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 to Find Your Missing Friends Again

Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate censorship. We already know that Google, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook shadow ban conservatives. One of the irritating consequences of Facebook's busybody policies is the disappearance of your friends from your Facebook Newsfeed. Here's how it works:

1. On the Home Facebook page, newsfeed, Facebook sets the default to Top Stories.
   
2. Even if you set the newsfeed to something else, every day or two, Facebook resets your newsfeed back to Top Stories.
3. "Top Stories" is Facebook's edited newsfeed. Their algorithm edits out things they don't think you ought to see. It tends, in my case to shift posts I see in a distinctly leftward direction.
4. If you want to continue to see your friends' posts, you have to keep changing the feed back to "Most Recent".  
5. Or you can do this:

Download a program called Facebook Purity or as it's now known "Fluff-Busting Purity".

This app loads on top of your browser to provide a dashboard for Facebook that allows you to adjust settings, block spam and ads and, my favorite bit - it can prevent Facebook from resetting your newsfeed to "Top Stories" and blocking your friends so that you can't see them on your feed. It puts the letters FBP at the top of the Facebook webpages. You just click on it and select the settings you want. It makes your Facebook time more like what you want instead of what they want.

There use to be a way to reset your newsfeed to "Most Recent", but in late 2020 they hid that button under several layers of menus. Then in late March 2021, they did away with the link to change back to "most recent."  Now, without the FBP app, you simply cannot find a consistent way to switch your newsfeed back from the FB "Top Stories" censored feed and you'll miss all your conservative friends' very entertaining memes. And you will be effectively shadow-banned if you post conservative things.

Click the link above, download FBP and install it. Once you set the newsfeed you'll see your friends again. Facebook's going to hate that!

© 2020 by Tom King