Why Your Integrated Laptop Camera Won't Work

The keys you need!

 

The camera on my Lenovo T-410 kept going off. I use it with Skype and Movie Maker and Facebook so it's inconvenient when the thing isn't working. I couldn't figure out why it quit on me. At first, I figured that the camera was broken, but then it unexpectedly came back on. Then it went off again. 

I looked up the laptop and found the original drivers and reinstalled them. The camera came right back up. Next time I shut the laptop off, the camera didn't come back up when I booted up the laptop again. Here's how I fixed the problem.

I did a Google search on how to turn the laptop on and off. Bingo!  I discovered that there is a not very well described and not very intuitive way to turn the camera on and off. Apparently I've been accidentally turning it on and off.  On the Lenovo T-410 there is a function key in the lower left corner of the keyboard. To turn the camera off and on, hold down the function key (Fn) and simultaneously press the F6 key. It turns the camera on and off.

Solved my problem immediately.  So, if you have an onboard laptop camera I recommend two steps.

1. Look up how to turn your particular laptop integrated camera on and off. Try it and see if it works.
   
2. If that doesn't work, look up the integrated camera driver software for your particular camera and install the software.
3. Then, try step 1 again and see if it works.

If that doesn't work, you probably have a busted camera. Get yourself a USB camera and plug it in. It's too expensive to try and replace the onboard camera.

Hope this helps. I read through a lot of ways to fix a camera that doesn't work, but these steps were the only ones that worked. If your camera is on, The camera will work when you fire up the software that uses it.

© 2021 by Tom King

How I Fixed My Printer After a Paper Jam Left It Printing Double

FIXING MY CANON PIXMA MG3620 - THE SURPRISINGLY SIMPLE SOLUTION:

I have a Pixma MG3620 that I bought for my home office a couple of years ago. It recently started eating paper. Finally, I had a nasty paper jam where the paper was sucked up inside and I couldn't reach up inside the machine to pull it out. 

I almost dismantled the thing with a hammer, until (God bless YouTube) someone showed me how to open the back to get inside. Once I figured out how to open the transport cover in the back (push down toward the arrow- see photo), I was able to extricate the paper. 

Turn the printer on its side
& press down to release
the transport mechanism cover

When I tried to print again, my printer started eating paper and no matter how many times I cleared it, it wouldn't stop eating the paper.  On a hunch I shined my flashlight down into the mechanism and spied something shiny. I made a hook out of a paper clip (see photo for how the engineering for the hook was done). I reached in, snagged the plastic thing and pulled out a small plastic bag of extra earbud covers that had apparently taken a ride up inside the printer on one of my print jobs. 

I had been so frustrated I was looking for a new printer last night. The turning point was finding out how to open the transport cover which turned out to be very very easy. They even embedded an arrow in the  cover to show which way to push it to open the paper transport mechanism.

I felt a bit stupid after I saw how it was done. So glad I don't have to buy a new printer. I'd have had to pay twice as much to replace it with the same one, Inflation has doubled the cost of the same 3 year old printer. How's that for a green new deal?

 

Where the baggie was hiding.

Once the printer is open, check here (see arrows) for paper or trash. In this photo I've got the paper transport mechanism cleared of paper but down in there where this arrow is pointing there was a glint of plastic when I aimed my flashlight at it. The trouble was now, how do I get it out of that narrow space. My fingers are too fat to fit in there.

Sooooooo, I had to fashion a highly technical tool to retrieve the bit of plastic stuck in the paper path. I did this by bending a hook into the end of a large paperclip using a pair of needle-nosed pliers I keep in my pencil box for just such emergency repair tasks (I tend to drop things down into tight places). You can see here my elaborately fashioned hook and the plastic bag of earbud bud-covers that somehow got itself sucked up inside my printer. The wife says it's an object lesson about keeping my desk clean that God had sent to me. I do not argue about these sorts of things with her. Besides, she may be right!

 

You can see the stray letters and the doubling of the text. It was all due to
smudges on the encoding strip. Not something I'd have expected.

