Afternoon, kiddiwinks. Uncle Mike has just made an interesting discovery.....interesting, that is, to those of you who run Epson printers.
I can't speak for any other brands, since I've always used Epsons, right from day one. But from what I can figure out, this 'function' is peculiar to Epsons, and is all part of their efforts to 'encourage' you to have your device serviced regularly (for outrageous sums of money!) at their approved 'service centres'.
As if selling you a device at a reasonable price, followed by gouging you, ad infinitum, with extortionate ink prices, wasn't enough, the WIC value - once it reaches a certain point - will cause your printer to just quit working, without warning. All you'll see in your wee display panel will be something along the lines of
"To continue using this device, visit your nearest authorised Epson Service Center."
Over my dead body!
There used to be a free reset utility for Epsons, years ago, that worked under Windows. I had to use it, several years ago, because one of my Epsons gave some very heavy-duty service for a couple of years printing photos.....and I eventually hit the WIC value.
It was made by some Russian devs, and although it was hard to read, it did work. Mostly...
I've never been able to find one that functioned under Linux, until now.....and, TBH, I don't print anything like as much these days. Following a browse around the web, I located a repo of .deb packages for the WICreset utility. I downloaded an age-related one for my daily driver - jrb's lite version of BK's Quirky April 64 - installed it, annnd.....it works perfectly.
It tells me that the current value for my Stylus SX218 is around 32% of the way to the maximum value.....so I'm OK for quite a while yet!
Most after-market ink vendors nowadays will sell you these reset keys - single-use, I'm afraid, though there's NO 'expiry date' - for a small fee (a few dollars or pounds). Many people will just chuck away and buy new again, but I intend to hang onto my SX218 for a while longer yet. The printer works, the scanner works, the drivers I have for it give full functionality.....why add to the growing e-waste problem? (And most EPSON users will probably only ever need a reset key perhaps once - or maybe twice - in all the time they own one.)
Downloads link can be found here:-
https://forum.2manuals.com/index.php?/t ... der-linux/
Hope some of you find this useful.
Mike. 
