Hi! I'm new to both Krita, and drawing/coloring as a whole.
I use a stylus pen which has an eraser button, but if I at any point use any tool other than the brush tool (ie. fill tool) it will change the eraser button on my pen to switch to whatever tool it was that I used until I restart the app.
This is really annoying when I just want to use this button to erase I would never want to have anything else on it
Any idea how to fix this or a workaround?

Okay, just adding this since i've discovered this after writing this up, but I SOMEHOW may have potentially fixed the issue??? The thing is; I dont know how. Disassembling the pen MUST'VE done something? The battery wires were crossed on one-another when taking apart the pen so the black wire was being squashed by the looks of it. so I undid that then closed it back up since I couldn't find the tuner thingy that was mentioned in other videos
After testing the pen for 1-2 minutes, it seems to work fine, i'll edit this out if this is just a short lived fix...
If you want a TL;DR to my issue, then i'm having the same issue as the guy in this thread but with my XP pen system instead of a WACOM one. for the long story + fixes i've tried refer to below.
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Good day to you all, i've got quite an interesting issue regarding my styluses for the XP Pen 22E Pro Display and I haven't found a fix for it, yet alone anyone even talking about this device in particular, kinda feels like I chose the bad egg of their line of products...
Anyway, my issue is quite simple in concept; I've been using the device for 1-2 years now with little issues (most which just required a driver update) until a few months ago where i've started to notice my pen randomly cutting out whilst drawing and making strokes. I do not know why this is the case but it's been bugging me since it first popped up. so I decided to do a tiny amount of tweaking...
Firstly, I assumed it was just the pen running low on battery, let it charge for the night and came back to the issue persisting.
Ok, not the battery then. Next, I tried to update my driver, this didn't change anything.
...Not the driver, I removed all the wiring and re-plugged them to no avail.
Not the display screen. After that I kinda just sucked it up and endured it until now where it has been REALLY bugging me now.
I tried updating the driver again, replacing the charger incause it was faulty, restarting my art softwares and restarting my PC all which did not work. So I finally turned to the internet.
First I found a thread which announced the same Issue I have but with a WACOM tablet, someone linked this video and I followed through assuming it might've just been my USB wire acting up, this was not the case and this resolved nothing, thanks nonetheless.
Here I found a few videos regarding PA1-2 pens which had little "tuners" in them which can accidentally turn by itself when dropped, and as someone who has dropped my pen a few times, I assumed this was it, so I carefully looked through some of these videos and whilst none of the pens were the one I was using, they looked similar enough for me to assume that this would be a straightforward fix, just find the tuner in my pen and twist it a bit until its correct again.
I spent the next few minutes disassembling my pen, I wanted to find videos of my specific stylus being disassembled but could not locate a single one on the internet anywhere. so, I kinda had to go into it blind.
Luckily, it wasn't too disimilar from the other pens, I took it apart without damaging anything, being really careful to not lose that tiny screw on the back and eventually got the circit out.
...Not only was there no tuner, there was nothing out of place...? The wiring seemed fine, nothing was loose or out of place, all the components were still on the circuit, if anything fell off then it'd be within the pen but it was not, so in confusion, I closed back up the pen and reassmebled it back to how it was before I took it apart and now I turn to you guys for help.
I've already ordered a new pen and its on the way but i'd still like to know if its possible to atleast know why my stuff is acting the way it is, nothing is saying that the new pen will resolve this issue either since I don't know if that's even the solution.

For almost two years I have been over the moon with my old stock m91 that had an old stock n75 type 2 attached. I loved it significantly more than any cartridge combo I’ve used before, it kind of restarted my fading vinyl hobby.
A few months ago I upgraded the stylus to a pfan aftermarket black diamond n75. There was a significant bump in clarity and separation. I was happy until I heard the drop in low frequency response, and general musicality/tone
Since then I have read 3 other people say they hear low end response drop in either a jico or pfan aftermarket Shure stylus. I’m wondering if this is maybe just how aftermarket Shure stylus are?
I’m not crazy about swapping out my stylus too often. And yet here I am going back and forth between my old stock n75 and my pfan n75 like every couple of days.
Has anyone here been in a similar situation or is very familiar with how to handle vintage Shure carts and stylus?
And this point I will buy whatever I need to buy to get the fun of my old stock n75, while keeping the detail of my pfan n75. What stylus would would that be? Should I instead buy a m75 cart and put this pfan n75 on that cartridge to get the both of both worlds? There has to be way right?
Thanks in advance. I appreciated all the help I got a few days ago with my question about the telefunken tl-1000, this is by far the most positive vibes and fun audio sub and look forward to any two cents from you guys at all.

I want to definitely say that, for the most part, switching from a Moto G Power 2020 4G-only phone to a Moto G Stylus 5G 2023 on Warp 5G went very well. However, I have a few strange issues I am trying to figure out if they exist because I went to a 5G device on Warp or if they are device-specific issues, or something else. I apologize in advance about the length of the post but want to be as detailed as possible. I certainly won't blame people for not reading. However two of my issues are issues I think the community can help with. Perhaps one of the mods can reach out where applicable?
1 - I burned up my 2 GB pool running speed tests. I knew what I was doing and expected it mainly because I was noticing some strange inconsistencies between the 5G indicator and Speedtest.net and LTE Discovery reporting I was only connected to LTE. When the data connection indicator up top reported 5G, the other two apps reported LTE CA (mainly b2/66). I drove around town and found an area I frequent that the indicator said 4GLTE, which was confirmed by LTE Discovery, but upon running a speedtest it switched to 5G (I don't think it said UW but I can't remember... I do not have mmwave capability but maybe was getting some C-band) and Speedtest.net reported it was a 5G connection and LTE Discovery showed both LTE (not CA - b66 only) and a 5G NR NSA (does not show band but does show a neighbor cell of SA n2 as well as b48) connection. Is this somehow related to what I have been reading about Verizon shutting down or retooling DSS and that essentially the 5G indicator at the top is unreliable? Could it be saying 5G when solely connected to LTE CA. I must say that data speeds increased GREATLY by switching to the 5G device. I burned up that 2 GB in just a few tests--so there seems to be no issue at all with the deprioritization I was getting on the G Power 2020. This - to be honest - is more of a nerdy concern, curious about the inconsistencies. Real world the speeds have been incredible despite what the indicator says. And at first I thought I was not provisioned for 5G NR but I think I debunked that this afternoon.
2 - Is it true that shareable data plans cannot use SMS to top up? I tried this on purpose as I have never topped up my plan before and wanted to see how it worked. I purposely burned up all of my data. Voice calls and texts continued to work perfectly but of course apps and web do not work (the 5G indicator is actually grayed out). A chat support rep told me, however, I am ineligible to use SMS to top-up and that I must connect to wifi or use another device to do so. I am unclear why. I don't pretend to know the system well but the rep provided a theory that it was too complicated to do because it's a pool. Not sure why you can't just top up the pool providing all devices the ability to continue. And to be clear, I am not doing auto top-up and I actually only have one device in the pool. Can anyone explain why this can't be done? Or is there anyone on a shareable plan been able to accomplish a top-up via SMS? If it's true shareable plans cannot use SMS and there are no great explanations why I'd sure like to request this to be implemented in the future. I did receive the 90% used warning e-mail but it came late and I also predict the possibility I might blow past the 90% too quickly and not have the opportunity to jump on the app to top-up. Is the only other option to call customer support to have them process the top-up? If so, is there an additional fee for that, over the $2?
3 - Voicemail indicator seems to be having a problem. I had no issues with the G Power 2020. My voicemail is currently set up with a password from earlier. I left myself a voicemail a few nights ago as a test. No indicator nor notification. I left it alone and did not troubleshoot further. I was able to get call screening to work... realtime translation which was pretty cool. At the time I was on Wi-Fi calling. The next day I left the house and noticed shortly after leaving my Wi-Fi the voicemail indicator appeared (and to be clear I receive a strong signal in-house). No visual voicemail though despite having that option turned on in the Phone settings (did I read somewhere here that visual voicemail does not work on Warp 5G?). Tonight I checked with chat support. They reset some voicemail settings and told me to restart my phone. I did. I tried on wi-fi, same issue. I disconnected from wi-fi, still no indicator. I called *86 and verified the voicemail was there waiting along with the previous one from the other night that does show in the list. Tried a couple more times, once off wi-fi and once on... nothing. The rep mentioned I need data for visual voicemail, even with wifi, to work so that might help explain part of the issue, as I am currently out of data in the pool. However they said basic voicemail notifications should work without data and certainly while connected to wi-fi, but none of that is working. Anyone else have issues with that?
I mentioned I contacted chat support and while the rep was very friendly, even offering to add a top-up to the data in order to assist with troubleshooting, at some point they stopped responding and then I received a survey invitation. I was unable to further reach anyone (maybe if I would have re-opened the browser and re-logged in I could have but at that point I gave up and came here). While connected, however, we tried a few basic troubleshooting steps such as making sure I was on the latest system version and leaving voicemails from other phone numbers, all were unsuccessful.
Anyone have any insight on these issues?
Sidenote - if anyone is considering the Moto G Stylus 5G 2023 I personally think it's a great value at $250 on both US Mobile's site and Amazon. It runs really well, the issues above notwithstanding. It's no late gen iPhone but it's also not $1000+. And - I do also have an iPhone because, nerd. Just my two cents on that. If anyone thinking about buying one has any questions I'd be happy to try to help.

