H2O Member | Tue Sep 15, 2020 | 12:45 PM | Likes: 2 

HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 Ink Cartridge Refill

Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:  10

An OEM HP ink cartridge set for the OfficeJet Pro 8710 that uses model no. 952/952XL costs around $100. However, if you purchase inks and refill the cartridges by yourself, it can cost you much much less. I will post a video about how to refill the printer cartridges with the inks in another article. In this article, I'm explaining how to bypass the HP firmware settings that only allow you to use OEM cartridges and have all other refilled cartridges disabled. No 1. DO NOT UPGRADE FIRMWARE IF YOU ARE PROMPTED TO DO SO. Just like you are not encouraged to upgrade the OS system of your computer or cellphone. This is a notorious manufacturers' strategy of slowing down your machine, torturing you and forcing you to buy a new one. No. 2. If you read this article too late and unfortunately have already upgraded the firmware, do not be panic. I will introduce a way to bypass it. But do not upgrade your firmware any further, because the manufacturer may come up with a new firmware in future that disables my trick. No. 3. This is the ultimate walk-around solution. Get a spare set of HP 952/952XL OEM original ink cartridges that have not been refilled. It can be new, partially full, or even empty. You will need to use it to perform a cartridge swap procedure, which will get you up running again with the refilled cartridges. Here are the steps: 1) Insert the OEM cartridge into the printer for approx. 25 second, and then quickly remove it. (This step is to fool the system that you have purchased and now are using an OEM cartridge) 2) Within 30 seconds, quickly insert your refilled same color cartridge into the printer. Now the printer should be able to resume as normal. Ignore any pop-up messages on the printer. Note that only the OEM cartridges can be used to reset the printer. The setup cartridges cannot use this trick. If you are still confused, here is a youtube video that you can refer to: link ...  Read more

H2O Member | Sun Sep 06, 2020 | 11:26 PM | Likes: 4 

Our Poor Bunny Passed Away

Categories: General | Pubby Cash Received:  10

So sad our "small bunny" just passed away today. She was the last bunny we have. We call her "small bunny" because she was the smaller one when we brought her home together with her sibling "big bunny" on December 11, 2018. At that time, she was around 3 months old, and her sibling "big bunny" was around 6 months old. I got them at $6 each from bidding at the farmers' market in Lancaster PA, saving these two littles from being sent to the slaughterhouse. We did a lot of restructuring of our basement to build them a nice home. Their potty training was effective after half a year, and the cleaning work was easy on bi-weekly basis. They are our most closest family members in the animal category in our home besides two aquatic turtles, two parakeets, and one hamster. They can respond to our simple directions such as "jump up" and "jump down" to and from our laps, and quickly greet us begging for food whenever we walk downstairs. Today when we walked downstairs cleaning the cage, the "small bunny" did not greet us, she hided herself in a weird spot - a gap between the cage and the wall with no exit and barely no movement room. I did not know how she got into there. I could tell she was quite sleepy, because her eyes were closed and she barely moved. After cleaning her cage, I held her belly with both hands and carefully took her out from that awkward hiding spot. To my surprise, her body temperature was quite high. I had a sense of her normal body temperature when I held her in the past, definitely was not as high as that. Obviously, she was sick, struggling against a fever. But what caused the fever? She lived indoors all the time, and was unlikely to touch undesirable transmissible bacteria and viruses. Food was the only cause as I could think of. She was given a large watermelon peel and several small tomatoes in addition to regular main food of timothy hays. Her body weight was quite okay, with no symptom of decreasing as her sibling - "big bunny" did, who passed away on January 30, 2020 at an age of approximately 20 months old with an obvious symptom of losing weight. And she was quite energetic, with the ability of jumping up easily, unlike her sibling who lost the ability of jumping several weeks before she died. My diagnosis of her death reason was the uterine cancer, which limited her peeing ability when given too many fruits. As I was holding her body after she died, I could feel her stomach was quite full, and there was liquid on the floor coming out from her mouth at the scene of her death. Our bunnies were not spayed, and the unspayed/unneutered rabbits in the wild can live 1-2 years, while spayed/neutered rabbits can have a life span of...  Read more