 

Once it got to where it would print, it started printing double and throwing out random lines of characters. Here's what it looked like (above). I then printed up a test print (left). It's supposed to line all those line segments up in a straight column. It did anything but straight columns as you can see. This would never do. I began scouring the Internet to find out what might be wrong. I had more time than money for a new printer at the time, so there was sense of desperation to my search. Finally, I stumbled upon the answer.

Here's how I fixed it.

1. Unplug the printer.
2. Open the front of the printer. Shine your flashlight inside.
   
3. Find the clear plastic encoder strip. It's above and parallel to the metal bar the printer carriage rides on. It's really hard to see. You'll need a strong flashlight.
   
4. Clean the encoder strip. If the printing is wacky and aligning the print heads doesn't work, you've got smudges on the encoder strip. Use a long wet Q-tip (I didn't have one so I put a soft wet linen cloth over the end of a ruler). GENTLY rub the smudges off the plastic strip. It's these smudges, likely from your earlier efforts to dislodge the paper jam, that are distorting your image.
5. When the strip is clear, you're done. Don't press hard. Gentle back and forth wiping works. Don't go up and down. You could break it. Breaking the encoder strip, as inconsequential as it looks, will turn your $120 MG3620 into a big plastic brick.
6. Time for some housekeeping. You might while you are in there, plug the unit back in and turn it on. Have your trusty Q-tip at the ready. When the rollers spin up, use your Q-tip to clean off the dirt and ink so the rollers grab the paper better. You can also go down to the paper tray and clean the rollers in the center that grab the paper by the sheets.
7. Print a test page. Everything should look good after that.
8. If it's still a little dodgy follow the instructions for aligning the print heads. You probably did that first, but do it again. You may have bumped the printer carriage or something It's pretty easy to fix once you know what's wrong. Cleaning that plastic strip should get you fixed right up.
9. A little more housekeeping while you're at it. My wife always makes me dust things whenever I'm back there fixing connections and replacing parts. I go ahead and do it because when she can't stand it anymore, she dusts back there and then I have to spend the next couple of hours reconnecting all the wires that fell out while she was cleaning.
   

Here's the smudged encoder strip.

I had no idea a few finger smudges could mess up the printing like that. Before I started, I didn't even know printers had an encoder strip that looked like very thin strip of Scotch tape. DON'T FORGET! Be VERY, VERY gentle when you're wiping it off. Breaking that delicate strip of plastic tape will assassinate your nice printer. Given the number of printers I've worn out, I could have built a brick printer wall out of them all. I still have most of them in the forlorn hope that one day I'll fix them. Not bloody likely given how fast Windows' new versions make my lovely old printers go obsolete, but I hate to throw the old warriors out on the heap. Notice, I tend to anthropomorphize my technology. You should NOT do that unless you have a lot of storage space for old electronics..

Have a lovely day and hopefully a better one than this one started out to be. Ah, but then it ended up pretty good. There's nothing quite as satisfying as kicking a problem in its fuzzy buttocks.

© 2021 - Tom King

 P.S.

Here is the highly technical paper jam retrieval tool I made.
Above it is the baggie of buds I retrieved with it.

 

 

 

2021 - Facebook Hides Newsfeed Controls....Again!

How to Reset Your Facebook Newsfeed to See All Your Friends Uncensored.

Facebook really doesn't want to let all that research they did with the US government back in the Obama administration go to waste. There was a study Zuckerberg et al were caught doing some years back in which they screened the posts that Facebook members were receiving. The idea was to find out whether screening out angry conservative posts from members, made the more passive and receptive to the calming and enlightened progressive messages they put in their place. 

First Facebook rigged their newsfeed setting so that every two days or so, everybody's newsfeed switched back to the "Top Stories" setting.  If you will notice, your more provocative (and entertaining) friends get censored in favor of more progressive content and screens out more stimulating conservative content. And very recently, they changed the procedure for switching your newsfeed back to "Most Recent" so that most people have a hard time figuring out how to get back to where they see their friends' posts again. Facebook is clearly using this quiet resetting of your newsfeed to calm you down and manipulate your emotions and make you more peaceful and receptive to the message Mr. Zuckerberg thinks you ought to be seeing.

