Inkjet Ink Saving Tips

Tips for Saving Ink

Use economy mode. Most printers allow you to select the "economy" or "draft" mode in the properties section of your printer. This means you will have a slightly lighter, less precise copy, but it will save ink. Use the economy mode any time you are printing a draft or a document, such as an informal letter, that does not need to be "presentation ready." As a side benefit the document will also print faster and dry quicker.

Print only the portions you need. Be careful not to print an entire, multi-page document when you only need one or two pages. Word processing and other programs allow you to select a print range for your documents. This is especially important when printing pages from the Internet. Often if you print a webpage, you will receive a lot of needless links, logos, and advertisements at the end of the webpage, and these often end up printing out on a completely separate sheet of paper. To avoid this, do a print preview to see which pages have extraneous information, and cut those out of your print range.

Sway it. When your printer warns you that your ink cartridge is running low, it's not yet time to replace it! Remove the ink cartridge from the printer and sway it softly from side to side, and then reinsert it. This will redistribute the last little bit of ink in the cartridge and often get you several more printed pages. You may even be able to repeat the process more than once to get some additional pages.

Don't turn off your printer in mid-cycle. Never switch off your printer until it completes its cycle. If you turn it off while the cartridge is still moving, the printer's head will be forced to stop in the precise place where you turned it off. This may cause the printer nozzle to dry out and the ink to leak.

Leave your printer on. If you think you will be using your printer soon, it's better to leave it on than to repeatedly turn it on and off. Your printer uses a tiny bit of ink during the initialization phase every time it is turned on.

Use the black-only mode. If you have a printer that uses both a black cartridge and a color cartridge, and you're printing a black and white document, remember to change your printer properties to the black-only mode. Why? Even if you only have a black and white document, some printers automatically mix some of the color cartridge with the black to print the document. Over time, it's possible to use up a color cartridge even if you never print a colored document!

Consider ink saving software. Several companies produce ink saving software, and some of these programs can be downloaded for free online. These programs generally work by optimizing printer data so that your printer uses less ink even while printing at high resolution.

Earl Wilson once said, "Money in the bank is like toothpaste in the tube: easy to take out, hard to put back." Don't keep taking money out of the bank to spend on wasted ink!

Tips for Making an Ink Cartridge Last Longer

1. Print only what you absolutely need:

 In short, you should print only those things that you may actually need to save consumption of considerable amounts of ink.

Additionally, these days you can find free programs online such as CutePDF that will allow you to turn almost anything into a PDF. uploaded to an online cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Box.comor Google Drive

2. Use Print Preview: 

 Print Preview is a useful function that shows you how the document will look after it has been printed. It can help you adjust spaces and decide which pages to print. Consider turning off the color ink cartridges, selecting only the text you require and only the pages you need - especially that last page with the footer that comes out with each print job. 

3. Print text over graphics: 

If you are printing documents only for later reference, print only the essential text and any related images or graphics that are required. Avoid printing images or colorful graphics if having a hard copy is not essential to the purpose of the document. 

4. Print in Draft mode as often as possible:

 Use draft print quality whenever you can. Go to File - Print to open the box that lists the settings for your printer. Click 'Properties' to bring up the various options available. You'll probably find different choices under the heading 'Paper/Quality' that allow you to select draft quality printing. Your document will print at a lower resolution but that may not matter for reference material that you will likely discard later. You can always switch to a higher resolution for a final version of a document. 

5. Print text in black ink only:

 Print documents that are in black and white with a black ink cartridge. Choose black and white printing over color whenever possible. Depending on your printer, you may have the option to select grayscale printing using the black ink cartridge only. If you print black with a color ink cartridge, various colors are mixed to create the black ink. This depletes your color ink cartridge a lot faster than it would deplete a black ink cartridge. If you're not doing presentation quality work, or if you're printing text only, chances are you won't need the other colors. 

6. Use color ink only when needed:

 If you want your refilled ink to run longer, then make use of color printing only when it is required. Otherwise, for general and regular use, it is wiser to use black and white printing that helps in saving your money on buying additional refills.

Modern personal printers can produce high quality photographs, particularly if you use specialty photo paper. But printing high quality digital shots can use a lot of ink, so if you print a large number of photos you might want to outsource your photo printing to a local print center. Many services allow you to order your prints online. You can also have your photos printed on calendars, mouse pads or greeting cards if you wish. 

7. Keep your printer nozzles clean:

 Perhaps the easiest change you can make to your printing habits is to keep an eye on your printer heads. The printer ink nozzles that dispense the actual ink use a spray function to get the ink onto the paper. As such, these nozzles can experience a build-up of dried ink and become clogged. Clean the nozzle heads every few weeks or more often if you're a heavy printer.

If a color cartridge isn't printing all the colors, remove the cartridge and wipe the bottom of it where the ink comes out firmly with a damp paper towel or lint-free cloth to unclog the nozzle. This will help the ink flow more freely from the cartridge. 

8. Use all the ink in the cartridge: 

 Continue to print even when your printer light comes on or you get a warning saying that your ink is low. Check the ink level in the cartridge and if it appears that there is some ink left, keep using it instead of changing the cartridge immediately. There is likely quite a bit of ink left in the cartridge; remember that the ink comes out in a spray so it doesn't take much per page. Use it all and then shake the ink cartridge to break up any ink clogs (especially in humid climates). You may get hundreds of extra pages out of a cartridge by doing this. Keep printing until the ink is almost completely gone (but be careful that you don't run the printer with an empty cartridge).

9. Select "Printer-Friendly" Pages when printing from the Web:

 You would be surprised how much ink is wasted by printing pages directly as they appear from a website. One Web page can have multiple pictures or graphics...not to mention several pages worth of printing because Web pages are typically much longer than a regular document. Opt for the printer-friendly option if you need to print something from the Web. This eliminates all the unnecessary images, and will save your ink cartridges as well as your printing paper. 

