We don’t do a lot of printing and since We have become a laptop only household printing has been further discouraged since going to the printer and plugging in is simply too much effort, I just save/print it to a PDF.

So after finally setting my printer as a network printer, using an old laptop, I was dismayed to find that the printer was not printing the first page correctly, the printing would start almost halfway down the page, strangely however subsequent pages of each job were printing just fine.

The printer is a Kyocera FS-1010, laser printer.

After some searching around the web I found a few people reporting the same symptoms:
http://www.fixya.com/support/t1083180-huge_margin_kyocera_fs_1000

But then I came across these threads on copytechnet forums:
http://www.copytechnet.com/forums/kyocera/15980-kyocera-fs1010-delayed-printing-1st-page-2.html#post55451

Basically there are some foam pads that insulate some moving arms from their stop point. These get compressed over time and no longer insulate the arms and they get magnetically stuck on the stop points.

The steps from this post are :

1. Open the right side of the printer
2. Disconnect all connections to engine board
3. Remove engine board
4. Remove plastic guard (white)
5. remove all 3 solenoids
6. Replace all pads on the solenoids that come up against stops
7. Registration Solenoid has 2 pads (1 against the solenoid frame and the other on a stop arm, the others just the frame pad)
8. Keep thickness to around .4 – .5mm Too thick on register arm will cause early printing.
9. Reassemble

So with the above and a service manual downloaded from : http://www.eserviceinfo.com/downloadsm/16172/Kyocera_FS-1010.html

I was able to open the printer, access the solenoids scrape off the old foam and glue some thin cardboard in their place.

After a successful ’Step 9′ Reassemble, printing is back to normal!

There aren’t many items in this tech would that can be fixed so easily simply, Of course opening up a printer and removing bits a pieces is not usually regarded as easy.

The Temperature at my place now is: °C full graphs here

Using a couple of Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors, a simple circuit and 2 simple pieces of software I have been able to track and graph the temperature of my home, indoors and out using my PC. I started this project in the hope of measuring the benefit of Insulation batts in my roof.

I got the Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors as free samples ordering over maxim-co.com website.

The circuit and software to read the sensors I found on martybugs.net http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/hardware.cgi

The Software that reads the sensors is called digitemp and can be found at : http://www.digitemp.com/software.shtml

The graphs are provided by the excellent but often misunderstood rrdtool http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

The rrdtool scripts I use and the scripts I use to read the temperature every 5 mins can be found here

If you want to do this yourself I really recommend following the steps on martybugs.net as it is rather complete.

It’s great to have this information, In the end I didn’t get a good idea on the insulation effect as I only had the sensors running for 3 days before the installers turned up.