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I've just wasted three hours of my evening tonight dealing with an annoying printer issue at the homestead. We have a Compaq Presario desktop setup in my son's room and that is what the family printer, a Lexmark X5470 is connected to that will all use. Or perhaps more accurately as of late, I should say we try to use.

The first issue of the evening was that the print spooler had gotten choked on a print job that was sent over and wouldn't print. I think problem stemmed from the fact that the computer had warned that printer was about out of ink and threw a warning up on the screen. Good thing is that I have an extra ink cartridge refill. My son didn't think to move the mouse and look for a message on screen, so they kept clicking print over and over again.

I found this article about force clearing the print spooler, which led to me this article that provided more details about a proposed solution using cleanspl.exe. That didn't seem to work either. I then proceeded to delete all my printers and printer drivers and try reinstalling from scratch.

That required a 50MB+ download of the drivers from the Lexmark website. That's annoying because I really didn't want all the software apps and management tools installed as well. I just want the stupid driver installed so I can print successfully.

After I think 5-6 installation, removals and reinstallation attempts I'm still not back to being able to use the printer. It's times like these that at least make me entertain the idea of giving a Mac a try. Not so much though, because I've had similar issues trying to get a printer installed for use with a client's Macbook. We are looking into commercial copiers that also work as printers so we can get rid of this current printer that we have and that does not work.

Image: Windows XP Add Printer Dialog and Lexmark X5470 Printer from Lexmark website

I’ve mentioned frequently how I enjoy blocking applications and requests from people on Facebook. Maybe I’m weird, but all those apps and quizzes just aren’t what I’m looking for as I use Facebook. I want personal updates from people and photos for the most part.

The applications and requests wouldn’t be quite as annoying if they weren’t this seemingly unending onslaught of gratuitous chatter. IMHO! =)

I’ve had a number of people ask me how to block these things, so here’s what I do. I can’t confirm completely that it will work 100% of the time, but there’s still a little bit of joy in telling everything to go away.

When you’re looking at your general news feed on your Facebook homepage, just hover over the top-right corner of the update you’d like to ignore in the future. When your mouse is over it you’re presented with a little menu item that gives you two choices:

1. Hide [Facebook username]: This hides all updates from this specific user. This probably isn’t what you want as it will block ANY updates from this person from showing in your news feed. Although that may still come in handy for those people you don’t want to “unfriend” but just want to ignore most of the time.
2. Hide [Facebook App Name]: This should hid any future updates from this app displaying in your news feed in the future. The problem with the Facebook platform though is that it’s very easy for people to write similar apps and rename them to do something else. I say keep blocking them, perhaps people will stop writing them if more and more of us ignore them.

For me, this stuff is like spam and should just be ignored. Hopefully this helps. If you’re not aware, you can also block all of those different “requests” you get from people too. When you click open the link to view the request’s details, there’s a little link option to “Block Application”. This should block all requests from this application to you in the future as well.

I’d love to hear any tricks you may have to streamline your Facebook usage. Let me know in the comments.

Image: Snagit of Facebook news feed