10. Use the printer regularly:

 If you don't print very often, you can stretch the life of your inkjet cartridges by keeping the printer moving. Print a page or two at least once a week using both your color and black ink cartridges. You can print something small (even a printer diagnostic test) to prevent the ink from drying up.

Another ink-saving tip is to power down your printer the right way after each use. Don't merely switch it off or unplug it, but allow your printer to power down slowly and shut itself down. The print heads need to be in the right position while the printer is turned off to prevent the ink from drying up prematurely. The printer should also be covered when not in use.

Top 10 Technologies for Information Security

Cloud Access Security Brokers
Cloud access security brokers are on-premises or cloud-based security policy enforcement points placed between cloud services consumers and cloud services providers to interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed. In many cases, initial adoption of cloud-based services has occurred outside the control of IT, and cloud access security brokers offer enterprises to gain visibility and control as its user’s access cloud resources.

Adaptive Access Control
Adaptive access control is a form of context-aware access control that acts to balance the level of trust against risk at the moment of access using some combination of trust elevation and other dynamic risk mitigation techniques. Context awareness means that access decisions reflect current condition, and dynamic risk mitigation means that access can be safely allowed where otherwise it would have been blocked. Use of an adaptive access management architecture enables an enterprise to allow access from any device, anywhere, and allows for social ID access to a range of corporate assets with mixed risk profiles.

Pervasive Sandboxing (Content Detonation) and IOC Confirmation
Some attacks will inevitably bypass traditional blocking and prevention security protection mechanisms, in which case it is key to detect the intrusion in as short a time as possible to minimize the hacker's ability to inflict damage or exfiltrate sensitive information. Many security platforms now included embedded capabilities to run ("detonate") executables and content in virtual machines (VMs) and observe the VMs for indications of compromise. This capability is rapidly becoming a feature of a more-capable platform, not a stand-alone product or market. Once a potential incident has been detected, it needs to be confirmed by correlating indicators of compromise across different entities for example, comparing what a network-based threat detection system sees in a sandboxed environment to what is being observed on actual endpoints in terms of processes, behaviors, registry entries and so on.

Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions
The endpoint detection and response (EDR) market is an emerging market created to satisfy the need for continuous protection from advanced threats at endpoints (desktops, servers, tablets and laptops) most notably significantly improved security monitoring, threat detection and incident response capabilities. These tools record numerous endpoint and network events and store this information in a centralized database. Analytics tools are then used to continually search the database to identify tasks that can improve the security state to deflect common attacks, to provide early identification of ongoing attacks (including insider threats), and to rapidly respond to those attacks. These tools also help with rapid investigation into the scope of attacks, and provide remediation capability.

Big Data Security Analytics at the Heart of Next-generation Security Platforms
Going forward, all effective security protection platforms will include domain-specific embedded analytics as a core capability. An enterprise's continuous monitoring of all computing entities and layers will generate a greater volume, velocity and variety of data than traditional SIEM systems can effectively analyze. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 40 percent of enterprises will have established a "security data warehouse" for the storage of this monitoring data to support retrospective analysis. By storing and analyzing the data over time, and by incorporating context and including outside threat and community intelligence, patterns of "normal" can be established and data analytics can be used to identify when meaningful deviations from normal have occurred.

Machine-readable Threat Intelligence, Including Reputation Services
The ability to integrate with external context and intelligence feeds is a critical differentiator for next-generation security platforms. Third-party sources for machine-readable threat intelligence are growing in number and include a number of reputation feed alternatives. Reputation services offer a form of dynamic, real-time "trustability" rating that can be factored into security decisions. For example, user and device reputation as well as URL and IP address reputation scoring can be used in end-user access decisions.

Containment and Isolation as a Foundational Security Strategy
In a world where signatures are increasingly ineffective in stopping attacks, an alternative strategy is to treat everything that is unknown as untrusted and isolate its handling and execution so that it cannot cause permanent damage to the system it is running on and cannot be used as a vector for attacks on other enterprise systems. Virtualization, I\isolation, abstraction and remote presentation techniques can be used to create this containment so that, ideally, the end result is similar to using a separate "air-gapped" system to handle untrusted content and applications. Virtualization and containment strategies will become a common element of a defense-in-depth protection strategy for enterprise systems, reaching 20 percent adoption by 2016 from nearly no widespread adoption in 2014.

Software-defined Security
"Software defined" is about the capabilities enabled as we decouple and abstract infrastructure elements that were previously tightly coupled in our data centers: servers, storage, networking, security and so on. Like networking, compute and storage, the impact on security will be transformational. Software-defined security doesn't mean that some dedicated security hardware isn't still needed it is. However, like software-defined networking, the value and intelligence moves into software.

Interactive Application Security Testing
Interactive application security testing (IAST) combines static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) techniques. This aims to provide increased accuracy of application security testing through the interaction of the SAST and DAST techniques. IAST brings the best of SAST and DAST into a single solution. This approach makes it possible to confirm or disprove the exploitability of the detected vulnerability and determine its point of origin in the application code.

Security Gateways, Brokers and Firewalls to Deal with the Internet of Things
Enterprises, especially those in asset-intensive industries like manufacturing or utilities, have operational technology (OT) systems provided by equipment manufacturers that are moving from proprietary communications and networks to standards-based, IP-based technologies. More enterprise assets are being automated by OT systems based on commercial software products. The end result is that these embedded software assets need to be managed, secured and provisioned appropriately for enterprise-class use. OT is considered to be the industrial subset of the "Internet of Things," which will include billions of interconnected sensors, devices and systems, many of which will communicate without human involvement and that will need to be protected and secured.