Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Weird Issues After Upgrading to Debian Bullseye

Edited to add: "hey, it's been sooo long since I posted, how weird is that, amiright?" I fucking hate computers. But god bless search engines, because I'd never be able to get shit done on my home machine without them. I can't remember if I've posted about my first foray into running Linux at home back in 1998 or 1999, but even without Laurie saying she hated it because she had no idea how to use anything on the desktop, it was a massive pain in the ass for ME. 

It's still a pain in the ass sometimes, but now I have a magical electronic hive mind to use as reference instead of massive, poorly written book authored by a dude who smelled like musk and Cheetos cheese. 

Anyway, I'm adding MY two cents to the magical electronic hive mind of knowledge. I can promise you I only smell of Tide, sandalwood & pomegranate (the fancy way of saying Axe Anarchy deodorant), and Dr. Bronner's almond soap. 

I'm also going to crank this out as quickly as I can while it's still fresh in my memory, so ignore any grammatical gibber jabber and technical wonkity woohahs (e.g. jargon) that I may flesh out at a later date. 

So...I decide I'm finally going to fix my dual boot issue on my home machine. I can't use GRUB to get into the Win10 NVMe disk ("Invalid Signature") I added last year so that I could play a Cyberpunk 2028 and Witcher 3 (both of which I've played literally twice, haha...what a waste of $$.) Anyways, I've been putting off fixing what I though was wrong. I finally took a look yesterday and figured "hey, if I'm mucking around in this shit, I might as well finally update from Buster to Bullseye.)

I do a bunch of stuff, mostly following the instructions from Debian's site, and things are looking preeeetttttty okish. I start mucking around with what I think I need to do to fix GRUB ("hmm, well UEFI IS already setup for Win. Secure boot isn't enabled. OOOHHH, ok. Well, fuck.") and realize that the reason GRUB is that my fucking Linux partition is setup as MBR and not GPT because even though it's running on a pretty modern and fancy SSD, 

I wasn't paying attention when I upgraded from my 10ish year old hard drive and basically just continued to use a partition scheme that's almost old enough to have it's own Judd Apatow movie (This is 40...come on.) OK. I'll stick with switching disks at boot time in BIOS for now. But hey, I'm upgraded! Everything is great! 

Ron Howard Voice: "Everything was not great."

I opened Spotify this morning to get some motivational tunes going and it's just a black screen. Well shit. Do some hive mind searching with no luck--if you think it's tough troubleshooting general Linux issues (hello, 11 year old forum posts!) try doing it for a specific application, even one as widely used as Spotify. SURE, I could use my phone's Spotify client to stream to my office speaker, but then it eats up my battery. Anywho, the Linux forum on Spotify's site is sometimes useful, but not today. I try opening it via command line to see what's up and this is what I get: libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null) Very helpful! I try uninstalling/reinstalling Spotify and it's the same shit. 

I start looking for troubleshooting libva error shit. Well, i must be missing the libva packages from the upgrade. Yes sir--let's apt-get that shit and, well it's installed and the lasted version. OK, I should use vainfo to check versions? Well, I dont' fucking have that anymore. Ok, let's install. Hmm, ok--that looks like what I should see. Check chrome://gpu (edge for me, homie) to see what's up? Done. Looks fucking fine. Is xorg.conf right? Uh, yes. lspci | grep VGA? YES IT'S THE RIGHT MOTHER FUCKING DRIVER. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggggggggggggggGG. 

Ok, let's try some basic Spotify troubleshooting. Well, yes--aplay is recognizing my sound cards. And wow, starting it on command line with a log dump was SOOOOO helpful. I know have a single line text file that says "libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null)

That's some very NEW and super helpful information. Ok, let's try playing the test audio file...but first, looks like i need to raise my speaker volume. 

Hmm, why am I not getting that annoying gnome bubble pop. 

Hmm. Why isn't there a fucking output device in Gnome Settings. 

 *Sigh* More googling.


And I come across a Reddit post of something not entirely dissimilar from my audio issue that was resolved with a reboot, but one of the comments talked about grep'ing dmesg for firmware shit. So let's try that: sudo dmesg | grep firmware and hmm..."Unable to load firmware rtl_nic/rtl8168h-2

I've been seeing that shit since last year after a kernal update and I've been ignoring it because my NIC card has been working fine. But ok, let's try to fix that.  Back to the keyboard and well, hello 11 year old AskUbuntu post, haha. 