Context: The Bell of Saint Gerstahl was a bell made from the blood of a Saint and guarded by the Sisters of Battle. The bell was said to have divine properties, and it was prophesied that the bell would ring when Cadia was in trouble. During the 12th Black Crusade, Trazyn stole the bell to save it from the clutches of the Black Legion after its Soritas guard was massacred by the traitors, and it remained in Trazyn's collection for the next few centuries
When the Bell began to ring in Trazyn's possession, a small force of Traitor Guardsmen/cultists and a limited amount of Black Legionnaires had already been assaulting Cadia for the past few months. The Imperials genuinely believed that this was the full force of the 13th Black Crusade. When this screening force was repelled, the Imperials believed that they had successfully defeated the Black Crusade and saved Cadia, but when the bell rang for the 13th time, the true might of the Black Legion emerged from the Warp. There's a lot of fluff in this excerpt, so I decided to skip over it so that this post doesn't become longer than it already is

Blood and iron. Iron and blood. One lay on the other, and within the other. The slick shine of the iron-rich blood – still warm – on the cold surface of the bell. Two related elements, joined in accidental symbolism. If records were to be believed, the bell had been forged from blood. It was said that when Saint Gerstahl – the sacred soldier, favoured patron of the Cadian trooper – fell defending the Gate in the centuries after the Great Heresy, acolytes collected his vitae in a crystal reliquary. There it stayed for centuries, a venerated and lucrative relic on the shrine world christened with his name. Until, one night, Blessed Gerstahl appeared to the cardinal with a message: he must extract the iron from the tarry, coagulated remnants and forge it into a bell.
A bell that would toll when Cadia was in mortal danger.
That was when the Black Legion descended upon it, in the opening raids of the Twelfth Black Crusade.
The vanguard had sworn to die rather than surrender their relic. And they fulfilled that oath. Their bodies now lay beneath the cold iron of the bell, some resting in its shadow. Chest cavities blown open, limbs severed from the impact of traitor bolt-shells, their own vitae splashed onto the blood-forged iron. It ran in frozen rivulets down the engraved surface, turning the scrollwork and decorative psalms into channels of gore. They had saved it, in a sense. Their stoic defence had given Trazyn time to lock the bell and its entourage in stasis, then spirit it to the archival vaults of Solemnace. Now it hung, unmoving and fastened in time, among the relics of Cadia past. Gazed upon by the unseeing eyes of general officers snatched from the battlefield, zigzag trench-lines full of Shock Troops and a rank of Chimera variants bisected to show internal detail. Overhead, a squad of Night Lords Raptors arced through the vaults above a lit display of human eyes.
All of them, artefacts of the Cadian Gate. The ephemera of Abaddon the Despoiler’s twelve Black Crusades. Darkened exhibits stretched across twenty-five square miles, a private gallery of humans, exquisitely arranged to please the historical and aesthetic tastes of the alien curator who’d imprisoned them. Nothing in the gallery apart from maintenance scarabs had moved in over a millennium. Which is why the soft pat-pat-pat of fluid echoed as far as it did. It fell from the iron surface of the bell like the first drops of icicles melting on the eaves of a hab. Drip. Drip-drip. Jewelled drops met the upturned forehead of a slain Battle Sister and stained her pale skin with splashes of crimson. Pat. Pat-pat. More drops. Coalescing on her brow, trickling into her open eyes. Blood moved on the bell’s skin, collecting in beads like rain on a window and falling in defiance of the stasis field
And the bell, without propulsion or force, began to swing. A hand’s breadth at first. A sway. Its clapper moving in a soft pendulum arc too weak to do more than scrape the sides. Then, the arc widened, the violent motion of the bell flinging droplets of blood to either side, spattering the faces of stasis-locked Shock Troopers. Sizzling on the protective fields of lasgun displays. Swaying wider until the bell went fully perpendicular and the clapper inside dropped, its hammer striking the iron of the bell.
Clang. One.
The blackstone floor vibrated. A rank of medals swayed, its stasis field shorting out. An organic clatter filled the chamber, the sound of ten thousand jaws – held shut by hard-light holograms – shaken so hard that the teeth rattled. Overhead, the flight of Night Lords Raptors tumbled from the vaults and into a trench display, snapping bonesand crushing lasgun barrels. Neither Traitor Space Marines nor Guardsmen reacted.
Clang. Two.
Trazyn, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries and He-Who-Is-Called-Infinite, screamed in rage. ‘Sannet! What is happening?’ ‘Unclear,’ answered his chief cryptek, his multijointed fingers dancing across phos-glyph panels. ‘Unknown resonance. Macro-seismic. Cracking the vaults, releasing coolant. We’ve lost the Ooliac sand sculptures.’ ‘Call the restoration scarabs.’ ‘Not responding,’ Sannet answered, data-chains flashing across his ocular. ‘Our nodal program misinterpreted the vibration as a re-interment signal. The legion has entered radical shutdown. I cannot rouse them.’ Trazyn cursed the very wheel of the cosmos. The interval between shocks had been only seconds apart, and while mental speech between he and Sannet was near instant, they were running out of time before the next tectonic shudder would hit
‘It’s not tectonic, lord,’ said Sannet. ‘It’s coming from the gallery.’
‘Where?’
‘The Black Crusades wing.’
‘That’s only two levels do–’
Clang. Three.
The shockwave shook Trazyn apart, his joint servos spasming and dislocating with the intensity of it. He evacuated the dying body and rushed his spirit-algorithm into the network of data-channels in the walls. Found a waiting lychguard he could use as a surrogate. Melted and reshaped the borrowed body into his accustomed form as he ran towards the gates of the Cadian gallery. Waved a hand at the enormous gates in a gesture of opening.
Clang. Four
The doors ahead, twice the size of a monolith, blew off their hinges andtoppled down at him. He felt them crumple the necrodermis of his cranium like parchment and burst his central reactor before he transferred to another body, sheltered in the lee of a Baneblade.
He sprinted. Waving hands at display plinths, throwing code-signals from his palm emitters. Trying to restart shielding and repulsors, to protect his delicate artefacts.
‘No, no, no, no, no, no–’
Trazyn saw the bell. Trazyn saw the blood. He slowed his chronosense to take in the swinging relic and its sheets of ruby spray. It was far more human vitae than had been splashed on its surface. Almost as if the relic itself were bleeding from the pockmarks and scratches where bolt-shells had marked it.
‘Sannet,’ Trazyn said, casting his visual senses into the data-stream of Solemnace so his cryptek could run analysis. ‘The stasis field has failed. Hard restart.’
‘The field is active,’ Sannet responded. ‘Movement should be impossible.’
‘Not impossible, warpcraft.’ Trazyn watched in fascinated horror as the bell completed its arc, the blood-forged metal swinging high as the hammer inside dropped like the great mace of a warmaster.
Clang. Five...
Clang. Six.
‘It started an hour ago, canoness,’ said Sister Navarette...
'It’s ringing?’ Genevieve asked. ‘Are you certain?’
'Without being touched...'
‘A bit late for a warning, isn’t it? We’ve been fighting the Despoiler’s Thirteenth Crusade for nigh three months.’
‘It rings in celebration,’ said Arch-Deacon Mendazus.
‘Celebration of what?’ she asked.
He looked at her, scorn on his features. ‘Victory, of course.’
Clang. Seven...
Clang. Eight...
Clang. Nine...
'What’s wrong?’ asked Ravura.
‘We’ve stopped,’ said Hellsker. ‘The engine’s cut.’ She banged on the communication hatch until the driver slid it open. Told her what was coming over the vox. Hellsker bit her lips. Took a moment to compose her face before turning to deliver the news. Keep it short, she told herself. Be stoic. They were looking at her, expectant, when she turned. Smiles still gleaming under their helmets.
'Message from the front. Enemy is in full retreat. Pulling back to landing fields. The Thirteenth Black Crusade is over. We are victorious'...
Clang. Ten...
Clang. Eleven...
Clang. Twelve
Corks popped, bouncing off the ceiling and landing on the long table.A group of artillery staff officers were trying to hit the chandelier. They cheered as one missile lodged in the hanging strands of crystal, and the lieutenant who’d fired it celebrated by pulling directly off the bottle. To Colour Sergeant Jarran Kell, it sounded like the hollow pop of mortar tubes.
As the cheer rose, he disappeared through the blast-proof doors before it became quiet enough for more demands. ‘Those idiots are still at it, I see,’ said Ursarkar Creed. The commander of the Cadian Eighth, saviour of Tyrok Fields, and Lord Castellan of Cadia bent over a desk collaged with documents and maps. Empty sacra tumblers served as paperweights, and an ashtray fashioned from an Earthshaker shell smouldered with half a dozen cigar-butts. The room – so pristine when Creed had moved into it – reeked of tobacco.
As the cheer rose, he disappeared through the blast-proof doors before it became quiet enough for more demands. ‘Those idiots are still at it, I see,’ said Ursarkar Creed. The commander of the Cadian Eighth, saviour of Tyrok Fields, and Lord Castellan of Cadia bent over a desk collaged with documents and maps. Empty sacra tumblers served as paperweights, and an ashtray fashioned from an Earthshaker shell smouldered with half a dozen cigar-butts. The room – so pristine when Creed had moved into it – reeked of tobacco.
‘The Archenemy is in retreat, pulling off-world,’ Kell answered. ‘You told them to enjoy themselves.’
‘I said to enjoy it while it lasts, there’s a difference.’ Creed turned red-rimmed eyes back to the charts. ‘I know Shock Troopers can’t do anything in moderation, but I didn’t mean for them to undermine readiness. This isn’t over.’...
Let’s hope that I’m being paranoid.’ Creed leaned backwards with his hands on the small of his back.
‘It’s true what the war council says, you know. The forces that hit us were commensurate with previous Black Crusades. Larger, even.’
‘Not you too, Jarran.’ Creed shook his head.
‘It is possible he was killed in the Eye, fighting some other warlord.’ He saw Creed’s look and added: ‘It’s happened before.’
‘You can’t believe that.’
‘We picked up signals saying so. Good quality intercepts. Hard decryptions, definitely look authentic.’
‘Tell me this, if this was the main Archenemy attack, where are the Terminators? Where’re the waves of Black Legion, the warp engines? We’ve had cultists and mutants, Traitor Astartes in tactical roles, but you’re telling me the Archenemy leadership spent centuries building this force then never landed here in person?’
‘No one can explain that to me. Not any of them. Not the Navy, not the Aeronautica, not Militarum intelligence or the Scholastica Psykana or the demigods of the Adeptus Astartes. None of them can tell me the one Throne-damned thing I want to know.’
He threw his cigar-butt on the desk in frustration, smearing a debris field of ash across a chart of the Rossvar Mountains. Then he slammed both fists onto the desktop and shouted the last three words: 'Where is Abaddon?’
Clang. Thirteen.
The ship emerged from the immaterium with a noise like a child being torn from the womb. A moment of blood, a primal experience of a creature first feeling the cold air and pull of gravity – sucking atmosphere into its lungs before screaming it out in pain and confusion. Except in this case it was not the ship that screamed, it was the material world around it. The very atoms rent apart, bleeding indescribable colours.
Abaddon. The Warmaster of Chaos, right hand of Horus, Master of the Black Legion and the being fated to kill the False Emperor. The man who had pulled Morkath out of the dark as a child, and made her what she was – though what that was, exactly, remained a subject of whispers.
The Warmaster sat in an ebony throne too large for his enormous frame. What manner of creature required such a seat – one large enough to dwarf the Warmaster, even in his battle plate – was, like so much aboard the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity, beyond Morkath’s understanding.
Yet the space around the Warmaster was not empty. Daemon-things flitted there, darting and howling. Folding in upon themselves in geometric shapes or bursting into flames that devoured their essence as some stray emotion set them ablaze.
‘The stars are different this time,’ he said.
‘Different, my lord?’ Morkath asked, opening her eyes to see the Warmaster without his shroud of parasitic spirits.
‘I remember.’ Abaddon’s head, twice as large as that of a mortal, did not regard her as he spoke, yet even so, the low rumble of his voice rattled through her. ‘I recall how the stars looked when we exited the Eye last time.'
'I remember where every star was fixed, then. It was the same. The same constellations, unchanging from the first time we exited the Eye to the last. Twelve times, the same starscape.’
‘But now they have changed?’
‘New stars,’ growled Abaddon. ‘Different stars. Moving… a fleet.’

