The Problem:

A file server that was receiving my nightly backups had its power supply unit give out when a resistor blew up. Since the old 400MHz Celeron machine wasn’t much more than a glorified external hard drive, I decided that instead of replacing the fried part, a more practical, energy-efficient solution would involve putting its 80GB hard drive into another machine, and backing up my important files to that machine instead.

This solution proved the most promising, as now I would have full access to a relatively current copy all of my Desktop, Documents and Pictures directories on both machines – even if one were switched off – in addition to having a nightly backup of my important data.

The only problem here was that when doing my backups, I wanted to keep my files synchronized between the two computers and I didn’t have room for everything in the /home directory on the Stereo PCs small 20GB hard drive.

The Solution:

Hook up the 80GB drive as a slave and move the /home partition on the Linux machine in the livingroom to the larger hard drive.

When I initially installed Ubuntu on my jukebox PC, I figured I’d put everything in one partition as it was only one, small, 20GB drive anyway. When I decided to add the 80GB backup drive to the system, it became apparent that separating /home from the rest of the system would be a good idea as well.

I didn’t want to reinstall anything, and I didn’t want to lose any personal settings (I had multiple user accounts set up for other family members), so the solution was just to move the /home directory. Only a few steps are actually required to accomplish this, and since the steps in the articles I’ve found on the subject have required a little bit of tweaking, I figured I’d write my own how-to both to help others, and to refresh my own memory should I ever need to do it again.

The Problem:

Yesterday I decided to install some new ink tanks in my Canon Pixma iP3000. It had just been sitting there, unused, for months and it was time to bring it out of retirement. It powered on nicely and was hassle-free to share with my Linux machines from my Vista PC, but when I printed a test page, I noticed a distinct lack of black ink on my page. Using the printer’s maintenance tools proved a fruitless endeavor.

The Solution:

It is a well-documented fact that sitting idle with dry ink tanks for a few months is not good for the nozzles on an inkjet printer. When ink doesn’t flow through on a semi-regular basis at least, bits of ink tend to dry up in the microns-wide holes, and you have a clogged print head. Canon makes replacement parts for this very purpose, but for an older printer like this, be prepared to shell out about $50 on eBay (brand-new print heads for newer models are probably double the price; often a large percentage of the original price of the entire printer). Well, I wasn’t prepared to go that route, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had nothing to lose anyway.

After a little bit of Googling I decided that cleaning couldn’t be too hard. So here’s what I did:

Before & after removing the ink tanks and print head

First, I took the ink tanks out and removed the print head (it comes out easily as the ink tanks are what hold it in place). The print head is a small plastic piece that has some circuitry on one side and slots for the ink tanks to fit on the other. On the bottom are the nozzles (you may notice some smudged ink here that will tip you off as to where the black and colored nozzles are).

L-R: ink tank bays, contacts, nozzles

Next, I tried simply cleaning the area around the nozzles with a moistened Q-Tip. This used to work on an old HP printer I had about a decade ago, but my problem was evidently more severe this time around.