It wasn't exaaaaacccttttlly the complete answer, but close enough for me to run sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek and then sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek and then reboot and voila..EVERYTHING FUCKING WORKED AGAIN. 

Fucking audio drivers for both speakers and HDMI, missing web cam, missing mic, and of course, missing video driver that caused Spotify to not load. 

I fucking hate computers.

Keywords: Debian, Bullseye, Spotify, Linux, libva, Spotify black screen after upgrade, computers are the debbil.

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Sourdough Rye Bread


"All sorrows are less with bread. ”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

So it looks like the last 18 months or so of posts have only been my Instagram crossposts.  I think that all my real posts are prefaced by "hey, it's been sooo long since I posted, how weird is that, amiright?"  Well, get used to it!  You will get what you get and be happy with it, god damn it!  How dare you presume to tell me how to run my blog.  I was blogging when you were shitting in your diddies, Mr. or Ms. or Mx. Zoomer.  Back in my day, you posted on a free webpage from Geocities, or Open Diary, or Xanga, or (pour one out, homies) MSN Spaces.  And it was a JOURNAL, not this fancy schmancy weblog shit you youngins call it. (*sorry, that made me laugh since there's no fucking way anyone under 40 is actually using a blog.  Tumblr? Sure.  But an actual blog, nah.)  Any of y'all still have your blogs up?  I think John's the only one still in my RSS feed and he hasn't posted in almost a year.  Let's get a blog roll going in my comments, bitches.

So Val asked me for a recipe on my Instagram post, so here it is.  This turned out really good, but it could have been better.  Usually my sourdough bakes are a two+ day affair, but I needed this bread done the same day to make Reubens with homemade corned beef.  They were fucking amazing, but not really a real Reuben since I didn't have swiss (I used Barely Buzzed cheddar)and my Russian dressing was more like a Koryo-Saram dressing since I was using kimchi mayo I had leftover from Kenji's Kimchi brined KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) sandwiches as the base.  That's a sandwich recipe you need to make too, btw.  OMFG.

So if you want to make this taste better, you can reduce or eliminate the extra yeast and just use your starter.  But if you do that, you'll need to bulk ferment for a much longer time and do an overnight ferment once you've shaped your loaves.

I had pulled my starter (it's 100% hydration, e.g. 1 part water to 1 part flour) out of the fridge the night before and topped it off with 200 grams of filtered water and 200 grams of bread flour, since I wanted about 240 grams of starter to serve as the levain and I needed some left to throw back in the fridge and some to make a batch of sourdough buttermilk pancakes the next day.
Look at those bubbles

I was shooting for a 75% hydration level, but I know I miscalculated the amount of water.  I still don't know what I landed at, but we'll figure that out here in a sec once I start writing out the recipe.  Whatever it was, it was great for this purpose and was super easy to handle and shape and even better, didn't stick to my fucking banneton.   JFC, I screwed up last week and put the wrong water in a recipe and it was like a thicc ass batter.  That shit stuck to EVERYTHING and I had to hand wash the linen cover to my bannetons.  Pro tip--after you measure your water, get rid of the container that doesn't have your measured water.

I'm going to add approximate times, but your mileage will definitely vary.  That, I think, is one of the most important lessons I've learned from baking bread--you have to be flexible.  Bread will rise when it rises.  Although you can speed it up by using commercial yeast like I did this time, haha.

Ingredients:

240 grams 100% Hydration, Mature Starter
772 grams King Arthur Bread Flour (KA is my preferred since it's probably the best I can get in the area)
108 grams Spelt Flour
108 grams Rye Flour (both Spelt & Rye are Bob's Red Mill, I think)
10 grams fast rise yeast (eliminate if you want to do a slow proof/ferment)
20 grams caraway seeds
22 grams of fine sea salt
2 Tbsp molasses
650 ml filtered water (or grams)  Did you know they're the same for water?  The metric system is awesome.  

So, since I used 650 ml of water (and had 120 in the starter) it looks like I came in at 69 (nice) percent hydration.