At this point, Abaddon's crew detect multiple Imperial warships

‘A combined fleet,’ said Abaddon. ‘Consolidated due to casualties.’
‘Our opening moves must have damaged their fleet assets even more heavily than we estimated,’ Morkath said.
‘With the remnants split chasing the Vengeful Spirit away from Cadia,’ added Siron. He seemed ready to speak again, but the Warmaster cut him off.
‘Meaning, the Gate is open.’ Abaddon said
‘To Cadia!’ roared a beastman, raising its clenched fists. Across the command deck, crew howled, crowed, bellowed, gurgled, ululated. A thousand mutant throats screaming the elation that came with an achievement millennia in the making. Feet and hooves stamped the decking. ‘To Cadia! To Cadia!’

The next few pages are dedicated to describing the massive horde of ships that had emerged from the Eye of Terror from the Imperial perspective. It's easily the largest Chaos fleet the Galaxy had ever seen since the Siege of Terra, and is the main force that Abaddon planned to use to take Cadia

‘Holy Throne,’ whispered Admiral Quarren. ‘How many are there?’
The command deck of the Emperor-class battleship Might of the Faithful had observation windows eight hundred feet wide – but the roiling wash of warp translation took up nearly the entire expanse. By far the largest warp emergence Quarren had ever seen.
But it wasn’t the prismatic un-colours of the immaterium that chilled him – it was the splinters of black amidst the unnatural hues. Ships. So many ships. More than he’d battled so far in the entire Black Crusade – a campaign his force had barely survived...
Quarren saw a stylus rattling on the arm of his command throne, and realised he was shaking, with the ship rattling in sympathy...
This was like no fleet he’d ever faced. No fleet anyone living had faced. The greatest Archenemy armada since the Great Heresy

I think this is one of my favorite openers for a 40k book that I've read. The way that the Imperial forces genuinely believed that they had won, only to be surprised when a fuck-off massive armada of Chaos warships emerged from the Eye is really cool imo.

“Deadly Attractor” (TOC)
by P. Orin Zack
[2003]
 
