Monday, 5 November 2018

Spreadsheets

There are a few out there
My favourite is one posted by diktaf at reddit.com/r/icecreamery
Amazingly I can't find any discussion about it but I have learnt a lot from it and always use it.
I find most recipes produce something far too sweet and once you get an understanding of POD and PAC you can develop mixtures that suit your own taste.

I've developed the sheet further:

  • all ingredients are selectable through drop downs
  • mixture total weight may be customised easily
  • warning if not enough eggs
  • automatic prediction of serving temp PAC
  • calculation of sugar %
  • calculation of costs - work in progress

It's available here 

My nice new printer

It's an Epson ET-2550 which prints, scans, copies and makes tea.
These things use bottles of ink rather than cartridges, are supposed to save 70% of running costs and can print up to 4,000 pages in black and 6,500 pages in colour which apparently saves me thinking about ink for two years. So it was a bit of a surprise to read

Ink life
For best results, use up ink within 6 months of removing the seal from an ink bottle

in the ET-2550 User's Guide (CPD-42914R1), however, this is from "Epson America, Inc." and the manual (NPD5248=00 EN) that comes with this one doesn't say that so maybe we have better ink.
Anyway, you transfer the inks from the bottles into the tanks on the printer and, as you remove the seals, lickle drops of ink stick to your fingers.
Delicate folk might like to try pliers or wear gloves.

After that, you switch on, press some buttons and wait while the system primes itself. In the meantime, you can install the software, there's a cd in the box but I used the weblink. It all went well until it tried to update the firmware. You turn the printer off which takes a while then turn it back on. The software couldn't find the printer so I pressed the OK button, tried again and it worked.
Test print was fine so I ran the head alignment check, although this was not mentioned, and it needed a bit of adjustment; the nozzle check for clogged nozzles was perfect.

Scanning A4 goes as follows:





Printing an A4 photo' on glossy paper with maximum quality took about six minutes. First go with no colour correction was a bit drab, second attempt used the PhotoEnhance/ Landscape option and was very good given that this is not a photo' printer and only has CMBBk inks. Paper was Fujifilm Multijet that I've had for several years.

Original


Scan of the print


Hmm, that's a bit blue, I suppose that I need to calibrate it.

First go with a Passport

black and white points set

better but still not green enough