The One with the Thoughts of Frans

KDE ships with Klipper by default, while Gnome has no built-in alternative. Though I prefer a little history, the absence of a clipboard manager isn’t the worst thing in the world. However, xclipboard forgets what you copied if you close the application from which you were copying, which is a serious annoyance and a usability issue for new as well as seasoned Ubuntu users.

Luckily the situation is easy to rectify. sudo apt-get install glipper, right-click on a panel, click “Add to Panel,” select the entry named “Clipboard manager” and click “Add.”

If you want to paste something other than the currently active copied text you can either select it from the Glipper icon or, if you prefer a more keyboard-based approach (like me), you can press Ctrl + Alt + C to pop-up a list of available items. Of course you could change that keyboard binding to anything you like.

The default settings are fairly sane, so unless you want to keep more than the last 20 copied items in memory you can leave it be.

“Quelle surprise,” you might exclaim sarcastically, and you’d be right. However, as it turns out the waste is worse than you might expect. A few head cleanings and you’ve wasted more than twice as much ink than what comes in a single cartridge.

In round numbers, the cylinder is 40 mm ID and the cap is 20 mm tall. Volume of a cylinder is πr²h, so you’re looking at 25×10³ mm³ of waste ink.

Seeing as how 1 mm³ = 0.001 ml, the tank currently holds about 25 ml of ink!

The printer has six cartridges. Assuming head cleanings drain an equal amount from each cartridge, that’s 4 ml apiece. Given that the large OEM ink cartridges come with 11 ml of ink, you can do the math: a third of a cartridge of each color just for head cleanings so far.

Assuming that the cartridges are at or around 11mL in my older Epson Stylus Photo R220 model as well, the amount of waste is likely very similar for my printer. I can’t find any indication of measurements, whether cubic or otherwise, on my cartridges: presumably because you’d realize just how little there is in those cartridges if it were indicated properly.

Combined with idiotic default settings that make you waste ink and paper, and ludicrous region restrictions that may make you waste ink, owning printers sure amounts to an awful lot of fun.