Chapter Three
 
… Saturday …
Frank arrived at the Kübler-Ross Hospice staff lounge before Healer Gutiérez the next morning, so he made himself a drink and got back to his book. A few pages later, he was interrupted by a quiet voice in his left ear.
“Let me know when you reach a convenient break point.”
He craned around for a look. Healer Gutiérez had an oddly androgynous appearance, even more so than in the still he’d seen. “Where do you want to do this?
She shrugged. “We can start here, then see where we end up.”
He motioned for her to take the seat opposite. “How shall we start?”
“Tell me what you’ve been doing so far, and how it’s been working for you.”
Frank sat back. “Well,” he said, “after the first few attacks, it was obvious that I couldn’t be a very effective Healer if I had to keep stopping in the midst of a session. I talked it over with Jerry, and we decided to see what we could learn about it.”
She raised a finger. “How is he, by the way?”
“Improving.” He nodded. “I dropped over to East-Side MedCenter last night for a visit. He’s stable. They’re reinforcing his immune system to counteract the agents used to clear out the poisons that got in through the wound. The nerves in his leg are responding to the knitting factor, and they loaded him up with nanobots to repair the bones that were shattered.”
“Go on.”
Frank rubbed his neck briefly. “Well, it seemed that there were similarities in the attacks I’d had until then, so we chose to focus on that to start. It had a tempo to it. Although the specific locations of the pain were different, it did tend to express itself in a repeatable way. I’d have an arpeggio of pain dancing in my right leg, for example. Then it would pause for an instant and do something similar in my left. The pattern was the same during each attack. It followed a complex sequence, then repeated at a higher intensity and greater speed.”
She waited as he paused to take a drink.
“Past a certain point, of course, I couldn’t resolve the components of the pattern any longer, and it just felt like a cloak of pulsating agony.”
“Okay,” she said, “so what did you do then?”
“Jerry shadowed me for a week. Some of my patients weren’t too happy with that. Fortunately, he had an opportunity to watch my energy field during an attack before we had to stop. As we’d suspected, my energy field was distorting as well. Since there’s a reciprocal balance of causality between physical and energy systems, we tried an experiment. We’d established the timing of the pattern by then, so we spent some time developing an energy pattern that would precisely offset the thing. The theory was that if we could cancel out the energy effects of the thing, it wouldn’t be able to reinforce itself, and would therefore fade out instead of getting stronger.”
“An interesting approach,” she said after a while. “How did it work?”
He shrugged. “At first, it seemed to do the trick. I went for a few months like that, but then the pattern began to mutate, and our counter pattern didn’t synch to it any longer.”
Healer Gutiérez cocked her head for a moment. “Do you have any idea why it did that?”
“Not really. In any case, we attempted to adjust the pattern, but all we succeeded in doing was to create a catalog of patterns, and I had to quickly pick the right one to use before it was too late. That brings us up to the incident at the courthouse.”
She sat silently for several minutes, her eyes darting about in physical reflection of the leaps among associated memories and ideas as she thought. Frank was reluctant to interrupt. Finally, she blinked a few times and looked down at her drink.
Frank spread his fingers on the table. “You said you had an idea?”
“Yes. It’s something that I’ve used for another purpose, but I believe that it would be effective in this situation as well.” She moistened her lips. “You may not want to risk it, though.”
He shook his head in confusion. “Why not? What is it?”
“Call it an active thought-form. Take the solution that you’d crafted, and give it a rudimentary intelligence. Make it want to balance out the chaos of an attack, and set it loose.”
Frank just stared at her.
She visibly drooped. “What?”
“You… you want to create an Elemental?”
She shrugged. “There are lots of names for them. What you call it really depends on your culture. Most of the names come with a big helping of emotional and religious baggage, though. They’re neither good nor evil in and of themselves, of course. I’m just suggesting that there’s a healthy use for one, that’s all.”
“And you’ve done this before?”
“Sure. Look, if this is going to be a problem for you, we don’t have to—”
Frank waved his hands in the air. “No, no. It’s not a problem. Just very surprising, that’s all. I’m curious, though. Have you had any trouble with these things after you created them? From what I know of them, they have a tendency to take on a life of their own after a while.”
“So we’ll keep an eye on it. We can always destroy it if—”
“Destroy it?” he countered.
“Sure,” she said flatly. “Why not?”
“Because once you create life, you must honor it. Like a baby. If your son misbehaved, would you kill him? Surely there’s another way.”
“Such as?” she said.
“Such as finding a new task for it. Such as helping it.”
Healer Gutiérez was silent for moment. She crossed her arms and considered the situation. At length, she nodded in agreement. “All right. If the thought-form gets out of control, we abandon the effort, and you do whatever is appropriate. Will that work?”
“Yes. How do we start?”
The lounge had begun to fill up by this time, so they adjourned to Frank’s office area and arranged to not be disturbed for a while. Soon enough, they were settled into what passed for comfort in Kübler-Ross. Frank was stretched out on the cot he kept in a corner for emergencies, and Healer Gutiérez was facing him in the comfy chair. She dimmed the lights, told him to relax, and started to talk him into a light trance.
“We’ll begin this much as you started the earlier process, Frank, by putting you into the moment when one of your attacks began. Cast back in your memory to an incident in which you were aware of what was happening from the very beginning. When you’ve found one, imagine that you have complete control over the passage of time, and pause the event just at the moment it begins. Now imagine that you also have complete control over the intensity of the experience, and turn it down so that you cannot be harmed by it. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Frank’s breathing was slow and even at first. Soon, it caught for a moment, and resumed a bit shallower than it had been. He nodded subtly.
“Okay,” Healer Gutiérez said quietly. “Now I want you to visualize your energy field as it appears when you are happy, healthy and well rested. This is the state that your new energy partner will want to achieve when it’s playing in your field, the state that you want it to return to when you’re having an attack.”
While Frank silently worked on that, she opened her palms towards him and moved them slightly as she reached out with her psychic sensitivity and familiarized herself with the feel of the energy flowing through his aura as it surrounded his physical body. Doing this, she learned what his resting field felt like. For their strategy to succeed, however, his imagined aural state had to be substantially the same. The only way for her to know if that were so would be to link with him and experience his imagined field as well. Then she could compare the two, and guide his progress.
She closed her eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. Focusing on the gentle psychic sensation of his energy field, she reached deeper and felt for the core of the interwoven pattern of consciousness. This was different for each person, and reflected the way they understood and interacted with the world. Frank would be doing a similar linkage with the witnesses in court, but they would be fully awake and distracted by the proceedings. Here, it would be possible for Frank to feel her presence as well.
Frank felt as though he was floating in a warm enveloping cocoon of dream. His physical senses were muted by the trance, and his mind was focused on the moment before an incident, imagining what his normal healthy aural field was like. In this state, time had no meaning, and a part of him wondered if he could reach through to the DreamTime from here.
Healer Gutiérez now adjusted her awareness slightly, so she could compare her experience of his cocoon with her direct psychic sensation of it. It was a difficult balance to maintain, one that could easily be used for other purposes in guided meditation, but without someone to help keep her poised on that balance, she had her figurative hands full. It seemed as though Frank’s visualization was distorted in a way, much like a person’s own recorded voice sounded different from the real thing, a bit tinny and weak, but substantially the same. Satisfied that they could begin, she withdrew from the link and resumed monitoring his actual field.
“Okay, Frank,” she said quietly. “Now we can begin creating your new thought-form partner. Are you ready to continue?”
When she saw him nod again, she smiled and took a long breath. “Imagine now that within your aura is a living energy being, a sprite that stays with you and wants to keep you healthy. It spreads throughout your entire field, and has the ability to affect how easily energy flows through you and around you. This sprite is a helper, a being whose happiness is dependent on your own. When your energy field is threatened, it acts like an energy version of your immune system and swings into action to make things right again. At the moment, your field is healthy, and the sprite is at rest. When you’re ready, we’ll show it how to help you.”
Frank’s breath deepened again, and a gentle smile crossed his face. Then he nodded.
“Good,” she said. “Now start playing back the incident we’ve queued up, and stop it once you have the first spray of pain.”
While she watched, Frank’s field puckered down the outside of his right leg, then stopped changing. He’d entered the first stage of the attack in a safe and controlled way. Everything was going fine.
“Okay, Frank,” she said. “Show the sprite where the problem is. You can do this by stroking it towards the area on your leg.” While she watched, a flow within his field began to gather over the affected area until the pucker was filled with the sprite.
“Play the incident a bit further, and do the same thing again.”
This time, a pucker appeared along the back of his left leg, then filled in. Frank repeated the process several more times before she suggested that he stop for a while. At her suggestion, he then restarted the sequence, and played through the same part of the attack in a single slow pass, but this time, with his pain control adjusted high enough to know how the sprite was affecting that as well. While she watched, his aura slowly ebbed and flowed as first the remembered attack and then the sprite affected each area in turn. When it was finished, she asked whether he’d felt pain.
He shook his head. “No pain this time,” he whispered.
With that aspect confirmed, they restarted the sequence yet again, but this time he let it run at normal speed. The sprite seemed to have learned its task. Satisfied, Healer Gutiérez brought Frank back out of his light trance state, and asked him to sit up.
“I think it worked,” he said happily.
“Maybe,” she cautioned. The real test is the next time you have an attack.
 