I use water filtered through my fridge since my city likes to heavily chlorinate the water.  I was going to say if you don't have a filter, you can leave it out overnight to let the chlorine dissipate, but apparently that doesn't work anymore now that water treatment is done with chloramine.  If you don't have a fridge filter, go buy a Brita or something.  I saw a generic version at the Walmart last weekend for $9.99.

Like I said, I fed my starter the night before and just left it out on the counter.  The temp on my counter is usually in the low 70's, so it's a good spot for a nice, long fermentation.  When I'm doing a regular sourdough bake, I usually just do an overnight bulk fermentation on the counter and things turn out great.


11:45 a.m. Autolyse the flour and 550 grams of the water.  This just means mixing up your flour and water and letting it sit.  I usually go for about an hour.  The link above gets into the science and shit, but basically it allows the enzymes in the flour to break shit down a bit and allows your flour to get fully hydrated.  

My water temp was about 110 degrees and that was a little too hot.  According to the experts, you should be shooting for a dough temp of 78 degrees, but again, I was shooting for a short and fast proof, so it wasn't a big deal.  My dough temp was 92.2 degrees after adding the water, so I really should've had my water 15 degrees lower.



Oh, I should note that unless I'm making rolls or something else that needs (kneads, heigh-oh) a long knead time, I do all this shit by hand.  Since this bulk ferments for quite a while, even with the acceleration of the instant yeast, you don't need to use a mixer or do any intense kneading.  Time and the "stretch and fold" technique will get your gluten developed nicely.  Be sure you are really getting everything mixed up well.  In the bread I fucked up last week, I was using a spatula to mix (I was making a double batch, so there was a shit ton of dough) and I didn't do a good job.  I had lumps of dry flour and it was just a total shit show.  Still tasted good, but man, what an embarrassment.

There are several other methods of kneading your dough--slap and fold; coil folding, using your mixer, etc.  Whatever works for you is what works for you.  You do you, boo.


12:45ish p.m. You should see a difference in your dough now.  It should look more relaxed and less shaggy.  I failed to take a pic prior to adding the rest of the ingredients in there.  This is the point where you'll add the rest of your stuff.  Usually it's just your levain and salt and remaining water.  But I had some extra shizz for this one, so I heated the remaining 100 grams of water a bit and dissolved the 2 Tbsp of molasses in there and then used that liquid to do a quick proof on the instant yeast.  

I sprinkled the salt over the autolysed dough, poured the levain and caraway seeds over the top and poked the entire surface many, many times.  I then added the molasses/yeast mixture and pinched/poked/flipped/kneaded the whole shebang until I was confident everything was evenly distributed in the dough.





It's like a giant stress ball.  But it sucks if you have arthritis in your thumb.  Every squeeze is a bit of agony, but you must endure and sacrifice to make delicious food.

Now you just let it sit and proof for a while.  How long depends on the dough temp, the ambient air temp, the quality of your yeasties, etc.  Since I had my oven on 300 and was cooking a corned beef, I sat my bucket next to the stove, where the ambient air temp was about 85, so that I would have a faster rise.  I've taken to using a post-it note to mark where my dough level is at the start, so that it's easier for me to tell when it's doubled in size.
1:30 p.m. So the next pic really isn't helpful, but that's what it looked like after I did my first stretch and fold (see gif below my pic for how that works--you basically stretch the dough from top to bottom, turn, top to bottom, turn, until all four cardinal directions have been hit.)




Gif Shamefully Stolen From Hint of Vanilla but I'm not a complete monster, so I didn't hotlink the image and instead have moved it to my own host instead.
I usually do four sets of stretch and folds.  The first one about 30 minutes into bulk fermentation.  And then every 45-60 minutes after.  After the fourth, just leave it alone to rise.  The first couple of months I got back into baking, I was fixated on watching the time.  "Hey, this recipe said I should bulk ferment for 6 hours, so now it's time to move on."  I've learned that your dough doesn't give a fuck about your time, homie.  Dough is going to do whatever the fuck it wants.  So instead of focusing on time, you want to look at how the dough is behaving.  Look for it to double (or more, depending on what you're doing) in size. When you poke it (gently, you fucking monster!) it should slowly pop back out.  By the time I was ready to shape, the dough was up to about the 4 QT mark on my bucket.