The "Top Stories" setting on Facebook is simply private corporate censorship and since Facebook is clearly a left-leaning corporate entity, it's also, in essence, censorship if content not approved by the Democrat Party. Fortunately, you can still switch your newsfeed so that you can once again get those posts from your grandpa complaining about how Joe Biden and that Pelosi woman are ruining the country. To be fair, Facebook also does censor ax murderers, the more open sorts of terrorists and most pornography. They don't trust their members to unfriend such people and, of course, conservatives like me get lumped in with pedophiles, serial killers, mass murderers and Ted Cruz and screened out of my friends' newsfeeds.

I on the other hand, live on the hidden island of the "Most Recent" Facebook newsfeed where I see the whole glorious flood of posts by my thousand some-odd friends. And you can too!  There are two ways to fix it so you see everyone and at the same time confound Facebook's Department of Acceptable Content Moderation.

#1.  The Easy Way - To make sure Facebook doesn't switch you to their heavily censored "Top Stories" newsfeed setting, download an app that Facebook doesn't like called "Facebook Purity". Just click on the link I just gave you and download the app. Once installed you can just click on FBP icon the program places at the top of your Facebook pages and you have control over Facebook at your fingertips. You'll have to update it a few times a year as Facebook generally eliminates FBP's access every time they update. Fortunately, the developer is never far behind in updating the app so you get it back in short order. I toss the guy a few bucks once in a while to support his efforts.

#2  The Hard Way - The Newsfeed link in the left column on the Home newsfeed page is now disabled. The other links work, but you can't click on Newsfeed like you used to and change the setting. You have to follow a more convoluted and distinctly unintuitive process. And frankly, I can't find anyone on the Internet who has figured out the new system for changing your newsfeed back to Most Recent. Using Facebook these days is like revisiting the Soviet Union or George Orwell's fictional Oceania where control over the proletariat is maintained by eliminating or redefining words, rewriting history or making it impossible to do things that might stimulate actual thinking which might lead to discontent which might lead to a revolt against the oligarchy.

I found a December 2020 article in Distractify that  explained how to reset your newsfeed after the 2020 "update' of Facebook. After 'splaining how to reset the newsfeed, the author noted, "...If you're finding yourself unable to find the option on the next update, chances are, following the same above steps will bring you back to the function. The order may change, and the icon, but hopefully, it won't ever disappear for good." Well in Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a dystopian social media future, hopefully didn't happen. The December procedure doesn't work anymore. Apparently it was too intuitive and people could still figure out how to get uncensored content.

So for now, see #1, because since the last time I changed my newsfeed manually, they eliminated the button that does so and substituted a button that doesn't work. For now FBP is the only way to reset your newsfeed.

One thing nice about having to use Facebook Purity is that it gives you some other great controls for managing what Facebook tosses across your screen. You can block things, improve the looks of your page and other fun stuff. So for now, until someone finds the secret door to changing your newsfeed, downloading FBP seems to be our only solution.

You know, Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for America's would-be oligarchy.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

How I Saved My Dying Hard Drive

I've got this 13 year-old 320 GB Seagate hard drive that has been my D: drive in my 3rd computer now. It's venerable to say the least. The power out here in the Fifteen Acre Woods likes to cut out. It used to do that a lot back when we lived out at Lake Palestine in Texas, so I bought a battery backup to preserve the drives in my computer because they said you ought to do that. Well eventually the first one stopped charging so I bought a second and the first one became a glorified surge protector. A couple of years ago (here I hang my head in shame) the second backup battery stopped charging. We've been pretty close to the wire financially the past few years, so I haven't replaced it.

So this morning, after leaving the computer on all night running a virus check, I woke to find it shut off, likely do to one of those power glitches we have pretty often around here. AND my D: drive which has all my original data on it would not show up. The computer couldn't read it. I panicked.

