Chronicles - Cursed - Online - Barnes and Noble

I will admit at the very beginning, I am as guilty as anyone else of the thing I am about to write.

Yesterday, to entice Avni to come with me to Costco I promised her the box book set of “Chronicles of Narnia”. While in Costco we realized they were out of stock but the book set was available on their website and could be delivered home in a few days. Being still slightly old school and considering yesterday was Father’s Day, I decided to call my old time/all time favorite bookshop Barnes and Noble on Brodie Ln and they said they have it in stock.

When we arrived at Barnes and Nobles, it was as though old memories were gushing through all at once, the times I used to spend there picking out the classics, enjoying the coffee and even waiting in line for the final book of Harry Potter. Some how the fresh book smell was quite intoxicating. The place in itself hasn’t change much at all and as always has been the staff was very friendly and they had the book set we were looking for but the cost was almost 3x of what Costco was selling and one can argue that's the reason they are not growing and may go out of business (that would be a sad depressing day when it happens). Since we were in the bookstore and I wasn’t ready to spend 3x over a box set of books I had no idea if either me or Avni will read the books I asked them if they had a copy of the book “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, a long time ask from Avni and I had been delaying for reasons unknown. They had and we bought the hard bound book and left the store.

I want to end the blog post with an appeal to all my book reading friends, Kindle and other reading apps and Amazon prime and all are great and wonderful but there is definitely great value in keeping a brick and mortar bookshop open. For one it is a great asset for the future generations and also a place where we spent our time exploring our interests and maybe even stumbled upon something that was totally unrelated to what we wanted but it expanded our horizons in other ways. Yes online is cheap and Amazon does a fine job of delivering in 2 days or even 1 day but considering books are such a tiny fraction of ones living expense the savings we make from this alone will not make you a millionaire or conversely will not break the bank either. If one plays the card of save the planet, I am sure both of us know that there are ten thousand better ways to do the same :).   

Refilled printer cartridges

For my hp inkjet printer at home, every time the ink dried up I used to buy brand new cartridges and some time along while printing some photos at Costco, I realized they have a service to refill the cartridges.

It was win win for multiple reasons, I hated throwing the cartridges away to a land fill, it was saving me some money and I could only refill the ink that had dried up (instead of buying set of 4 or 5).  As the saying goes first time lucky, first time I did it, it worked like a charm, printer recognized the ink levels and print quality was almost perfect and needless to say I was pretty impressed. 

A few months later  I realized the ink had dried up and I decided to go the same route, this time around the story went slightly differently. After refill the printer refused to show the ink levels and also refused to print anything at all. I tried the color and monochrome but no luck either ways.

I eventually made a trip back to Costco and there I learned a couple of things, first, they can actually measure the cartridge to determine if it has been filled with enough ink. Second, since the cartridge is now a non-standard it is fairly common for printers to show error for the amount of ink present.

Through the weighing process the good friendly Costco lady told me that the black ink for some reason hasn't gone through and she refilled it again. Of course my nightmare was still not over, for after coming back and repopulating the cartridges the printer still had trouble printing (it was printing blank pages or off color).

Then I came across this website inkjet411.com which suggested that I try electronically clean print head (in my printer, it's called clean cartridges) and voila it did the magic and the printer started working properly. One important suggestion the site had was to print a test print once a week to prevent ink from drying up.

Last but not least is that there is a limited number of times that cartridges can be refilled, I don't know that yet and will know soon.