and Part 2, dated November 10 2011.