Saturday, November 24, 2018

Current Browser Extensions: Vivaldi, Firefox, and Chromium

Wow.

As best I can tell it was over three years ago that I last posted a roundup of the Add-On extensions I was using.

Firefox as at version 40.0.3 (x32 bits).

Vivaldi was still a “technical preview” release at version 1.0.258.3 and totally amazed me with “tab tiling.”  I cannot image going through a natural disaster or other scale event without using tab-tiling in Vivaldi.

Here I am during the January 2018 Great-Houston-Ice-Crisis monitoring multiple weather and traffic events in Vivaldi using the split-screen tab-tiling feature.

_2018-01-16_08-14-36

Yes Virginia, that’s five open browser windows on a single page. Four blocked with a fifth on the far right side fully extended top-to-bottom.

And no, I’m not counting my SwiftOnSecurity Twitter-feed window on the far-left because that is not a “browser window” but actually running in a Vivaldi “web-panel” from the side-bar. I can collapse and extend it as needed to check that particular media feed.

If you look closely, this tab (with five web-pages) is just one of four “stacked” tab sets each with their own multiple sets of related browser pages.

Vivaldi lets you do some crazy stuff – all built in without the need for more extensions – to maximize your browsing efficiency.

That’s why the only “product” link badge I run on my Grand Stream Dreams blog is Vivaldi’s; and I do so proudly.

So here is my current web-browser line-up:

Vivaldi - If there is a crisis or massive multi-stream op-center monitoring work to do I go Vivaldi without question. Current (snapshots line) version 2.2.1373.4 (Official Build) (32-bit)

Firefox - If there is blogging or RSS-feed wrangling – I still go to Firefox (due to my custom system integrations with the Omea RSS Reader.  Current version 63.0.3 (64-bit)

Chromium - If there is deep-web exploration work needed – I use a stripped down version of Chromium. Current version 72.0.3620.0 (Developer Build) (64-bit)

And here are my Extensions/Add-ons for each of them:

Vivaldi Extensions

Yep. That’s correct. Just three extensions. Vivaldi (by default) provides all the other heavy-lifting that I need – natively!

Firefox Extensions

Quite a lot more, but mostly because of the needs to support my RSS/blogging process flow (stop laughing! I know there hasn’t been much GSD blogging of late, but, “Reasons!”.

Chrome/Chromium Extensions

More extension use here than with Vivaldi even though Vivaldi is built on Chromium.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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Friday, November 23, 2018

Fix: Windows 8.1/10 Black Screen with Cursor at boot

After upgrading my home laptop systems to Win 10 I began to notice a trend; every couple of times I tried booting the system I would be presented with a black screen and a blinking cursor…but no Windows 10 load.

Fortunately, powering the system off and then back on would allow the Win 10 OS to load OK.

It was an annoyance and signal that something was wrong, but nothing that this workaround wouldn’t address.

Then we upgraded our laptops at work to Windows 10 and started noticing the same behavior.

And our Surface Pro 3 users also occasionally complained about similar behavior.

After careful troubleshooting and searching the Internet, I fixed this particular problem on all our platforms by disabling “Fast Startup” in the power settings.

I’m not 100% why it seems to impact mobile platforms rather than desktops, but I suspect the fact that it involves loading the system from a specially saved/crafted “Fast Startup” hibernation state, if some hardware gets removed or not-detected between power-states – for example USB devices or the dock-station - it might cause the wake-up process to hang.

To fix this particular problem first go into the “classic” Control Panel for Windows, and into the Power Options applet.

On the left-hand side, select “Choose what the power button does”

Near the top of the loaded page to the right, select the “Change settings that are currently unavailable”  (note you may have to confirm a UAC prompt and provide admin-level credentials).

Once you do that, more options will appear below.

Uncheck the “Turn on fast startup (recommended)” checkbox.

Select “Save changes”.

That fixed my laptop issues at home, and by pushing this out to our systems as a standard configuration setting, it fixed the issues at work too.

More technical resources:

Cheers!

--Claus V.

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HP C6280 All in one Ink System Failure & other travails

Almost two years ago our HP C6280 “All In One” inkjet printer suddenly decided to toss up a mysterious error code and refused to print.

Swapping out ink cartridges did nothing.

Turning it off and on did nothing.

I was running a two-prong approach to resolution; dig deep in the Googles and research a replacement unit.

Finally I stumbled on this tip.

HP C6280 All in one Ink System Failure – FixYourOwnPrinter

Following the steps of combo-button pushes documented on that page resulted in a restored-to-operation HP C6280.  Since performing those steps I’ve not had that particular error problem come up since!

Here’s a slightly cleaned up version of those steps. YMMV try at your own risk.

Follow the below steps on the front panel of the All-in-One printer: (Note: you may want to read the comments on that page above as well.)

A. Press and Hold the “Print Photos” & “Red Eye Removal” buttons. Release both buttons. Display should say “Enter Special Key Combo”

B. - Press and release in sequence “Red Eye Removal”, “Print Photos”, “Red Eye Removal”
(display says "enter special key combo")

1. Press and release in sequence “Red Eye Removal”, “Print Photos”, “Red Eye Removal”
(display may show a message like “support COxxFN0723BR”

2. Press and release the right arrow button until the display says “System Configuration Menu.

3. Press and release the “OK” button.

4. Display should say “Hardware failure status”. If not there already, Arrow Key over to “Hardware failure status.

5. Press and release the “OK” button.

6. Display should say “Hardware failure status: Clear. Press OK to clear”.

7. Press and release the “OK” Button. Message changes to “Hardware failure status Cleared. Press Cancel to continue”.

8. Press and release the “CANCEL” button as many times as necessary, so that, either the “Welcome to Photosmart Express” screen appears, or, the “Ink System Failure” screen appears. PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO PRINT AT THIS STAGE.