Then I calmed down and went to Youtube. There I found a guy with a Youtube channel called DIY Perks and got some answers to what was happening. He suggested several things that data recovery professionals say you should never do like tapping the case and (horror of horrors) opening the case and unsticking the drive manually. Data recovery professionals were aghast and loud in their condemnation of this practice. Yeah, of course they were!

Now data recovery professionals charge something like $750 an hour for this sort of data recovery and since I cannot afford that, I decided to give the DIY guy a try. It can be hazardous but the only options the professionals offered was to toss the drive as a total loss or let them do it for a couple or three thousand bucks. I had pictures on there and legal documents, so I gave it a try.  Here's what seems to have happened to my drive:

When the power goes off, the heads of the hard drive are often positioned over the platter (the disk). If that happens and the heads aren't parked, they can get stuck that way. If the drive is inside your computer, there's not much you can do. If you can get the drive outside the case where you can get your hands on it, it turns out there is something you can do.  Since this drive was my secondary data drive, the computer could start without it, although it required I remove the old drive. The computer couldn't read the old drive so it would abort the boot process when it tried to get the Seagate drive going. Fortunately, I have another 320 GB hard drive I just bought a few weeks ago. So here's what I did.

1. I pulled the old drive from the computer and put the new one in its place.
2. I closed up the case, reconnected everything and booted it up. To my joy it booted up seamlessly.
3. Because the heads might be stuck, I held up the old drive so that it was on its side. I twisted it back and forth a few times along it's flat side in order to perhaps cause the platters to rotate slightly and perhaps free the stuck heads or loosen the platters so they can spin.
4. I tapped the drive gently a couple of times on my desk, tapping it on its back end. Same reason - to unstick the heads. Be gentle and don't tap or shake up and down. If the heads touch the platter they can damage your data. You want the heads to move back and forth to the platter, not up and down.
5. I then inserted the drive into my Wavlink docking station where the replacement hard drive (now inside the case) had been previously docked. I switched on the docking station and (joy of joys), the old drive spun right up.

My trusty docking station. You've just GOT
to have one of these wonderful devices!

While I do not recommend this procedure (so you are not allowed to sue me now because I said that), it seems to have worked and given the alternative of throwing my precious data away without trying to get it back, it was darn well worth it to me to give it a try.

A couple of caveats.  

• This only works if your drive is not entirely dead (unlike the wicked old witch).
• You can hit the drive case too hard and damage your data, so be careful.
• Always back up your important stuff (some of which I had already backed up but wasn't through yet).
• Transfer your data to a new drive as soon as you can. Once you've transferred all the data off your old drive, consider it untrustworthy and don't use it for anything important.

 My old drive is right now busily backing itself up onto the new drive and making itself obsolete. I'll probably format it and use it for my XP virtual machine. If it fails there won't be anything on it I can't afford to lose.

Back in the olden days (the early 90s) I had one old hard drive that I had to get really creative to start, so I know about cranky hard drives. It was a 30 mb drive so you can get an idea of how long ago that was. It was my computer at work and it would get stuck during bootup. I finally set the case to one side where it was easy to get to and took off the screws. When I went to start work every day, I would pull the case off, reach in and spin the little silver thing on top of the drive and manually start the disk to spinning. It would boot right up. Once it warmed up, it ran like a top the rest of the day. The computer went to someone else when I was transferred to public relations. I wonder if they ever got my replacement a new hard drive or not?  I had a car about that time that the starter had died on it and I couldn't afford a new one right then. So I always had to park on a hill where I could push it and start it rolling. Thank heavens I had a standard shift. I did wind up having to buy a new clutch for it though. It didn't like being popped every time you started it.

Good luck with getting your data off of your sticky hard drive. There are many ways to skin a computer cat.

Tom King © 2018

Exterminating the Koobface Worm

 

Watch out for a fresh round of the Koobface worm on Facebook. You'll get a message from someone you trust that offers a link to a youtube video. It sends you to a fake youtube site.

A popup opens saying you need the latest version of Flash Player to play the video. DO NOT CLICK ON THE FAKE FLASH PLAYER LINK.