… Monday …
Publicity about the impending court case was hard to ignore that weekend. It had been a while since the last great public scandal, and such things had a way of creating their own social weather. You could almost see the clouds of controversy starting to obscure the sky as diverse topics got drawn towards the developing squall, and bits of the story soaked into the communal consciousness. Start a discussion of just about anything, and it would find a way to involve medical politics.
Frank followed three others into the groundcar that left his residential cabstop that morning, and eavesdropped on them as he watched the city slide past. The first time their discussion found its way to the case he was reporting to, they all paused briefly before making an abrupt conversational left turn to escape its pull. The second time, they looked at one another anxiously, then shrugged and drove headlong into the storm.
Not that there was anything new about the situation, of course. In the hundred or so years since the Global Directorate had reunited the world, interregional conflicts over randomized environmental assets had given way to managed transnational economies. It didn’t hurt that one of the first things this latest successor to the League of Nations had done was challenge the world to plant a colony beyond our own sun’s planets. Audacious goals, even before the first moon landing, had served to focus the public’s attention beyond their own immediate problems, and this one was no different. Lately, however, it seemed that the only things worthy of that sort of attention were contrived, but it wasn’t clear what that might mean.
A crowd was already gathering outside the courthouse when Frank’s ride swung past on its autonomous way to the closest available cabstop. High-profile events, such as the class-action suit he’d been called about, usually drew a diverse following, in addition to those people who actually had a reason to attend. It wasn’t really necessary for the curious to travel to L.A., though, unless they wanted a chance to glimpse people they didn’t recognize on their way to explain things they weren’t interested in. More likely, they simply wanted a bit of chaos in their lives. Public gatherings never really got out of hand, but for some, even the possibility was enough.
As Frank approached the courthouse steps, he watched the swarm of people milling about. There were knots here and there, some moving slowly towards the doors, some parting as an uninterested party to the case blundered past, and one stationary knot, a standing wave with a powder blue glow at its center, that seemed to be growing. This latter would be the professional juror leading the inquiry. When the GD unified the world’s justice systems, it also introduced some long-overdue changes to how trials were carried out. One of these was empowering the jury, which was expected to render a verdict, with the ability to ask questions. This made it necessary for at least some jurors to be specially trained, and that led to the establishment of a new profession. Since then, men and women wearing formal powder blue outfits had gained celebrity status, because they truly represented the interests of the public in trials like this.
Curious to hear what was going on, Frank drifted towards this latter crowd, and stopped just close enough to make out the calm voice at its center. Unlike the people clustered about other parties to the case, this group was more interested in listening than in talking, and that made it easier to follow the conversation.
“I’ve been asked,” the juror said over the murmur, “whether I’m permitted to raise questions posed by someone here. The simple answer is yes, but in order to get a useful response, it’s important to ask the right witness, at the right time, and in the right way.”
“But how?” said a woman from the far side of the crowd. “How can you know that?”
The juror smiled. “An excellent question, and one that gets to the heart of the problem. Each party’s representation attempts to frame the inquiry by their theory of causes and effects, their choice of meaning and interpretation. This is how they try to control what is or is not relevant to understanding the case. This is also our starting point as the jury. If we want to explore an area that has been protected by their presentation, we first have to establish grounds for posing the question. Doing so requires knowledge of more than just the law, but also quite a bit of psychology, logic, dynamics and several other fields as well. In a sense, a trial is a three-sided balance, with the jury seeking truth while the contending parties seek to validate their positions.”
In the silence that followed, some members of the crowd drifted away, and were replaced by others. Frank looked around for an opening, and started towards the sparsely filled area to his left. He didn’t get more than two steps before someone grabbed his right arm from behind. Surprised, he started to pull it forward as he turned around to see who it was.
Somehow, he found himself staring into the woman’s green eyes before taking notice of anything else about her. A moment later, he was sure they were brown, and wondered how he’d made such a perceptual error. Now that he’d had a chance to see her face, it was clear that she was the kind of person who was hard to describe. Nondescript. Ordinary. There weren’t any distinctive things to hook a memory onto. Her brown hair was short enough to be stylish, but it wasn’t done in any way he could describe. Even her clothes defied easy classification.
Frank was about to ask her what she wanted, when the sight of an approaching L.A. Police officer sent her away into the crowd. Still puzzling over the incident, he worked his way around the juror’s crowd and walked up the steps to the courthouse.
Inside, things were far more orderly. The entry area was scanned by security systems that identified people as they crossed the lobby, and the locator board showed you where to go if you looked at the virtual display’s laser target. Since Frank was wearing his own display system, directions and information about the case against HealthTech Resources and Tanguru ProbliMetrics were shown in a far more convenient way. Brushing the details to the side as he walked, he made his way to the jury room, which was opposite the main entrance to the courtroom.
The apprentice juror, who was reading from a handheld unit at the time, looked up and smiled. “Good morning,” she said with what Frank now noticed was a French African accent, and indicated a nearby chair. “We have some time before they will call us in, so you might as well be comfortable.”
“Thank you.” Frank took a closer look at her Apprentice Juror ID as he sat down. “This is my first case,” he said, a bit unsure of himself. “Your ID doesn’t have a name on it, only a number. How am I supposed to refer to you?”
She flicked her book off and set it down. “That is probably the thing about my new profession that I like the least. When I was a researcher, I had a name and the objects of study had numbers. Now it is the other way about. During the case, it seems, I’m to be known simply as Juror #2.”
Frank chuckled. “I guess that makes the foreman Juror #1, then. He was taking questions outside when I arrived.”
“Yes,” she said, leaving the end of her word suspended, as if there was more to the answer.
Habits of language were important to Frank. They revealed a great deal of what went on inside, far more than most people realized. “Would you mind a personal question?” he said after waiting for the spoken ellipsis to fade.
When she nodded, Frank leaned forward a bit. “During the interview, you asked why I chose to work abroad as a Healer. I got the sense that you’d done something similar. Was I right?”
Juror #2 closed her eyes for a moment. To Frank, it was signal of a person’s attention to how things were said, a momentary inner focus, outwardly expressed. It also gave him a moment to look over the way her inner spirit had expressed itself in flesh, and how that form had in turn expressed itself in dress. Her intensely dark skin was set off by a carefully constructed sculpture of finely textured hair, and she wore a formal robe with a bold design done in colors associated by many peoples with earth, life and light.
“I have led several lives, you might say. Before this one, I performed research in Lambarene, above the western coast of the Central African Union. It was both fulfilling and sterile. I valued the rigor, the search for hidden truths, but not the solitude. There was no community in the process.”
Frank understood completely. He’d left First Nation for reasons that were similar, in an odd way. His sense of completeness had made him uncomfortable with any single method of approaching a problem, even if it was the traditional one practiced by generations of shamans in his family and tribe. They had long made use of western and eastern practices, but what Frank wanted to do was to develop a new synthesis of methods and philosophies. It wasn’t exactly a popular opinion, especially among his family, but it was the direction in which his personal truth lay, and that they could understand. So he had left to pursue his goal, and the path brought him to Los Angeles. He did not know why he was drawn here, but it had the feeling of rightness to it, so he became a Healer and joined the Hospice. That was several years ago. He was still awaiting the next bend on his journey when the request from the court had arrived.
Two other jurors walked in, greeted Frank and #2 briefly, and then settled down at the far end of the room to continue a discussion that had apparently started some time earlier. That made five, if you included #1, who was probably still carrying forth outside. Three jurors remained.
Refocusing from his memories to the moment, Frank glanced back at the door for a second before continuing. “And yet, even here, as a juror, you’re still somewhat isolated from the case you’re considering. Being known as a number instead of by your name must bother you.”
She smiled, and nodded slowly. “Yes, it does. But I find that it enables me to avoid the reluctance I might otherwise feel about probing into someone else’s truths.” She glanced down into her opened hands, relaxed them, and then studied Frank for a moment. “You moved here as well. Have you found what you were seeking?”
“That may be something I’ll only know in hindsight.”
Juror #1’s now-familiar voice preceded him into the jury room. He was still trailing a crowd when he entered, but only the two people that were part of the jury entered with him. That left one more to make their full complement of seven. Nevertheless, he closed the door behind him and suggested that those who were present take their seats around the conference table.
One of the two jurors who had entered after Frank tentatively raised a finger. “Shouldn’t we wait until everyone’s here?”
Number 1 shook his head. “He can catch up if he misses anything important. I want to make sure that the rest of you understand how this works.” He swung his gaze towards Frank. “Especially you, Healer Sanroya.”
“As Jurors,” he said strongly, “we are responsible for deciding the outcome of this case.” He then looked at each juror in turn. “We represent the people, and are obliged to find for the common good. There are many truths to this case, and each side will attempt to convince us of theirs. Before the reforms, courts were forced to choose one of those truths. As a result, precedents undermined the intent of well-meant laws, and justice became a servant of the powerful.”
Frank glanced around the table. Their foreman had quickly brought the group into unity. It was almost as if he had placed them all in a light trance. Even the rhythm of their breathing was coming into step.
“Your job here,” the foreman said evenly, “is to question those truths, to find the reality behind both of them, and bring it out into the open. You are not here to sit quietly and accept whatever you are told. Nor are you here to disrupt the proceedings. There is a well-wrought process for performing your job, and we, as a jury, will be far more effective if we all use that process.”
He paused for a moment. When he continued, his manner was looser, his bearing at ease. “During your interviews, I said that being a juror was a careful balance, that you would at once be both on public display and cloaked in secrecy.”
Frank watched intently, realizing that #1 spoke as performance art, as theatre. In a way, he was preparing the jurors to enter the courtroom as players in a sacred drama, to treat the room as sacred space.
A sudden rustling outside, followed by a resounding thump caught everyone’s attention, breaking the secular spell being woven by their leader. A moment later, the door swung open. The final juror stumbled over a thick black book and sprawled to the floor.
While their newest member stood up and brushed himself off, Frank leaned over and picked up the book. “‘A Pictorial History of the World’s Great Trials’,” he read. “Are you a historian, or just a book collector?”
The slight man took a breath. “There’s a difference? Virtual books can be changed. Authentic paper can’t.” He laid his hand on the book, which Frank had started to page through. “This one is from the time of the first space exploration, mid 20th century. It’s a record of western—” He froze when his eyes met those of the foreman. “I’m late, aren’t I? Sorry.” Then he took the book, walked to the far side of the table, and sat down.
Juror #1 waited until the historian stopped fidgeting, then spoke directly to him. “We’re here, all of us, to see that the common good is represented in a very high-profile case. It is important, not just for me, or for the court, but for the people following the proceedings, that we all treat the act of seeking justice with respect. That means not only showing up on time, but being prepared as well. Why did you bring that book with you?”
The historian cringed. “Perspective. I brought it to make sure that we kept this case, and our roles in it, in perspective.”
When nobody spoke, he laid his hand over the book and continued. “Courts, and… and their proceedings have changed over time. Some of those changes have been for the better. Others have not.” He cautiously studied Frank. “I’m not sure how I feel about you, yet.”
Frank smiled. This was, after all, the same juror who had asked him how he performed his special ‘magic’ during the interview. He was about to answer when they were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. A bailiff stuck his head in and announced that the jury had been requested to appear.
As they were getting up, the foreman said, “I go in first, followed by #2 here, then the other jurors. Healer Sanroya comes in last, and takes the seat closest to the witness box, beside #2. I sit farthest from the witness.” Before stepping through the doorway, he added, “Remember, a courtroom is sacred space. Treat it accordingly.”
The historian smirked, and followed the others across the hallway.
 