H2O Member | Sun Sep 06, 2020 | 12:33 PM | Likes: 2 

A Windows 10 Activation Tip

Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:  10

In the last article, I introduced our experiences of migrating the Windows 10 Home Version Operating System from one standby OEM computer to two self-built PCs – one succeeded and one failed. I concluded in that article that Microsoft might have an algorithm that forbids one from maliciously using one license on multiple machines. As I continued searching for activation methods including an option of purchasing a cheap product key from a third-party seller, I was directed to a website that sells Windows 10 product keys for 40 bucks each. This sounds too good to be true. I usually don’t buy anything from non-reputable websites for the sake of protecting me from experiencing credit card fraud and personal information stolen things. However, since I was intrigued by this, I kept on reading the reviews of the website. Although there were no complaints, it turned out the customers of the website did experience bad product keys they sold. The situations were generally like this – the first try failed, indicating the product key had been used, and then they contacted the customer service and were instructed to talk to the bot by clicking the help button in the activation page. The bot would instruct them to complete the rest of the process. This sounds very interesting to me, as I’ve never thought of talking to bot is an approach. I always think that, by clicking the help button, I will be directed to a real person. Since I had the same type of issue – “first try failed, showing the product key has been used”, why not try their method by talking to the bot? That was amazing, the bot did solve my problem. It appeared that the bot automatically communicated with my computer, extracted some information, and gave me a long string of code to enter. After this code was entered, windows was activated right away! I’m very happy about that....  Read more

H2O Member | Thu Sep 03, 2020 | 10:37 PM | Likes: 2 

Windows 10 Activation after a Major Hardware Change

Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:  10

Can windows 10 be activated after you do a major change to your hardware such as motherboard and hard drive? Why not? If it cannot be activated, it is a rip-off for Microsoft to charge you multiple times on the same computer. But it can be activated, what will happen if you migrate the license to multiple computers and that will make activating unlimited computers with one license purchase possible, and Microsoft will be losing money. This appears to be very confusing. We happen to experience such a dilemma when building two PCs: one with successful license migration, and the other failed. For our two cases, we were not doing a major hardware change on the original computer, we were building two completely new computers with an old computer with activated Windows 10 standby. The first build used the an M2 SSD with cloned hard drive data from the standby computer. Windows was activated on the spot while the standby computer was not affected. So, we had two activated computers with the same license. That was a saving of $120 - the cost of purchasing a new Windows 10 Home license. Our second build was done several weeks later. It was another completely new computer. Again, we used an M2 SSD with cloned hard drive data from the standby computer. The steps were followed exactly like our first build. However, there was no luck this time. Windows were not activated no matter how many times we repeated the process. The message on the Control Panel's activation page read something like "The license has been used". While reading a few articles on license migration after major hardware change, I understood the principle: the activated license info is printed in the motherboard. Upon a motherboard change, such info is definitely lost, and that's why you need to reactivate it. That's why we failed the second build. But how to explain our first build while the activation appeared to be carried over to the new computer automatically and we did not do any re-activation at all? I believe the trick was on the first login event with a same Microsoft account of the standby computer during the initialization of the first build. Microsoft detected the same login, which might trigger the re-activation automatically. However, if such change was done again in a short period of time (in our case, it was several weeks), it was not recognized as a regular major hardware change, because no one will upgrade a motherboard in several weeks, the license was marked as used and there was nothing you can do about it except purchasing a new license. This was our Windows 10 activation experience after many hours of tries. Obviously Microsoft will not tell you this, and you learn through your own tries. ...  Read more

Evan Tang Elder Moderator | Thu Aug 20, 2020 | 11:50 AM | Likes: 1 

Has NASA discovered another Earth?

Categories: General | Pubby Cash Received:  0

Astronomers have discovered a new planet and it is similar to Earth. This unique planet is called Kepler-1649c and is named after the Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler-1649c is 300 light-years away from Earth and a light-year is how far light moves in one year. Outside of our solar system, scientists have found more than 2,000 exoplanets and one thing makes finding this new planet better than others which is that Kepler-1649c is a lot like Earth. Kepler-1649c is only slightly larger than Earth and like our sun, a star gives the new planet light, it receives almost as much light as Earth. Also, scientists think it is about just as warm, too. Andrew Vanderburg is a scientist and works at a university. He helped a lot by writing studying about Kepler-1649c. Mr. Vanderburg said finding this many exoplanets is great and one could turn out to be like Earth. Well, that's it for this article and I hope you learned something new....  Read more

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