BlakeBlog

Adding Memory to the Lexmark C544dn

Just a quick update on my Lexmark C544dn: Buy this beastie more memory! It's not like it's obnoxiously slow with the standard amount of memory, but adding more memory is really cheap and it speeds things up tremendously in a couple of situations. First, if you tend to print n-up pages (multiple page images on a single side of paper), and second, if you print double-sided with anything beyond simple text (web pages are a good example). At least, those are the cases I found where the printer bogs down a bit.

I bought a 512MB module directly from Crucial, and with tax and shipping it was only $35. It's simple to add since you only need to unscrew the back panel (six Phillips screws, not four like is shown in the manual) to expose the printer's empty memory slot. After adding the extra memory I can print a document 2-up, double-sided, and the printer runs at the print engine's speed—no more long pauses between sides or sheets.

One other observation after having used the printer for a little longer: some reviewers dinged it because double-sided printing slows down the overall output speed considerably when compared with some other printers in its class. I figured that I wouldn't use the double-sided functionality that often, so I didn't let that drawback weigh very heavily in my decision-making process. Now that I have the printer, though, double-sided printing is so easy to do that I find myself making use of it much more than I expected. Still, the performance hit isn't bothersome to me and the added memory speeds it up a bit, too.

Overall I'm still quite happy with this printer.

Really Liking ClickToFlash

I'm probably one of the last folks on the planet to jump on this train, but ClickToFlash is a very nice alternative to the stopad.css I wrote about ages ago. (Overview: ClickToFlash is a Safari plug-in that automatically disables all Flash content in web pages, while stopad.css is a stylesheet you can use with Safari to block a bunch of ad networks.) One advantage of ClickToFlash is that it works on all Flash content in a page, but if there is actually some Flash-based content that you need to see all you need to do is click on the region to enable just that bit of Flash content. It also offers whitelists, so it can automatically load Flash on a site you frequently visit if that site uses Flash to present content you're interested in. ClickToFlash more directly addresses my gripes about Flash content without penalizing all advertisers like stopad.css does. It's pretty nifty and, in my experience, robust. Check it out.

Speedy DNSes

Surfing around this afternoon I was reminded that Google came out with an optimized DNS service. Since I'm working from home today I figured I'd run their namebench DNS benchmarking tool and see how my home network's doing.

Uh oh.

Yeah, take a look at that graphic. OpenDNS is 147% faster than my current DNS service provider. What the heck are my DNS settings? Er, um, it looks like I'm still pointing to Earthlink's servers, of all things! I haven't used them as my ISP in almost a decade. What an amazing piece of cruft.

namebench's recommendations were for OpenDNS, then Level3. Interestingly, OpenDNS was faster than SBC, my current ISP. Also, it's nice to see that namebench didn't bias the results in favor of Google.

Go check out your DNS performance and see if you can save a little time, too!

My Apple TV's Hard Drive Is Dead

A couple weeks ago I rented Terminator Salvation on my Apple TV, and while the first half of the movie played just fine, the second half played horribly. Playback would freeze every couple of minutes, and after 20 seconds or so it would skip forward 2-3 minutes and the movie would resume playing. I had to skip back every time to see what I missed, so it took me two hours to watch the final hour of the movie. I was pretty certain it wasn't a problem with downloading the movie data cleanly, but I didn't have time to troubleshoot it any further because of all of my holiday activities.

With the break here around New Year's, though, I thought I'd dig into it and see if I could fix whatever was wrong. So, I flipped my receiver to the Apple TV input and was greeted with the "reset" screen telling me there'd been a problem and asking whether I wanted to restart the Apple TV, do a hardware diagnostic, or do a factory restore. The diagnostic didn't turn up any problems, but every time I rebooted I ended back up at the reset screen. I couldn't do a factory restore, either, and since I'm long out of warranty there wasn't much to lose by opening up the box and pulling the hard drive to see what was up.

After a lot of research (more on this later) it looks like the 40 GB original hard drive in my Apple TV is failing. I have a 250 GB hard drive that I pulled from my MacBook Pro, but it has a SATA hard drive interface while the Apple TV uses a PATA interface. Over on the MacRumors forums, stevietech found a PATA-to-SATA converter and 8" cable that just barely fit inside the Apple TV case without modification. These pieces should let me re-use my old hard drive.

It'll take over a week for the parts to get here, but I'll let folks know how it goes. I hope that at the end of the day I'll have a fully-functioning Apple TV with some more storage space!