Now is the time to shape your dough and get a nice "skin" formed on your dough.  You're looking for the tight cheek skin of a 60 year old millionaire.  In my case, I normally make boules, since that's the type of banneton I have.  I want to start making some batards, but I need some other baskets for that.  You'll notice a lot of these links go back to The Perfect Loaf and that's because Maurizio is the fucking man.


Check out my giant, smooth boules.  You want to touch them, don't you?
After you shape the loaves, let them sit for like 10 or 15 minutes to relax the gluten.  Then tighten your balls of dough back up using your hands and/or a bench scraper and flip them upside down into your prepared bannetons.

At this point, if it were a normal sourdough, I'd throw them into the fridge for an overnight+ of fermentation.  That's where you get the wang dang sweet poon-tang of sourdough flavor.  But since I supercharged this mofo with instant yeast, I just need to do a secondary proof in the banneton.  

If I'm doing an overnight fermentation, I put the basket in a big poofy plastic turkey cooking bag (I reuse them because they're not cheap) but since today's bake was going to be fast and furious, I just covered the bannetons with damp paper towels.  Which I guess is pretty luxurious during this fucking Covid-19 induced paper goods shortage of 2020.  Man, what dickhead science lab fired up the particle accelerator and put us into THIS fucked up timeline?  Someone get me a DeLorean so I can get the fuck into the timeline where we have a normal, functioning government and I'm not locked in The Overlook hotel.



 

While I was playing around with my dough balls, I had an oven preheating for about an hour at 500 degrees and in that oven was an enameled dutch oven.  If you are swaggy enough to have an oven with a steam injector, 1) go fuck yourself, but 2) you can just bake your loaves on a baking stone.  Us poor folk (not really--I'm doing quite well, thank you) have to make due with our low end gourmet oven in our custom built kitchen and an enameled crock to get some steam powered oven spring.

Carefully pull your dutch oven out of the oven (that sounds weird and I've said "oven" quite a lot over the last few paragraphs.  Oven. Of. Ven.  Did I get pulled into Gilead?  Where's my red robe and white cowl?) and take off the lid.  I throw a piece of parchment over the banneton and flip it over, hoping that the loaf stays in place on the parchment.  Do your scoring (quick and decisive!) and carefully place the dough into the dutch oven.  Put the lid on and then put it in the oven.  Drop the temp to 475 and bake for 20 minutes.


Pre-flip dough and ghetto lame made from coffee stirrer and safety razor.  It legit works better than the one paid $3 for.
After 20 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking for anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes.

#humblebragthatlecreuset




If you notice, my bottom is a bit darker than I like.  I had my bottom rack too far down--I forgot to move it up a couple of notches prior to firing shit up. 

This is a fairly mild rye bread.  Just enough rye flavor that you know what it is, without punching you in the face.  It was great for my quasi-Reuben and good when I ate it toasted, with butter and orange marmalade.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

permissionerror: [errno 1] operation not permitted: 'lib' ->

In today's episode of dumb shit that made me write a blog post...

I finally got around to trying to figure out why I couldn't create a virtual environment (venv) using Pycharm for my Python class project folder.  I keep it on a USB drive because I do some work on it both at home and on my work laptop (when I'm not working through lunch, natch.)

Anyway, I kept getting the following error:  permissionerror: [errno 1] operation not permitted: 'lib' -> (and then the path to a symlink to lib64.) 

I figured it was an issue with my locked down work laptop, so I just kept manually navigating to a local python interpreter at work.  I said I'd get around to fixing it when I got home.  But low and behold, same shit at home. 

I tried manually running the command that PyCharm uses so that I could "sudo" it (thinking it was a permissions error.  That simple solution, of course, wasn't the issue.

The error is ACTUALLY caused by the fact that my USB drive was FAT32.  For some reason (beyond my knowledge level) you can't create symlinks using FAT32.  The fix is to reformat your drive into something that's a little more modern.

Since I need to use this drive on both my work machine (Win10) and home (Debian), I went with NTFS.  Wango, bango I was able to install the new venv on the USB drive on the first go after I had reformatted the drive.

Luckily, I had recently started using a sync tool called Unison to keep my USB drive synced up with my desktop due to a catastrophic loss of my drive data (during Finals week of my last Python course) that was caused by my wife putting a little percussive force on the door of my desk while trying to move a carpet.  Snapped a few pins off of the drive connection to the board that my shitty, shitty soldering skills couldn't fix.  But, it had the positive effect of getting me to finally start backing my shit up properly, haha.