 
Mara was sketching something when Frank returned home that night. Pegwin was asleep nearby, and the calming sound of Mara’s favorite acoustic artist was stirring the silence. She looked up from her stylus and asked him how court went.
“Stridently comes to mind,” he said as he sat beside her. “For some reason, lawyers seem to think that they can change reality with the force of their rhetoric. They made their opening remarks today, and both sides portrayed their clients as the injured party.”
She shook her head and smiled. “Winning an argument through the strength of one’s convictions may quiet an adversary, but it doesn’t defeat him.”
Frank sat with the thought briefly. He knew that his wife spoke not only from her mediation experience, but from meditation as well. “What are you working on?”
She tapped the stylus a few times, and handed him the pad. “My brother decided to enter the Fancydance competition after all. This is a design I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Give it a spin.”
The virtual clothesform that Mara had built it on wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough for the moment. Frank stroked across the image to rotate it, and then poked at a few places to see what kinds of feathers and other decorations she’d used. He wasn’t surprised to discover just how wide a swath of the Earth she planned to reflect in it. Before handing it back, he selected one of the canned dance sequences, so he could see how it would look in action.
The Fancydance competition, which had its roots in displays originally staged for reservation tourists before First Nation was founded, had become an industry in itself. Groupies bought knock-offs of the original designs, and people around the world and even from off-planet followed the careers of the best dancers. Her brother Alex’s publishing company sponsored several entrants each year.
Hearing her expectant non-verbal question in his head the whole time just made Frank relish the tension his silence had created. He even waited a while longer before answering. “Court went fine,” he said at last. “Thanks for asking.”
“Really?” she said gently. “Drop the other shoe.”
Frank sat back and crossed his arms in subconscious protection. “I can’t say the entire jury is completely comfortable with me yet, but they are willing to hear my reports. One of them is a historian, with a particular interest in trials and courtroom procedures. He actually brought a book with him, a pulp and glue book.”
“And the case?” she prompted, once again busy with her design. “What was the case about?”
“It’s a public action against two companies,” he said. “One runs MedCenters and the other sells Insurance. A group of prominent people contends that the two businesses conspired to treat them more expensively at MedCenters, rather than at a Hospice. Not that that’s news to anyone.”
“How are the companies framing their defense?”
“Pretty much as I’d expected,” Frank said. “They simply point to the jurisdictional rulings, and remind everyone that the disputed gray area is fair game for either side. But they have an even stronger argument.”
Mara stopped experimenting with the costume. “Which is?”
“Which is that most of the cases in question were brought first to a Hospice Center for evaluation, and then transferred to the MedCenter for treatment.”
She nodded. “So why the case, then?”
“Greed, of course. The result of routing patients like that is more money for both companies. There’s a far higher markup for the MedCenter’s flashy tech than there is for what we do. And the Insurance rake-off is better, too.”
Mara lowered her pad. “But then the Hospice staff would also be implicated, and that makes no sense. What do you make of it?”
“That’s hard to say. The results are certainly true; everyone knows that. So the only question is whether there’s intent behind it, whether there really was a conspiracy involved. Which reminds me…”
“What?”
He shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Some woman grabbed my arm before I entered the courthouse. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me. Then, for some reason, she freaked at the sight of a cop.”
“That is odd. What did she look like?”
Frank shook his head. “I wish I knew. At first, I thought she had green eyes, but they were really brown. Trying to remember her is like trying to wrestle smoke. Anyway, she disappeared into the crowd after that.”
 
(TOC)

I just moved, and we realized after moving here that the Internet situation was not ideal in any way.
Our only options are pretty slow speed home internet with AT&T satellite, or cable Internet/panoramic wifi with Cox. So naturally we've been trying for Cox, but suffice to say they're a nightmare.
I'd love to just use the hotspot off my phone at least for a while, but it seems like even that isn't gonna be an option right now. My partner has visible also, and their hotspot usually works fine, aside from occasionally disconnecting and needing a refresh. With my new phone (Motorola Moto g stylus 5g), it won't allow me to connect to the 5g hotspot at all. The 2.4gh "extended compatibility" will SOMETIMES connect, but never actually has Internet access. Visible insists I have hotspot service enabled/subscribed, and keeps walking me through the same steps to reset my network, restart my phone and try again. Same thing every time. Motorola also insists it's not the phone, but that's the only thing I can come up with because it's not a problem for anyone else.
Overall though, even just the data on my phone is a lot slower than it was a month ago at my old place. Their coverage map shows that I should have perfectly fine 5G UWB, but I only ever see 2 bars here, and sometimes it's just obnoxiously laggy.
I hear everyone's complaints about visible and I understand it's gonna be better in some places than others, but for such a short distance move it seems crazy. I used to have pretty much flawless service with them, and honestly I've always had amazing experiences with their customer service - Until now, with this one particular issue.
At one point last year I was considering switching carriers purely because I was broke and was almost desperate enough to go back to Mint or something. One of the reps from Visible actually walked me through porting out my number and was going to get me a refund on my service that month if I needed to Switch, she was completely understanding of my situation and didn't try to pressure me into staying or sell me any bells and whistles, she just immediately went to work figuring out how I could get a refund so that I could buy groceries and not lose my phone number which I needed for work.
I guess this is more a sad rant than anything, idk if visible is gonna work for me long term. But I have also had a couple other small issues with the Moto G Stylus 5g, so I'm considered trading it back in and getting something else. Idk. Any thoughts?

The Epson poster printer no longer prints the barcode that identifies what type of paper it is. It also no longer cuts the barcode off rolls of paper that previously had barcodes printed on it. Anybody know how to fix this? I’ve restarted the printer already… I’ve toyed a bit in the EPA settings but didn’t see anything… also played around in the printer settings and tools.

