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Author: Andrew Huey
printing
Hey! I got my iBook to print to my desktop printer, attached to my Win XP machine! Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound impressive, but it’s something I’ve wanted to be able to do since I had the PowerBook 1400, and I’ve never been able to do it until now. Relevant links:
Gimp-Print — for PC printer drivers
Mac OS X Hints — search for “SMB”, “printing”, or something similar.
Essentially, you need to enable SMB printing, install relevant printer drivers, then add your printer, using the arcane syntax “smb://user:pass@workgroup/server/sharename”.
slashdot
Good slashdot thread on the sorry state of the American people.
News of the Weird
From the most recent News of the Weird:
Officials at Somerville (N.J.) High School warned students in October to stop trying to get high by choking each other into unconsciousness. (With the so-called “California Knockout,” a student holds his breath for 10 seconds to get light-headed, after which a pal squeezes his neck to put him out.)
Go Somerville!
blogging from the iBook
Just for yuks, I’m blogging from Mozilla on my iBook. The Blogger interface actually looks OK, although it doesn’t have some of the functionality it has under IE on Windows.
weird things
There are still some weird things going on with my desktop computer, but it’s mostly good now. I may let it do a full backup tomorrow, while I sit in front of the TV and play Final Fantasy VII. (I really need to finish that game.)
For years I’ve been using a desktop sticky note program called Stickies, by Steven De Toni. It’s freeware, and it’s always worked fine, doing exactly what I want it to do. Unfortunately, after the last reformat/reinstall on my desktop machine, it started acting weird. When I was typing a note, the cursor would always jump back to the beginning of the line every time I pressed the space bar. Sometimes, it would jump back to the end, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Urk. I investigated quite a few possibilities, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. It’s exactly the same executable I use on my work machine, so the problem has to stem from some outdated DLL somewhere that it’s referencing. If only I had an easy way of figuring out which DLL it was.
I eventually gave up and decided to find a new sticky note program. Maybe I’m just really picky, but I must have tried out 20 programs without finding even one I liked enough to keep. I think I’ve settled on Magic Notes. It’s shareware, so it’ll cost me $15, but that’s pretty reasonable. In some ways, it’s still not as good as Stickies, (for instance, you can’t bring one note to the foreground without bringing them all to the foreground) but it’s OK. So, on with my life!
Links
Disturbing links:
A Photographic History of Michael Jackson’s Face
Snap Your Desk
(Update 10/28/2018: both from here, and probably dead by now.)
new iBook
The iBook showed up this week, too. It’s great. OS X is much better than OS 9. It looks great, too. DVD playback is nice. The sound quality is good, if you use good headphones. Lots of stuff to explore… I haven’t really even looked at the underlying BSD stuff yet.
Lots of Computer Weirdness
Lots of stuff has been going on with my desktop computer over the last week. To make a long story short, I would up reformatting the drive, reinstalling XP, and reinstalling all my applications. Lots of work, but the thing’s mostly better now. I still can’t run chkdsk/f or Norton Disk Doctor without hosing things up, but I guess I can deal with that for a while.