So, if you too are having a problem setting up a venv on a thumb drive, fix that FATfuck32 drive and you'll be ready to rock.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Converting Picasa XMP Face Tags to Usable Exif Metadata Tags


Is this the future?
2022 already?

I guess I finally broke the delayed post pattern now that I'm finally finding a good use for this thing--psuedomemory for the technology shit I always forget about.  I spend half my life trying to Google shit I Googled five years ago (and again three years ago, and again eighteen months ago...)  Bookmarking pages hasn't really done me any good, because I forget that I bookmarked a site (and also because there are times I find the bookmark, but can't remember why I saved it, haha.)

So today's episode of "Chris' only reason to post an entry on this elderly blog" is brought to you because I have like 15,000+ pics that aren't really organized.  Back when I used Windows, Picasa made things easier because of the face tagging technology.  If you wanted to find a pic of a certain person, you could just click their name and voila, you were good to go.

However, Picasa typically writes those tags to an internal DB and not to the images themselves.  There's a way to get Picasa to do that, but it writes them to a weird XMP field that isn't typically used by any other photo organizer.

I'm using Debian and GNOME as my desktop environment, so I'm using the default image manager that comes with the distribution.  Unfortunately, it does not use XMP tags for organizing or searching, so I was basically stuck trying to find some way of migrating those Picasa XMP face tags (mwg-rs: Regions/ mwg-rs:RegionList[1]/mwg-rs:Name) into something that another application could search.

The solution is actually really easy to use, but the hard part was actually finding it!  Google searching was a little wonky and the results weren't all that clear.  I finally found this post in the Exif forum, but if you didn't phrase your search terms precisely that way, you'd never find it.   Here's my useless search history:

shotwell search xmp
mwg-rs:Name to exif tag
mwg-rs:Name
linux photo program that can read xmp face
how to search xmp tags 

The post I linked to above was exactly what I needed and it actually was super easy to do.  It's literally one line, assuming all of your photos are in a hierarchical directory.

Here's a video walk-through of how to make that happen:


It only took around 20 minutes to run through about 17,000 files in 254 directories.  Not too shabby!

Here are some links to the stuff that powered today's post (all excellent, Open Source projects)

ExifTool by Phil Harvey- "a platform-independent Perl library...for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files."

Shotwell- A digital photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment.

Kazam Screencaster- The screen recording software I used to record the above video.

Monday, July 23, 2018

ComicTagger Error StrpTime


Long time, no see/speak/etc.    You can thank an annoying, seemingly obscure technical problem I ran into for breaking my 42 months of blog silence.  These hiatuses (yatus #bigbrother) seem to be getting longer and longer over the years.

So anyways, I decided to try to organize my electronic comic book collection yesterday and installed a program called ComicTagger, which helps grab and write metadata for comic books.  

I get it installed and ran into my first problem right off the bat.  The application wants you to put in the path to WinRar (or any RAR/UnRAR program) but the little tool you use to navigate through your filesystem doesn't actually navigate anything.  It'll open the box and show you your root folder, but none of the contents.  The workaround for that was to just manually type in the path.  Since I'm running Linux, my path was "/usr/bin/rar" and "usr/bin/unrar"

Problem solved!  Let's get to tagging comics!  I drag and drop a file over to test and wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  The dialog box that popped up is just sitting at 0% for a few minutes before I realize that there's an error in the terminal window and I'm stuck.  Here's what I see:

Traceback (most recent call last):  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/taggerwindow.py", line 540, in dropEvent    self.fileSelectionList.addPathList( self.droppedFiles )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/fileselectionlist.py", line 196, in addPathList    row = self.addPathItem( f )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/fileselectionlist.py", line 271, in addPathItem    if ca.seemsToBeAComicArchive() :  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 618, in seemsToBeAComicArchive    ( self.getNumberOfPages() > 0)  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 775, in getNumberOfPages    self.page_count = len( self.getPageNameList( ) )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 751, in getPageNameList    files = self.archiver.getArchiveFilenameList()  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 395, in getArchiveFilenameList    for item in rarc.infolist():  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/__init__.py", line 127, in infolist    return list(self.infoiter())  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/__init__.py", line 122, in infoiter    for params in RarFileImplementation.infoiter(self):  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/unix.py", line 171, in infoiter    data['datetime'] = time.strptime(fields[2]+" "+fields[3], '%d-%m-%y %H:%M')  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 478, in _strptime_time    return _strptime(data_string, format)[0]  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 332, in _strptime    (data_string, format))ValueError: time data '2006-03-29 18:32' does not match format '%d-%m-%y %H:%M'
The highlighted section is the actual error.  There's nothing about this on the project Github site, the Google site the code was originally housed on, or the application's web forum.  NOTHING.  There is literally one post on an Ubuntu forum where a dude asks about the issue in 2016, but no one ever responded!  And if he ever discovered the fix, he didn't post it in that thread.  DON'T EVER DO THAT.  If you fix your own problem, update the fucking thread!

Anyway, I DID figure out a fix and I decided to post it on my blog, so if anyone else runs into the problem, it's a 30 second fix and not hours of googling like a moron (me!)  I should've just sat down and worked through the problem like I finally did this morning. It took me about 45 minutes and 25ish minutes of that was trying to find and install a text editor that had line numbers on it, haha.  I tried Sublime and it wasn't.  Now I know why the editor war has been ongoing for over 30 years.

In this case, ComicTagger is choking while trying to strip out and reformat the date it finds in my CDisplay RAR Archived Comic Book (CBR) file.  It looks like the (or A) programmer hardcoded the date format as %d-%m-%y %H:%M, which is Day-Month-Year (two digit) Hour:Minute (Military format.)  However, it looks like the file date that was getting pulled from my CBR files were in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM. The strptime Python module was throwing up an error because the date that was getting passed to it wasn't matching. 

Here's the fix:  I went into /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/unix.py and edited line 171 to reflect the actual format that was needed:

data['datetime'] = time.strptime(fields[3]+" "+fields[4], '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')
There you go.  Now I've wasted another 90 minutes writing this up. I hope you appreciate all that I do for you!

See you in 2022, bitches!

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Automatically using the Multipurpose Feeder on a Dell B2360DN Printer

Why is this like sacrificing a goat to an angry and judgmental dark lord?  All I wanted to do was be able to print stupid UPS shipping labels without a lot of hassle.  I want the print from the Multipurpose Feeder if there's something in the slot, but from the tray if not.  Automatically.  But, the default setup on my Dell B2360DN printer makes that impossible.  Sure, I could just load up my Tray 1 with all those free, delicious UPS labels, but then I still have to manually tweak something when I send a regular print job.  
RTFM?  Not anymore.  Dell's documentation is shit.  But it can be done! It’s a multi-step process that I’ve pieced together from a few different forums and a bit of dicking around.
After these changes, I can now just send a print job to the printer and unless I shove something into the Multipurpose Feeder (MP Feeder) it’s going to route out of Tray 1.  If I want to print one of my UPS labels, I just stick it in the MP Feeder and the B2360DN will THAT instead of the paper out of Tray 1.  You know, like pretty much every other printer I’ve owned has done out of the box.  But no judgments, Dell.
  1. Front of B2360DN
    Change the default MP Feeder settings in the Diagnostic Menu:
    1. Power off the printer
    2. Hold the OK and left arrow key
    3. Switch the printer on
    4. Release the keys once the amber light comes on
    5. Scroll through the Diagnostic menu using the right arrow.
    6. Select Printer Setup
    7. Select ENGINE 2 (push the right arrow 5 times to reach this option)
    8. Change ENGINE 2 setting to 8* and press OK
    9. Press the return arrow key to return to the Diagnostic Menu
    10. Press the left arrow to select EXIT DIAGNOSTICS
    11. The printer will reboot
  2. Change the Default Source and Paper Type for the Multipurpose Feeder
    1. Press the Wrench key to reach the Admin Menu
    2. Press OK to reach the Paper Menu
    3. Press OK to select Default Source
    4. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder and press OK
    5. Press the right arrow to reach the Paper Size/Type Menu and press OK
    6. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder Size and press OK
    7. Select Letter and press OK
    8. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder Type and press OK
    9. Select Plain Paper and press OK

Friday, February 8, 2013