Have you tried pulling the CMOS battery?

Depending on how old the laptop is, that should work fine. Just find a manual or guide to help you locate the battery, and remove it for 30 mins (main battery too, of course). This will cause a full BIOS config loss and it will reset to defaults when you replace the batteries and reboot it.

This will not work if the laptop is a newer UEFI 'bios' though, and you're stuck trying to flash firmware with a password reset, as you've been doing. Acer shouldn't need to identify your laptop to give you bios files I'd think - you can usually bypass those automatic searches and instead search for your laptop model manually. I've not updated an Acer laptop in a long time though, they may have enshittified the process.

Good luck on your adventure

If it was a desktop I would say just do a bios reset by pulling the battery or moving a jumper. Laptops are a different beast altogether and without specific model numbers it's a shot in the dark because manufacturer's use different techniques to reset at different times.

Assign a fixed address to it on the router, and put it in the "no internet access" group under parental controls there.

Probably not. You could set it to not resolve domains, but that doesnt block all traffic from the printer.

Is the gateway something like 192 168 255 255?

I have a PiHole setup that my router uses as a DNS server. Can I just block it there?

Only a hole for the print services with specific port mappings to the printer itself.

Which is the same as if there was no vlan. It's not like any router forwards port 631 unless you specifically open it up. And without port 80 open on the vlan, your PC can't get to the printer settings. But if your vlan has 80 open so you can use the printer, then there was no point in putting it in a vlan.

Sorry, I meant just doing a static IP and not giving it a gateway.

Only a hole for the print services with specific port mappings to the printer itself.

That's at least the best you can do. Otherwise fully isolated vlans are pretty good.

Printer mac addresses never change. Blocking Mac is the easiest and most secure.

Vlans rarely provide security people think they do. If you want to print, your pc needs to have access to the vlan the printer is in which means you have a hole in your security that anything else can go through.

A vlan is no different than creating a separate network with a firewall. If something can break the firewall to get to your PC, it can break the firewall to get to the printer.

Vlans are not the easiest answer.

As someone else suggested blocking the printer at the router is easier.

If your router supports it you can provide the printer a bogus default gateway and DNS. That should prevent it from having internet access. You could also likely do this in the printer if it has a way to configure it directly.

A firewall rule that blocks access would be better but will depend on what you have available.

VLAN without internet access is a step above that.

A Raspberry pi print server will work as well by bypassing any network connection whatsoever

Or you could just use a long usb cable and not deal with any of it.

This is the easiest answer.

Maybe there are better ways to do this but I'd put it in a VLAN configured how you want. Any device that gets less trust than your PC belongs in a separate VLAN I think, just as a matter of basic security.

The simplest way is to just connect it to your network normally, and block its internet access at your firewall (the all in one wifi/router/switch that most people have).

If that isn't an option for you for whatever reason, you can do something like connect it to a raspberry Pi via USB, and have that device act as a print server.

What kind if switch/router are you using? You should be able to set up a firewall rule to block a device from accessing the internet. Of course, the steps depend entirely on your hardware and router OS, but essentially:

• give printer a static ip on you main network
• tell firewall that any traffic originating from printer static IP on the internal network destined to the ISP is not allowed, and vice versa
• assuming printer mac address doesnt change, you can also apply the same rule to the mac address.

You could statically assign an IP to the printer (if it has WiFi/ethernet) and not set a default gateway. It then won't know how to communicate with the internet but still be accessible on the same local subnet.
A more advanced route would be separate VLANs with routing rules between your main vlan and the printer vlan, while blocking all outbound traffic from the printer vlan.

Or you could set up something like a raspberry pi or similar as a print server. The printer connects to it via USB only, so has no access to any networks. And the raspberry pi is the device you configure and trust, which does the translation from network based printing to USB based printing.

Two options:

1. In the printer manual set the IP and mask but do not set the gateway.
2. in the router set DHCP for that Mac address with a fix IP. In the firewall menu block traffic to that IP.

