Season's Greetings

08:25 Friday, 8 December 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 52.57°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 635

It's the time of the year when we start getting cards from various friends and family. It's the only time we get actual mail from real people. I shouldn't say that. Mitzi gets thank you notes from people, because she does nice things.

Anyway, I've been trying to keep up with printing and mailing a photo greeting card to my mom every day (except Sunday) for quite some time now. I don't recall exactly when I started, but it's been several months anyway. I just ordered 300 60lb 10x7 glossy scored photo cards from Red River Paper, because I'd gone through the 60lb and 80lb boxes I already had on hand. (80lb is excessive. 60 is about the sweet spot.)

I got the idea that maybe I'd print some holiday cards and mail them to people I know. I have a box of "pano" cards I use, but I don't use them often. One of my neighbors has a holiday setup in front of his house with flamingos and a gator, typical Florida stuff. I figured I'd shoot that and use it for the card.

Wherein I've returned to another circle of hell.

Printing.

I'd already managed to create a document in Apple Pages that would print a pano card, and I figured I'd just use that.

Well, one thing led to another and I don't know where I went astray, but eventually I ended up with the dreaded, "The media type and paper size are not set correctly. Change the media type or paper size setting, and print again."

To make a long story short, I don't know exactly what resolved the problem because I tried a lot of things. But I think one of the key things was to start with a "page layout" blank document in Pages. Apparently, I was using "word processing." I also seem to have two drivers for the Canon 100 Pro printer, and one works for some cards and the other works for other cards. Don't ask me why.

Anyway, I created the card and did my first test print. Near the end of printing, I heard this mechanical sound I'd never heard before. When the card comes out, about the last ¾ of an inch of the image is slightly out of register with the remainder of the image. If you didn't know to look for it, you might not spot it. Or so Mitzi says.

I ran all the printer tests, alignments and so on, and all seems well. Tried again. Same thing.

Oy.

This printer is over seven years old, but it's worked reliably for the last several months when I've been printing with it nearly every day.

I just ran a couple of letter-sized prints through it, using some of the sample pages I got from Red River years ago. (Polar Gloss Metallic 255 68lb ULTRAPRO GLOSS 2.0), and I got a communications error on the borderless print ("Fill" in Photos), and the very last part of the image is kind of a gradient fade. The one with a small margin all around printed perfectly.

As an aside, I printed an image of the 1917 Miller Golden Submarine (a car), and that sure prints really nice on this paper. I'm kind of dazzled, actually.

Anyway, I think I may have a driver problem printing borderless. There were no weird mechanical noises on these larger prints. I was worried there was a worn tooth on a belt or gear.

I wasn't too thrilled with the photo I was using anyway. I'll have to see if I can't come up with something I like better, and maybe I'll just go with the 5x7 format.

On the other hand, I haven't sent holiday cards in decades, so why start now? Make myself crazy like this. Yeesh.