Hi gang, hopefully someone here can think of something we may have missed. Thanks for any and all help. Forgive me if this isn't a suitable forum for this, and also forgive me for how long this post is.
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Situation:
> 2x Macs, 4x printers. For ease we'll call these: Mac1 Mac2 Epson HP6 HP7 Zebra
= Both Macs are MacBook Pros (I'm not sure on exact specs, but can probably get this if needed) > Epson = Epson ET-3850 > HP6 = HP Photosmart 6520 e-All-in-One > HP7 = HP Photosmart 7520 (I think?) > Zebra - Just your bog standard Zebra label printer (isn't too relevant)
= Both Macs were originally on macOS v12 (Monterey) before troubleshooting began [Mac2 still is on Monterey] = Both Macs can print to the Zebra with no issues = Epson, HP6 & Zebra are all at the same location, on the same network (for future purposes, we'll call this the "BTB" network) = HP7 is in a different location, so can be ignored to an extent in this ticket, though Mac1 would ideally be able to print to this one as well
= Mac2 can send jobs to all printers with no trouble
​
Now the issue:
= Mac1 is unable to print to Epson, HP6 & HP7 == Sometimes shows "printing" for short time, but cancels job or job stops and hangs permanently
> The main troubleshooting has taken place using Epson & HP6 > Printer power is connected fine, and connected to the BTB network > Mac1 is confirmed as being on the same network as these printers (and Mac2) > Cancelled all print jobs and tried to print again, still the same issue > Removing and re-adding the printers hasn't worked > Manually adding the printers via the IP addresses (found & confirmed through Mac2) with manually installed drivers (HP drivers found through link below) also hasn't resolved the issue
https://support.apple.com/en-us/106385
> Mac1 cannot ping the printers, and cannot access the webpages >> Whereas Mac2 can successfully access the printer webpages through the Printers & Scanners Settings option > Tried to follow the guide "Create a manual IP connection" linked below, but can't proceed past Step 4, as we can't access the EWS as mentioned:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_2026537-1681507-16
> IP Scanner used on Mac1 and it can see the printers have an assigned IP address, but they aren't showing as "alive" devices > Originally, the printers weren't showing as "shared" by Mac2, but we've since tried this and are still running into the same problem > Updating Mac1's OS to latest version (Sonoma v14.3.1) hasn't resolved > Reset the "printing system" using the right-click feature in Mac1's Settings, then re-added the printers once more. Still the same problem
>> Device restarts for all have been attempted throughout >> Mac2 has been printing fine on all during this troubleshooting over two days

Recently some people have been presenting some issues when trying to use their drawing tablets, they suddenly stop working or there seems to be no apparent problem and still not being able to use the pen. As far as I'm concerned this is a issue with tablets from various brands (Wacom. Huion and Xp pen) and that mostly just concerns pen displays. This was born from the most recent Windows 11 update and so far no official fix has been released, the update just seem to fuck with the tablet drivers making them incompatible under Windows ink.
NOW, WHAT TO DO: -The easiest fix is just disabling Win ink altogether under your tablet driver (Don't use absolute/mode mode) **As far as i'm concerned this works in Krita, just make sure to choose Configure Krita-Tablet settings>Tablet input Api Wintab and then restart the app
Note that this may not work since some software like Photoshop needs Win ink to work, (There are some workarounds for this, they are actually the first results that come up when searching how to solve Win ink not working, look up "how to fix drawing tablet for Photoshop" or something like that).
SECOND FIX, MAKING WINDOWS INK WORK
Remember there is no official fix as of now, so this guarantee neither a fix or that it doesnt break later on. This worked for me and if it doesnt for you there is no much option but to wait and official update.
Under Bluetooth and other devices>Stylus/pen and windows ink>Additional configuration>Disable: "Allow using pen as a mouse" and "Dont allow using touch handwriting when using a pen"
On the same window disable Shell handwriting and then restarting the pc
Next: 1. Uninstall the drivers 2. Restart the PC 3. Download drivers and extract the .exe file 4. Install as usual 5. Restart when asked, then enter your password and restart once more. Lastly restart when prompted to enter your password (without accessing the pc). (Basically restart your PC 3 times) 6. Enter your password as usually and then right click the driver (Pen tablet in this case) and make it always run as an administrator. 7. Check if this fixes your pen detection issues with win ink
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My partner traded in his previous phone in November and the store associate at metro convinced him ro buy the tcl stylus saying it was the best phone for his budget, not wanting an iPhone and not wanting another Samsung. The first thing they told him was that he could only use the charger that came with the phone for whatever reason, and using any other one would mess it up. But the charger it came with is a usb c charger just like most if not all android phones so I don't understand what makes it different? The cord was too short and it made him frustrated because if the phone was charging he couldn't really use it because of how short it was. He started using a longer cord with the same plug that it came with, and his phone started taking longer to fully charge. He's constantly having issues with the battery life and now his phone never fully charges it constantly says slow charging, and now it constantly restarts all the time. We don't even know where the original cord is now because it looks so similar to other cords we have because there's literally nothing unique about it nor the plug, other than what the associate said to us. We've even bought actual Android fast chargers, and I know they're legit because when I use them on my Samsung, it always says fast charging but on his it says slow charging. It's too late to return it and other than switching to an iPhone I don't know what else he could get from MetroPCS that would be better. He can't afford to switch services that do credit checks and such.

I couldn't find an apple feedback channel to report this erratic kb behavior in more than 250 signs so... Here it is on Reddit, hope the Apple team sees it and gives a cr*p, because keyboard input is like the most basic requirement of any device... And those pbms have been there for years now maybe. I'd anybody knows how to address the Apple team directly on that, please let me know. There it is:
Ever since a big update some years ago maybe, there's been a change in the way a little toolbar related to the usage of onscreen keyboard is displayed. Well first of all, after thorough research it appears nobody knows how to call it on forums, so I hope you know what I'm talking about: since the update, it's taken the form of a dark grey bar at the bottom center of the screen. Before the update, you could move it ion any side of the screen or minimize it in an angle. Now it's impossible to get rid of it when in certain apps it hides key functionalities set at the bottom, and it's also impossible to show after it sometimes disappears... The behavior of this bar seems completely erratic: sometimes it's here, sometimes it's completely absent and sometimes it only shows one icon and there's just no way to display the full bar.
But my main concern as a onscreen floating keyboard user, is that the bar has proven highly unreliable as trip showing or hiding the keyboard on the screen, which has been an issue for more than a year now I believe... It is quite surprising that a company like Apple would not insure the basic requirement of keyboard input...... And instead focus on emoji updates. Priority order. Well here's the thing:
In most apps (I haven't really dug in which in particular but it's really wide spread if not universal), for some reason (say you clicked ion something or you switched apps, or any other actions that basically says "I'm not trying to type on the keyboard right now") for some such reason the keyboard will disappear and (if you're lucky) will minimize into that toolbar so you can call it back. Well, first of all it doesn't always do so : sometimes it assumes that you'll just need to point somewhere in a typing area and that will be enough to make the keyboard reappear, but sometimes however much you hit the screen in a typing area, nothing will happen and you have to reach the bottom little grey bar (of you are lucky enough that it wanna display... Sometimes it will show you instead another light grey bar that fills the whole bottom (again: name of it?...) which will propose for instances to use your passwords or bank card credentials or whatever. Sometimes it will simply not be there and you have to switch app or perhaps restart the app to have it finally appear...).
There, you see... It's already a mess.. it's not the worse yet... The worse is this: so if you're lucky to have it here (although unlucky of it hides some key functionality of the app...) then you have to hit the keyboard sign to make it appear, but most of the time it will not work. So instead you need to long press the kb icon, and then hit "show keyboard". That's a bit cumbersome but I wouldn't mind too much... IF IT ACTUALLY WORKED! ^{^} of course it doesn't. So then you have to long press again and this time your only option is to "hide keyboard" (but the kb had never actually shown up so you're hiding something that's already hidden). Then long press again and hit "show keyboard" (again ^). Only then will the keyboard appear.
Now finally, I usually don't use Apple onscreen kb because its prediction is not as good as Google which already knows my input from Android phone, also because Google as built-in translate input, a simpler kb switcher, and a Chinese pinyin input that allows sliding input (unlike Apple's for which you have to type each individual letters with your big fingers on a rather small screen which doesn't fit your hands like it does on an iphone...). Also I'm not used to the Apple input methods: capitalisation, auto space, and spelling suggestions which makes it a nightmare sometimes when you just want to change your cursor position but instead you cannot help selecting the whole word that the Apple system wants you to change because it assumes you misspelled it... Anyway for some reasons, I'd rather use Google keyboard input most of the time ( I actually prefer Apple's for speech to text).
But of course the process to select a non-Apple keyboard in the keyboard menu that pops up when you long press that kb icon on that little grey bottom bar, that process is even harder... Probably because Apple doesn't want you to use another third party kb. So I'm afraid I will complain for nothing here... Because of course this will never ever ever change.
Here it is though: when you finally get that kb to pop up, sometimes it will show the last used kb (assuming you want to continue with the same input methods and the same language, which is my preference also), but sometimes it will switch back to the last Apple kb you used (which might also be in another language...). So not only do you have to long press 3 times and hit show and hide and show again, but you also have to long press another time too select the third party kb you wanna use instead. And even then, sometimes you have to ask it a second time because of course it would be too simple... But there's even worse: in some apps such as Nebo (a handwriting and word processing app), the third party kb are simply just excluded from the list of available kb, just like when you are required by a prompt to input some password for instance (for security reasons you can only input pw using Apple's kb). And then, the only way I found those apps to have the third party kb in the list is to unselect the in-app kb input by selecting the stylus handwriting input, then write something, scribble a bit, then reselect the word processing tool, making the grey toolbar reappear with this time (sometimes) finally the third party kb option. Even that is highly, and I mean highly unreliable...
I'm getting tired to write such a painful complexe process so I will stop there. But you can see already that the floating onscreen kb input method is messy as hell on ipad. And personally I don't see the use of a non-floating kb that will take half the screen space and hide the view of what you're writing. So the only option left is to buy a physical kb, which isn't an option I'm considering. And even that I'm not sure works properly...