My printer is a HP ColorJet Pro MFP (I dont know the model #/what series it is)

So, if you have it visible via USB at the moment, you can probably have the Arch Linux PC tell you with lsusb. That'll list all attached devices.

But, as to the general problem, if you're fine with using USB other than running short on USB ports, I'd probably try one of two things:

• Your USB hub might not support a new enough version of USB. I think that devices are supposed to fall back gracefully, but I definitely have seen the occasional device that does wonky, probably non-standard things with different versions of USB. I have a phone, for example, that will tether using a USB-2-capable cable but not with nicer USB-3-capable cables.

• Just put the other USB devices that you're plugging into the computer on the hub, rather than the printer.

That's simple, you know it works already, and it solves the security issue.

If you want to do the WiFi route, that's going to be entirely dependent upon your wireless access point (you likely have an all-in-one "router" that acts as a broadband modem, router, and wireless access point). There isn't going to be a standard way to do this, and I can't even guarantee that the router is going to be capable of it, but if it has a management interface, probably Web-based, it'll likely have some list of devices, probably sorted by DHCP lease or MAC address, that have paired with the WAP. If it's in there, it'll have some option to cut off access, but again...I can't tell you what it'd look like, since it'd depend on the system.

If that doesn't work (like, you can't make your router do that, or you have multiple devices that you want to be able to print to the thing and don't want to keep your PC on), you may be able to take another PC, connect it to the printer (e.g. via USB) and set it up as a print server running CUPS. That way, there's absolutely no way for the printer to reach the network, and you have control of the device serving the printer to the network.

If you definitely want to go the WiFi route and your router cannot block Internet access to a device that it gives an address to, then you may be able to throw the router into "bridge" mode and set up your own router hooked up to it running OpenWRT or something similar, and have that be the wireless access point for your whole network, and have that disallow access to the Internet to that particular device.

I really appreciate you sharing this! There is so much value in learning how life was lived earlier! 🩷🙏 This player cannot record, unfortunately, and neither can the next one that's arriving today (a Sharp JC-200(GY) ). But if the Lauper tapes turn out to sound that much better, I'll buy a deck with which to copy them. 😊

Tapes did sound a little better new, because they hadn't been worn by the magnetic heads. Cassette tapes are technically rated for hundreds of plays, but a lot of us would copy tapes onto blanks and listen to those.

The problem here is that the commercial tape has just enough tape for its longest side. Once you figure that out, you copy the longest side first. Then you carefully disassemble the blank tape and unspool the remaining tape, and cut it off, but you leave a couple inches. You then tape it to the spool. Now your copy is just as long as the original tape. (You might also record "bonus tracks" to fill the space.)

We put a lot of work into tapes back in the day. I remember there were two brands of blanks I liked. I liked the case/shell of one but the actual recording tape of the other. So I would buy two ten-packs, and disassemble them two at a time (one from each brand) and swap the innards. They were like $9-10 and $10-15 each (for ten-packs) so my cost would be around $25. A friend of mine would pay me like $5-10 for the bad/bad tapes. And they weren't really bad. They were just not as good. He also bought a lot of tapes (like with music) and I'd copy his. Neither of us really had the better or worse end of it. Really, we were just bored most of the time.

I just ordered three supposedly factory sealed Cyndi Lauper tapes, just to see if "new" tapes sound at all better than the ABBA tapes that my dad found in the cellar the other day.

yes, it's used to rewind, not play.

I had one where the feeding spindle was smooth and fixed.

The only reasons to have the feeding spindle grip the gear and move is to rewind the tape and/or collect the tape in auto-reversing decks.

Many portable players didn't have rewind/auto-reverse fir cost reasons, so the feeding spindle would be just a fixed pin.

So, why not get rid of it? Well, to prevent the feeding roll from wobbling and causing jams or damage to the cassete or tape.