Tuesday, September 11, 2012

A Tin Foil Hat For My Canon MX860 Printer

Our Canon MX 860 is probably the first multi function printer we've owned that really multi-functions. When all the laptops are behaving, it not only prints, but effortlessly scans to any machine, or to a thumb drive. The copying and faxing even work well.

My main issue with the printer isn't how it works at all. It's how it just sits there. The printer is a few feet from our bed and has the habit of randomly lighting up the LCD screen.

One minute I'm lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, the next the room is flooded with light as the printer is doing gosh-knows-what. Usually I kvetch. Some nights I might drag my butt out of bed to turn it off.

Then it hit me, this was an easy fix: all I needed was some scotch tape and a bit of tin foil and the printer is now permanently dark. You've just got to love tin foil, which is opaque so it doesn't allow light leakage.

Here's the setup:

Hardly glamorous, but it gets the job done.

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