■ Connect to HP wireless printer in polynomial time

Ah, progress! Self-driving cars, paper straws and wireless printers. Why bother with printer USB cables when you can print over thin air? Last year I bought my first "airprint" HP Deskjet 2710e which has fuelled my machine rage no end. I don't know whether this is HP's revenge for buying its cheap printers, but it never works. Forget about printing or scanning in a hurry, the device won't connect. You see errors like printer offline or status unknown or similar failures. HP smart troubleshooters are no help at all, and end up recommending rebooting the PC and/or printer, usually to no avail. Sometimes it scans without printing, or will print but scanning is currently unavailable. More often it will obstinately refuse to do anything at all. The damn thing has a mind of its own.

If you are an unhappy owner of a HP wireless printer you will recognize the desperate and invariably futile attempts to connect, such as:

Turning the printer on/off or rebooting the PC
(often it cannot be turned off, it must be unplugged!)
Turning the printer's wireless button on/off
Throwing curses and verbal abuses to the printer and its manufacturer
Confessing all sins and seek absolution from evil powers
Wearing your lucky sweater
Waiting for the correct phase of the moon...

Workaround: try direct wireless connection

As I was about to return the darn thing and demand compensation for my runaway blood pressure, I hit upon a solution that "guarantees" printing and scanning on demand. Try it and see if works for you. The idea is to disconnect from your home wifi and connect to the printer directly. Here are the steps:

Turn on the printer and wait for the blue wifi "ready" indicator (not blinking).
Check your wifi available connections; there should be one called DIRECT-xx-HP something (see pic). If you cannot see anything turn the PC wifi on/off to refresh the list.
Connect to the printer's wifi. The password is usually on a label inside the printer's casing (open the lid for ink cartridge access)
Print and scan to taste, then reconnect the internet.

Regarding scanning, there's an extra complication. The daft HP Smart app that initiates scanning requires an internet connection, so you must start it before you disconnect (before step 2). Then it will scan when connected to the HP scanner directly.

It still is a PITA, but at least it saves most of the time-wasting, ensuring a working connection first time, every time (?)

Now that I blogged about this solution, I am sure it will be jinxed and stop working. If it does, I swear I will buy a printer with a cable connection as in the good old days. Progress me @rse <g>