How-To Guides

How To Guides

May

2024

Using the Canon 8400F Scanner on Windows 11

Here’s a quick guide on getting the drivers to work for the CanoScan 8400F on Windows 11

The CanoScan 8400F Scanner is nearly 20 years old now, it was annouced in late 2004 and if you want to get a brand new scanner of this calibre you’re looking at well over $1200AUD for an Epson Perfection 850. Sadly my CanoScan 8400F is having a whole host of issues now and is on the way out, so I’ll have to replace it soon. I did find installing the drivers on Windows a bit difficult, so I figured I’d post some quick notes on how to get it working.

You’ll need to download both the CanoScan Toolbox (Version 4.9.3) and the CanoScan 8400F Drivers (ScanGear CS 10.231a) for Windows 10 64bit. Here’s a link to the Canon page with both.

When you install the drivers, it will extract some files and then disappear – it works, it just doesn’t tell you. If for some reason it didn’t work, you can use 7zip to extract the installer to get to the .inf files to manually install the scanner drivers through the Device Manager.

Installing the CanoScan Toolbox seems to work as per usual.

Here’s the trick though! You need to add the Twain driver path to your environment variables.

To do this, you’ll want to go to: Settings -> System -> About -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables -> Scroll down to “Path” under System Variables and click on Edit -> Click on “New” and enter the text: C:\Windows\twain_32\CNQ8400

Hit okay a few times and reboot your computer.

Now you can open ScanGear and scan away!

May

2024

Setting a Blank DHCP Searchdomain on OpnSense

Super quick one because it took me way too long to google the answer…

How to tell Opnsense to not send through the searchdomain setting with DHCP – this stops it from interfering with domains that have no TLD (for people with funky LAN setups)

Problem: I use pihole for my network, I have my DHCP server telling the clients to use pihole for the DNS. But if I try to resolve something that has no TLD (eg. trying to resolve rin instead of rin.com) – it will instead try to resolve rin.localdomain.

If you suspect this is happening to you, on Windows or Mac, you can run the following:

nslookup > set debug > yourdomain

You’ll get a result like below, where it’s appending .localdomain or whatever domain your opnsense router has set in it.

If you look in the opnsense router settings under the DHCP server settings, you can either set it to blank, which will set it to the domain of the router, or you can enter a domain in there. You cannot enter “.” as a domain either.

Solution:

You have to set the DHCP server settings manually using their options, the options are

119 – Domain Search

15 – Domain

Set this under Additional Options as below:Hit Save and Reload the service, then renew your dhcp lease on the client.

Thanks to this Reddit post for the solution.

The real TLDR here though is don’t use TLD-less domain names, but I like them, so I will keep them. 😛

Oct

2023

Thermaltake Riing Fan Rewiring and Pinout

I needed a 120mm fan for my 3D Printer that I was messing around with and found some Thermaltake Riing Plus fans I had lying around, but I needed to control them via a standard fan header rather than using the special 9 pin plug they have. Here’s a quick run down to change the pins around to use it as a standard PC fan, as well as how to wire up the LEDs to work with WLED (on an ESP8266/ESP32), Marlin on an Ender 3 (SKR Mini E3 V1.2) or to a 5V Motherboard RGB header.
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Sep

2020

Rubber Band Cars STEM Project

About the project

This is a project I worked on with a group of students at both the schools I work at. The original goal was to have the students at both schools build the cars then meet up and talk about their cars and have races to see whose car can go the furthest. Sadly COVID-19 resulted in us being unable to meet up, but we still built them and had in school races anyway!

The basic principle is the Rubber Band cars are planned on paper, designed in TinkerCAD on the computer and then 3D Printed and assembled by the students.

A little bit of background on me: I’m the Technology Officer in two primary schools and I’ve been doing this job for 11 years now. My background is in IT and I’m a tech enthusiast – I’ve done a bit of everything! I’m not actually a qualified teacher, so I do my planning alongside the teacher who I’m working with to make sure that it ticks all the boxes.

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Dec

2019

Where to get games for PC

There’s a boatload of different ways you can buy/rent PC games these days. This guide is a quick rundown of the different places you can get games from and how to score yourself a good deal too!

I cover Games Launchers, Stores and subscription services. Please feel free to leave a comment if you think I’ve missed something!

Also: Everything should be up to date as of December 1st 2019 and any pricing listed is in Australian Dollars.

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Sep

2017

My Favourite Mac Apps 2017

UPDATE: May 2020 – Not a lot has changed. Wunderlist is gone now and I’ve moved over to using Microsoft Todo. Here’s a few more alternatives too. I stopped using Control Plane as it was bugging out too much on me, I ended up just making shell scripts that do what I want to to when I swap from home to work.

NetNewsWire stagnated, then was reborn. I wasn’t a huge fan of the changes, so I swapped to using Reeder.

Everything else is still good!

A while ago I wrote an article about my favourite apps, I figure it’s time I did it again!

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Aug

2017

Managing Storage on your Mac

When your computer starts to run out of space, it will come up with error messages saying “Your Startup Disk is almost full”. Once it completely runs out of space, you won’t be able to save any documents and it will start to behave weirdly (programs crashing etc).

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Aug

2017

General Touch Bar Tips

The Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro lets you do a whole bunch of functions within apps that support it. I’ve put together a few tips for ways you can utilise this and extend what you can do with it!

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Aug

2017

IFTTT Triggers with a MacBook Touch Bar

IFTTT lets you create applets that let you control things like web services with custom triggers (eg. Create a To Do Item if you receive an email). I’ve been using it to control the lighting in my house based on triggers I’ve put on my Touch Bar.

This guide goes through setting up IFTTT with my Xiaomi Yee Lights and then adding triggers for them on my MacBook’s Touch Bar.

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Aug

2017