9. Using the Power Button, turn the unit OFF and unplug the power cable from back of the printer and wall outlet.

10. Wait 30 seconds for the power to get discharged and then plug the power cable into the wall outlet first and then into the back of the printer.

11. Turn the unit on. The printer may display message “USE POWER BUTTON TO SHUTDOWN THE PRINTER” followed by “PRESS OK TO CONTINUE”. Press OK.

12. If the printer has already initialized, then go to the next step. If not, the printer will start the “ONE TIME INK INITIALIZATION PROCESS”. Allow this process to complete and do not interrupt. Once the initialization process is complete, the printer will print out a Diagnostic Page.

13. To verify printer functionality print a SELF TEST PAGE.

FYI: The TinyApps bloggist also posted some tips with working with other HP Officejet hardware: Resetting an HP OfficeJet 5740

Then about six months ago the C6280 started experiencing paper-tray feed issues.  I tried a number of things and sometimes could get the paper to barely feed but usually not. I checked/cleaned the rollers, looked for jammed bits of paper, did everything but a full tear-down.

I gave up for a while and started researching new printers again, and put a note on it to not try printing as it wasn’t feeding.

Lavie came in one day while I was away and needed to print. She worked on it as well but also gave up.

Finally one Saturday I really, really needed to print something and didn’t want to run out to find somewhere to print from or pick up a new printer so I made a final attempt at troubleshooting.

When I lifted it up off the small side-table it sat on I noticed a small bit of plastic beneath. Hmmm. Hadn’t seen that before.

It was 1/2 of a geared wheel that seemed to be made out of a black nylon plastic. That couldn’t be good.

With the aid of a flashlight, I inspected the gear mechanisms and drive shafts. After a patient review I eventually found a drive shaft with a matching 1/2 gear piece that engages other gears.  It seems that this drive shaft powers the paper pick-up rollers from the paper-tray. Somehow it had broken in two and this was keeping the paper from picking up.

With nothing else to loose, I use a combo of super-glue gel, long needle-nose pliers, and a ton of patience to re-glue the two gear halves back together while aligned and engaged carefully with the drive gear wheel above it.

I let it set for several days to make sure the glue cured properly and then with fingers-crossed, loaded the paper tray back up and sent an print job through.

It fed and printed just fine…and has held fine many printing jobs later after all these months.

It was a miracle that that 1/2 piece of small broken wheel didn’t get lost or drop into the carpet with all of our earlier troubleshooting.

So if you still have an old HP C6280 here’s proof you can keep it limping along after all this time.

Cheers!

Claus V.

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Win 10 Laptop Storage Space-Drain Solved!

A lifetime ago (back in July) I was struggling to understand why my Win 10 workplace laptop’s hard-drive was running out of storage space.

grand stream dreams: QuickPost: PowerShell Scripts and Win 10 Helps

Despite my best efforts the 500 GB HDD had gotten down to about 60 GB – 80 GB of free space despite some pretty severe Windows space-hog/temp-file cleaning work.

That post detailed a number of PowerShell scripts I was using to try to find out the source of the space usage.

Reminder – because this was a work-laptop, my use of the normal third-party storage analysis tools I would rely on was verboten.

After several weeks of running modified versions of many of these scripts I was nowhere closer to finding the issue. I had lots of data, but the results suggested that the file or folder where the space eating usage had happened was off-limits to typical admin-level scripting runs.

Just before giving up and planning for a system reimage, I had an epiphany; Windows 10 comes with a built-in Storage Sense platform to let you understand (at a very high-level) space usage of your local drives in a categorized manner!

How to manage Disk Space & Storage using Windows 10 Settings – The Windows Club

Go into Settings (the gear icon in Win 10), select “System”, on the left side-bar select “Storage”, then click on one of the local system drives at the top you want to explore under the “Storage” section.

Let it run for a moment and it will then give you a report of storage use.

In my case it was immediately apparent that the “System & reserved” section was where the maximum file-usage was occurring; way more than a baseline Win 10 laptop in our enterprise.

You can click on any section and dive deeper into that.

That revealed that I had over 250 GB of files related to “System Restore”.

This was an interesting find as our Group Policy turns off System Restore. A visual check of all the options and settings under “Manage system restore” confirmed these were all disabled…so what was there and how did it get there?

VSSAdmin to the rescue!

I opened an administrator-elevated CMD window and ran the following command:

vssadmin list shadows

That revealed one “orphaned” shadow copy file created quite some time before I actually noticed the space drain.  A check of our operations logs for that timeframe couldn’t find any obvious actions or infrastructure routines that should have created it. So how it was triggered remains a mystery.

With the shadow copy ID known now I next ran this, using the actual ID # I found for that argument variable:

vssadmin delete shadows /Shadow={shadow copy ID}

It ran for quite a while, but then returned back to the blinking prompt cursor.

Another “vssadmin list shadows” confirmed it was gone, and a look at the local drive properties showed my space usage was back to a normal level with lots of free space available again.

Mischief managed!

More resources:

Cheers!

Claus V.

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