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Theft by technology.

For years now my printer of choice has always been a laser printer.  I like the faster speed, more quiet printing and the quality of the output.   The drawback of any printer is that it needs to use ink or toner.  Companies know that you need it, and they also know that they can make a cartrage that works perfect stop working by design.  Designing a way to make something stop working is one of my most hated things in the world.

HP is by far the worst offender at this.  They design their printers to count the pages, and then stop working when they reach a specific number and force you to buy more ink, even if your cartage works perfect they make it stop working by putting a chip on it that tells the printer that is has printed enough pages, even if it is still half full.  This makes is almost impossible to refill or even recycle the cartridges, they simply need a new chip that can only be had from HP.  Lexmark recently sued a company that made chips that worked with their printers.    In Europe these chips are ILLEGAL, because it blocks recycling.

For this reason I have avoided all HP printers for many years.  So I have this trusty brother printer.  It was a really good deal and prints fast and with high quality, but today it stopped working.  It flashed the toner light, and said toner low.  I was just finished with a print job and it worked perfect, nice and perfect then all of a sudden it stopped.  I had to print something really important so I kept turning off and on the printer, I even took out the toner a few times and it would power up and do a test then say flash the toner light.  After I while I decided to search the web and after a ton of research I found that other people were able to fix this.

brother-hl-2140-toner
How brother steals your money

It is so simple.  Look at the photo, in the center there is a hole, the printer shines a light into this hole, it bounces off of a mirror on the other side and then a detector will tell you the toner is bad if it sees light.  But as you can tell the whole is rather high up.  So you could have toner for 100’s more pages left in there.  So I simply took a black sticker, folded it up and blocked the whole, and guess what, my printer prints perfect now!

I know that they are out there to make a buck, they don’t make money on the printer, but they sell the toner cartridges for WAY too much money to compensate.  They design them to fail and this makes them last much less.   This makes the cartridge cost more, due to the added complexity of the mirror and lens.  It makes the printer cost more to make.  It even makes them put more in the landfills.  But it lets them sell many more cartridges.  At least brother is easier to fool than HP.

If you are reading this because you have the same problem I know this will help.  I would ask that you let me know that this helped you by posting a reply, it is easy and free.

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July, A record month for this blog and why

This month has really been a great month for this blog, it looks like Jason Dragon is getting some critical mass. July of 08 had over 2.3 times the unique visitors as the second best month, May of 08. Blogs are suppose to go up but this is a lot faster than normal. July 30 was the best day ever passing July 24 by 6 hits.

The stats say that this is due to a few things. First I started a Computer Entry section which is simply a page that has a list of all the blogs that I wrote on the subject of computer, but this page is very popular, it is on the top 5 of my pages every month. In that section I wrote an article about Laptop computers, and from the day I wrote it it has always been in the top 2 of all the pages. It now is by far the most popular article that I have ever written. But there is an article I just wrote yesterday, about StoresOnline, that had the LARGEST first day viewing of anything I ever wrote, it had more views than my entire blog was getting last month. The subject is something that many people are asking about online.

I also did a few things differently, I blogged a bit more with 14 entries, my previous record was 12. I also added my blog to StumbleUpon, I did not put the links from my blog so I really only got a few hits from that. But the MAIN area where I got more hits was by finding great blogs that had content that was much like mine and if I found a place where I could push the conversation forward, almost half of my new visitors came from that. I also was added to the Planet section of PF Buzz along with many of the top Finance blogs. I also was able to get more hits by adding more tags to my articles, I have about 20% of the hits coming from this. I also added myself to twitter finally, I have been trying it out before I publicize it but you can check it out if you like. I also rewrote my personal webpage at JasonDragon.com.

My best blogging moment of the month was due to a fairly unpopular buy very important blog I wrote, about why our country is in trouble economically. I linked to the Perot Charts site and the right hand guy, Mike Poss, of Ross Perot noticed the link and came to my blog, read it and took the time to email me about it. I always liked Ross Perot so it made me feel good to get this note.

In other blogging news I am still in the race for the 7m7y contest. This is a contest that could be described as mentorship by a really great and successful guy. He is going to mentor only 7 people and he is willing to do it for 7 years. He will help them all become multimillionaires. He will document the process and write a book on it. In two weeks or so the final 7 will be selected, I really hope I am one.

Thank you to all my readers, and all the people that subscribe to this blog, if it was not for you I would not be doing this, and this process has really taught me a lot.

Thanks, Jason Dragon