11 ms·

Not surprised. There's something in the water in the Windows print spooler. I have a Brother HL-L2380DW printer that worked "just fine," but then at some point

Not surprised. There's something in the water in the Windows print spooler. I have a Brother HL-L2380DW printer that worked "just fine," but then at some point after a Windows update, everything started printing inverted. Like literally the printer would paint the page black, except for white where the text was. I thought it was a firmware issue on the printer, but it only happened when printing in Windows. Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors? Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem. Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround. [0]: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/~/inverted-text-or-white-text-on-a-black-background-when-printing---windows-10 https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/...

knbt 6y ago
I recall a windows update caused all the computers in the office using some default network print driver to bluescreen on printing and if outlook was open the profile would get corrupted. People go to print an email and suddenly everything was fucked. I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
cillian64 6y ago
Thanks so much for mentioning this! I had the same problem connecting my work laptop to the same printer and eventually just gave up after an hour of looking for an "invert colours" button.
- akersten 6y ago
  Happy to have helped. It was actually quite an ordeal when I first ran into this. I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that. Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I have Bose wireless headphones. They used to operate as expected: leave bluetooth on at all times on the laptop. When turning the headphones off, they disconnect. When turning the headphones on, they reconnect. Eventually there was a Windows update, and this stopped working. Now, if I turn the headphones off, only the microphone will reconnect when I turn them back on. To get sound to play through the headphones, I have to disable and then reenable bluetooth in Windows. Every time.
- akersten 6y ago
  You know what's funny is that Microsoft does a great job with what I call "community QA" on some of their other properties, like Minecraft. The Minecraft bug tracker[0] is readily accessible and the community around it tracks down most bugs before they hit retail via their "snapshot" release cycle. The Windows side, not so much. The words "Windows Insider" come to mind, but honestly, I have no idea how that works. It doesn't feel like there's a community around it, or if there is, it must be small. If I run into a bug post-update on Windows, I certainly don't feel empowered to pop open a Jira like I do for Minecraft. I get that it's a different scale and all - but it seems like Microsoft should really put some effort into crowdsourcing their bug reporting if they're not going to invest thoroughly in QA/regression testing for their flagship product. [0]: https://bugs.mojang.com/projects/MC/issues https://bugs.mojang.com/projects/MC/issues
- seniorgarcia 6y ago
  Have you checked if this was possibly because of https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102 https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102? I mean, I get why you would blame MS for breaking this but maybe the onus is also on Bose and their ridiculously bad driver support.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    I haven't checked. How would I do that? The headphones are able to connect once after disabling and reenabling bluetooth in Windows. If the problem were that the headphones are configured to use a fixed, predictable long-term key, it isn't obvious to me why Windows would accept that key sometimes, but not all the time. (Note that I don't need to have Windows forget the device and re-pair from scratch.) Is there some aspect of initial bluetooth negotiation that would explain this?
seniorgarcia 6y ago
Can someone who knows chime in on who is responsible for providing Windows with WSD drivers? Would be interesting to figure out who actually messed up here, I somehow doubt MS just randomly picks a driver to install so the fix seems really weird.

knbt 6y ago

I recall a windows update caused all the computers in the office using some default network print driver to bluescreen on printing and if outlook was open the profile would get corrupted. People go to print an email and suddenly everything was fucked. I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?

cillian64 6y ago

Thanks so much for mentioning this! I had the same problem connecting my work laptop to the same printer and eventually just gave up after an hour of looking for an "invert colours" button.

akersten 6y ago
Happy to have helped. It was actually quite an ordeal when I first ran into this. I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that. Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I have Bose wireless headphones. They used to operate as expected: leave bluetooth on at all times on the laptop. When turning the headphones off, they disconnect. When turning the headphones on, they reconnect. Eventually there was a Windows update, and this stopped working. Now, if I turn the headphones off, only the microphone will reconnect when I turn them back on. To get sound to play through the headphones, I have to disable and then reenable bluetooth in Windows. Every time.

akersten 6y ago
You know what's funny is that Microsoft does a great job with what I call "community QA" on some of their other properties, like Minecraft. The Minecraft bug tracker[0] is readily accessible and the community around it tracks down most bugs before they hit retail via their "snapshot" release cycle. The Windows side, not so much. The words "Windows Insider" come to mind, but honestly, I have no idea how that works. It doesn't feel like there's a community around it, or if there is, it must be small. If I run into a bug post-update on Windows, I certainly don't feel empowered to pop open a Jira like I do for Minecraft. I get that it's a different scale and all - but it seems like Microsoft should really put some effort into crowdsourcing their bug reporting if they're not going to invest thoroughly in QA/regression testing for their flagship product. [0]: https://bugs.mojang.com/projects/MC/issues https://bugs.mojang.com/projects/MC/issues
seniorgarcia 6y ago
Have you checked if this was possibly because of https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102 https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102? I mean, I get why you would blame MS for breaking this but maybe the onus is also on Bose and their ridiculously bad driver support.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  I haven't checked. How would I do that? The headphones are able to connect once after disabling and reenabling bluetooth in Windows. If the problem were that the headphones are configured to use a fixed, predictable long-term key, it isn't obvious to me why Windows would accept that key sometimes, but not all the time. (Note that I don't need to have Windows forget the device and re-pair from scratch.) Is there some aspect of initial bluetooth negotiation that would explain this?

seniorgarcia 6y ago

Can someone who knows chime in on who is responsible for providing Windows with WSD drivers? Would be interesting to figure out who actually messed up here, I somehow doubt MS just randomly picks a driver to install so the fix seems really weird.