UPS: "Do not connect laser printer..."

NTI is WICKED stuff ! We used to make it by mixing a very strong household cleaner called Handy Andy with pure iodine crystals 'borrowed' from the biology department. For some reason, the ones there were a lot more pure than any iodine crystals or liquid derivatives available for theft in the chemistry department ... Once it had been made, and passed through a filter paper, we used to put it into corked boiling tubes (bigger than half inch test tubes), and carry it around the school with us in our inside pockets. A good splat of the stuff on the floor in the corridor, would just about dry in a lesson period, to the point where it was unstable. At the end of the lesson, let the teacher leave the class first ... Oh the bang, and that luvverly cloud of purple smoke rising to the ceiling, and the crackles underfoot for days afterward when walking down that corridor. The fun of laughing at the caretaker and his assistant trying to remove the purple stain blasted into the surface of the tiles ... Then there was the joy of making delayed fuses for tuppeny bangers by soaking string in .... potassium nitrate .... was it ? Tape a couple of inches to the top of a banger, then set light to it and leave it under a seat at the back of the cinema at the midnight movie. Plenty of time to return to your own seat before it went off.

Oh happy happy days. What joyous things we learnt in 'real' schools all those years ago !

Thanks for reminding me of my mis-spent youth. :-))

Arfa

Hmm, mine was biological grade too, though only because I had no access to "chemicals" in high school. ;-) I used a 28% solution of ammonia water I bought by the gallon in a local drug store. About ten years ago my mother's best friend married a retired pharmacist (can't get away with anything, forever). He remembered me and once when we were visiting, my mother asked "what in the world" I did with all that ammonia water. My mother was ~85 at that time. ;-)

NTI is soluble in alcohol and perfectly stable as long as it's "wet". An artist's paint brush and a classroom lock can generate loads of fun. My senior year, I also had a master key to the interior locks in the high school. That was fun too.

Yeah. Kids today...

You forgot?

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Never heard of them before. Don't like the website either.

I have had some fabulous Tattenger bottles though.

household

mild,

Actually, if you mix household ammonia and household tincture of iodine you can produce trivial amounts nitrogen tri-iodide. Maybe enough to break your skin. There are some other chemicals that can be made as well. However due to the low active concentrations of household chemicals the yield is extremely poor. More pigheaded legislation.

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OK then. Count me as well, i have an old Epson color 860 that still works fine and an Epson R200 as my main printer. Of course i only use them a little bit. Replaced the inks many times due to finally running out.

We kept it 'wet' by having it corked into the boiling tube as soon as it was made. I don't know what the carrier liquid in Handy Andy was, but that was what was keeping it wet. Whatever it was, quite volatile though, as it didn't stay wet for long once a dollop had been splatted onto the floor.

How bizarre ! I too had a set of keys in my last year. At the end of the previous year, we had a hot drinks machine installed in an open area under our physics block, which was built on 'stilts'. By the side of the machine, was a door which led to a cellar that backed onto the boiler room. The water supply for the drinks machine came from in there. At the start of the autumn term after the long summer holiday, myself and my little gang of 'troublemakers' - well, it seemed like we were at the time, but kindergarten stuff compared to what you see in the papers and on TV now - were not far away from the machine when the caretaker unlocked the door to go in and turn on the water supply. He left the keys in the lock, and one of my 'merry men' , who is now a senior pilot at one of the biggest airlines in the world, crept up and removed the whole bunch. Afterward, he was terrified of being caught with them, so he gave them to me for safe keeping. We had a lot of fun that year, getting into places we shouldn't have been ...

I bet if I looked through all of my junk, I've still got them somewhere !

Well, not really, but it's all been a very long time ago now. You leave school, go to college, grow up a bit, get married, raise kids, and become a responsible citizen :-( Then you start to get old, and become a grump, remembering what a good bloke you were back in the day. Guess I'm close to slipping into that phase now. Grown up kids look at me like I'm mad when they see me with an iPod stuck in my lugholes, listening to the likes of Uriah Heep and Dr John ...

Arfa

Here's a question. Is it because the Epsons that seem to prevail over long periods, get only light use, as you say yours do, so only get turned on when needed ? I think that this has a lot to do with the clogging problems of the printers that Epson offer these days. I like to have my printer always on and 'ready to roll'. I can't be doing with waiting 5 minutes while the thing coughs and wheezes its way to being ready. When I need to print something out, I need to do it now. The HPs seem to have a proper 'sleep' mode where the heads 'park' over the seal, as it goes to sleep. The Epsons appear to just 'stop' with the heads where they were last left. They only seem to park if you do a full shutdown. IMHO, this is the reason that the heads clog. Being left out in open space, the ink just dries in the nozzles. Once it has done, it can take several cleaning cycles to recover them. The fact that colours cannot be cleaned individually, is a royal pain in the arse, and leads to huge ink wastage.

OTOH, my current HP is now probably 3+ years old, and has never been turned off apart from the occasional need to do a full reset, when for some reason the network has lost it, and it needs to be forced to talk to the router to get a new IP address allocated.

To be fair to the Epsons that I have owned, I have never had an issue with their general performance, speed, or print quality. I just find this head clogging thing, which is a well known problem, sooooo frustrating, to the point where I just get mad with them, which ain't good for the old hypertension ...

Arfa

Isn't pure Iodine highly unstable?

What about not being a bubble jet printer? Aren't all HP print cartridges equipped with a bubble jet print head?

Personally I prefer HP and the old Okidata impact printers. Although Brother does makes a decent line of personal Laser printers priced well.

I don't personally print enough color to make the cost of carts an issue for my HP 5550. And being now 4 years old it has never been problematic.

That's called "Spirit of Salts" in the UK.

There's something wrong with hydrochloric acid? I use SnoBol, which -- uh -- "cuts the crap" far better than detergent-only cleaners.

A couple bottles of Chimay Gold, properly handled and stored would suffice just fine.

OK maybe a case.

If all you print is 5 times a week, and idle current matters that much, burning a few calories by forcing anyone wanting to do a print job to walk over and turn on the printer's main switch (zero idle current) and wait a few minutes for the printer to boot up to its ready point would be the right way to go.

Then again, it matters not what printer you buy, and you can plug it in directly since you do not need "protection" for a device you only use 5 times a week, which has no need to be plugged into a UPS to begin with. Any normal power strip would protect it, and many have RJ45 network isolation ports as well. If you are using the USB interface, it IS 100% plug and play and would not need to be plugged in until runtime either.

Wont you have to open up the IEC power cord and clamp only a single path?

I also notice that many of these are powered with standard 10A IEC line cords. How can that be right for a device with such high usage declarations?

Thermal Embedding... wait!

Vulcanization...

Makes the print job live long and prosper, as opposed to...

control

The problem with Epsons used to be that the print head stayed on the printer, where HP replaces them with each cartridge.

That may have changed now though, since I haven't bought a printer in years, and have seen several would be huge advances in detail and color range capability. I don't know how they spray these days though, or who the big print engine maker is, or if they all make their own now or what.

Used to be Canon. Seems like there are a lot of different "engines" out there now though. Tektronix and Xerox still use solid ink methods. I though most ink jet setups were piezo though by now, since it has such precise fractional portioning ability.

Did they bring you a blunt yet?

Only in the hands of the highly unstable.

Yes!

Even though the bottle of Dos Equis I had while doing the tear-down maintenance on our DE filter yesterday night just hit the spot :-)