Do that and you won't get infected.  If you did click on the fake Flash Player link, you have the Koobface worm.  Here's how I cleaned it off my computer.  You can also watch a Youtube video that tells how to get rid of it.  I got to it done quickly before it brutalized my system, so all I had to do was run Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware software.  If you have had it for a while, watch the video for some extra steps you might need to take.

I cleaned it off my computer within hours. If it stays any time at all, it will harvest your name and some private info. If it stays long enough it will harvest your passwords and send it to the hacker.

Here's what I did. 

1. Go to  http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684  and download the TDSS Rootkit removal tool.  It comes as a zip file.  Save it on your desktop.  Extract the file to your desktop.  Don't put the TDSS Killer program in a folder on the desktop.  Just extract it to the desktop. 
2. Run the tool, clean and repair following the prompts and then restart the computer.
3. Go to http://www.norman.com/support/support_tools/58732/en and download the Norman Malware Cleanter and place it on your desktop.
4. Run Norman Malware Cleaner and clean any installed malware from your computer.  Follow the cleaning prompts and then reboot your computer.
5. Go to CNET.com 
6. Download "Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware program (it's free). 
7. Install Anti-Malware, check for and download the latest updates and run the full scan. It will take a while. When it's done it will list the infected files. 
8. Leave the boxes checked and click on the repair link. 
9. Now go away for 15-20 minutes (don't mess with it). The program may appear to freeze. Just cut off the power and reboot when you come back. 
10. Rerun the Anti-Malware software. A scan should show you free of the worm. Check the last log file and it will show what was found and deleted.
11. First time you open your Firefox browser, don't go anywhere.  Click on Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings.  Then change the settings to "No Proxy" and you should be okay. This worm hijacks the proxy settings on your computer.  If you don't do this, it will still redirect you to a bogus website and make your life miserable.
12. The first time you open your I.E. browser, click on Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN settings.  Uncheck the "Proxy Server" option and check "Automatically check settings".  I had to close I.E. the first time because it wouldn't let me select Internet Options, but the second time I opened it, I was able to fix it.  Don't know why - possibly because I hadn't used IE since I contracted the Koobface worm.  (Doesn't that sound just like something you'd pick up on a trip to a bordertown restaurant). 

Anyway, this ought to get you back up and running and keep your system clean. 

IF IT DOES NOT, GO GET ON THE "MY BLEEPING COMPUTER" WEBSITE AND SIGN UP FOR AN ACCOUNT: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/

They have some very knowledgeable folk on the site who can talk you through a thorough cleanup. You may encounter recommendations to use a program called "Combofix" on other websites. Do not use this program without getting help from the Bleeping Computer folks. It fools around with key parts of the computer's operating system and if you don't know what you are doing, you can get really screwed up.

You'll need to set up an Account on "Bleeping Computer" and post a topic for your specific problem. There is a list of preparatory steps you'll have to take to get ready and the process may take a little time to work through. It's either that or pay some computer tech several hundred bucks to wipe and rebuild your hard drive and you still may lose data in the process.

One more note. If you try to search "Koobface Worm Removal" you will get links to a lot of sites that will actually give you the Koobface worm. Make sure you have a tool like "Web of Trust" or your anti-malware software running to warn you about untrustworthy sites. Try the above process and "Bleeping Computer" before you go stepping into that minefield. Doing a Google search to correct a "google redirect" virus that you have on your computer is asking for a trip through the looking glass.

One more note.  If you try to search "Koobface Worm Removal" you will get links to a lot of sites that will actually give you the Koobface worm.  Try the above process before you go stepping into that minefield.

Hackers who do this are thugs and bullies and no better than the punks who used to give them wedgies back in junior high school. I personally think we should catch them and hang them publicly in the town square -- by the back of their Fruit-of-the-Looms! Just let 'em dangle there for a while! Then we should put them all on a deserted island somewhere well north of the tropics where it gets really cold in the winter. Leave them no computers or electricity - nothing but farm tools and bags of turnip seeds.

Good luck.

Tom