1. The about:config page

In Firefox, there is an internal about:config page with thousands (tens of thousands?) of individual configs that can be freely edited by the user. If you don’t like a particular UI element or behavior in Firefox, there’s a good chance that you can change it with a config. The about:config page is also used to individually enable experimental web platform features (without requiring a browser restart like in Chrome).
Here are some of the configs that I’ve edited or added:

• devtools.toolbox.zoomValue = 1.2 — increases the default text size in Firefox devtools to 120%
• browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false — prevents the entire browser window from closing when the user closes the last tab (I find this behavior annoying)
• devtools.inspector.showUserAgentStyles = true — shows user-agent styles in the CSS Rules pane in Firefox devtools (why are user-agent styles hidden by default?)
• browser.chrome.guess_favicon = false — stops Firefox from attempting to load the website’s favicon from the default location when an icon is not declared in the HTML document (I use this config to get rid of the distracting ”favicon not found” errors in the devtools console)
• browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible = false — removes menu buttons from the individual items in the URL bar dropdown list (those buttons make tabbing through the items slower)

2. Mozilla cannot decrypt my data on their servers

All the major browsers have a feature for syncing the user’s browsing data across devices (Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync, Apple iCloud, and so on). The user’s data is stored on the browser vendor’s servers, and this data is of course encrypted. But can the browser vendor decrypt this data? Google can. Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them.
It seems that Mozilla goes out of their way to make absolutely sure that they can’t access the synced browsing data of Firefox users. The encryption is strong enough that with current technology it would take trillions of years to break into this data, so it’s pretty safe. However, if I somehow managed to lose all my devices where I’ve activated Firefox Sync, my browsing data on Mozilla’s servers would be lost forever; there would be no way of recovering it. Still, I like the idea of using a browser from a company that does not want to access my data on their own servers. I feel like this is how it should be.

3. Translating web pages is also completely private

Firefox Translations is a relatively new feature that allows users to translate web pages to a different language (from a small set of supported languages) directly in the browser, without sending any data to any servers. This feature is based on machine learning and neural networks.
This is another example of Mozilla going the extra mile to protect the user’s privacy.

4. Mozilla develops their own browser engine

Firefox uses Mozilla’s Gecko browser engine. No other major browser uses Gecko. The web is my favorite platform, and since a diversity of browser engines is good for the web*, I want to support Gecko. By using Firefox and reporting Firefox and web compat bugs, I’m doing my part.
*Allow me to quote Google’s F.A.Q. from 2013 when they forked WebKit:

Hold up, isn't more browsers sharing WebKit better for compatibility?

It's important to remember that WebKit is already not a homogenous target for developers. For example, features like WebGL and IndexedDB are only supported in some WebKit-based browsers. Understanding WebKit for Developers helps explain the details, like why

I couldn’t have said it better. We currently have three major browser engines—and a couple of smaller ones in development—and of those three, Gecko is the only one that may be at risk. I’m not sure what Gecko’s conservation status would be if it were a real animal (probably “Conservation Dependent”), but I don't plan on giving up on it anytime soon.

5. The best support for extensions on Android

The web has unfortunately become slower and more annoying over the past decade. Extensions that block ads and other types of problematic content have become necessary to have a normal web browsing experience. On Android, Firefox has by far the best support for browser extensions. This includes uBlock Origin (the best ad-blocker) and extensions for adding user styles and user scripts to websites. I actively use all of these extensions (uBlock Origin, Stylus, Tampermonkey) on desktop to tweak websites to my linking. It is awesome that Firefox users on Android can do the same.

6. A great picture-in-picture player

I should probably finally mention an actual feature in Firefox that a regular user might find useful. I don’t really use Firefox for its general features, but if there’s one such feature that I really like, it’s the native picture-in-picture video player in desktop Firefox, which is superb. It has everything that one could ask for. It can be quickly opened via an overlay button that is shown when hovering any video. It can be resized and positioned anywhere on the screen. It has the full controls, including pause, mute, and the seek bar for skipping to any point in the video. I use it all the time.

In summary

I trust Mozilla more than I trust Google, Apple, Microsoft, or any other company that makes web browsers. This trust is based on the fact that Mozilla chooses the highest level of user privacy when developing services such as Firefox Sync, Firefox Translate, and others. A web browser is an integral part of a person’s online life, so it makes sense to choose a browser from a company that one trusts the most.
In addition to that, Firefox offers the highest level of customization, whether it’s through browser extensions or internal configs. This is important to me because I prefer websites over native apps.
Any great feature, such as the picture-in-picture player, is just the cherry on top. I understand that for most people it’s probably the other way around. They care about features more than they care about privacy and customization. That is fine. There is no wrong answer. Everyone should use the browser that serves them best.

Hi to all,
I've a Dell Laptop 9330 2-in-1 with archlinux, plasma and wayland.
I write there because even though I'm not using the surface linux kernel, I think that this community has a bigger experience on how the touchscreen works under linux.
My pc works well, also the stylus is recognized, but randomically the touchscreen does not react anymore to touches and the same for the stylus receiver.
That happens more frequently when the PC is turned on for a lot of hours (I use it as my main Pc connected to external monitor and power.
When the issue happens I can have the touch working again by turning the PC off (sometimes I have to go to the UEFI setting to force a cold boot).
The question is, is there a way to detect what is happening or force a refresh, reload of the touchscreen module without the need of shutdown and restart?
Is there anything that I should check when the issue happens?

I'm having a problem with my mobile data connection on my G Stylus. As of right now the mobile data is bugging, it's not automatically connecting like it's supposed to, it's like every spot is a dead zone right now. I've restarted my phone 6 times and checked if it was the correct version, it was. But my data still isnt automatically connecting like it's supposed to. Does anyone know how to fix this

So for some unknown reason my phone's display won't go black when my phone is up to my ear and it's driving me nuts because I keep accidentally pressing buttons/apps when on the phone. It's happened to me once before. I accidentally hit something and the display wouldn't turn off when up to my ear. Somehow though I was able to fix it, but it happened again and I can't figure out how to change the setting for this.
It's not that I'm having a black screen. I'm having my screen on when my phone is next to my ear. I want my phone to have a black screen when up to my ear again. I've googled everywhere and nothing is helping. So I've come to reddit for help please. ;-; I don't think there is a proximity problem with my phone as this happened before and I was able to fix it. Also I did restart my phone as well.
I have a Moto g5 (2022) - without the stylus capabilities. Any help would be super appreciated.

With the smoothing option enabled, photoshop has a setting (Under the widget icon next to Smoothing on the pen/brush tools) that should control if, when the stylus is released at the end of a line, the line finishes itself by connecting to where the stylus was at that point or not. This setting is called "Catch-up on Stroke End" and it's a setting I normally leave off because I don't like how it works. I just noticed that, despite being toggled off, toggled on-then off-, and having photoshop restarted, I cannot disable this setting anymore.
The "Catch-up on Stroke End" effect is always being applied. :( If anyone could help me find out why it's doing this, I'd appreciate it a lot!