HP = Hardly Productive

Don’t ever buy an HP printer.  Ever.

We had an HP Photosmart  7350 inkjet printer.  Why didn’t we like it?

1. It was very slow. It would take at least 30 seconds to print one page of text.  When you’re in a hurry, that’s way too long.
2. Pictures would take in the order of 20 to 30 minutes to print.
3. HP has horrible support for Macs.  It is unbelievable, but when their printer driver ran on any of our Macs (G3s and G4s) the driver would peg the CPU at 100% the entire time the document was printing.
4. Just installing the printer on a Mac was a pain.  Their driver didn’t just show up in the list of HP drivers.  I had to drill down through several advanced options to load their special (read: lousy) driver.
5. I tried plugging the printer into our wireless base station to allow network printing.  No dice.  HP don’t play ‘dat.
6. I could have it set up connected to my spare iBook running as a print server, but why should I have to run ANOTHER server just to do that?  We ended up just having to plug directly into the printer if we ever wanted to print.  A big pain.

Our printer finally ran out of ink.  We decided that instead of paying $45 for new cartridges, to pay $50 for a new Canon IP1700 printer.  This was one of the best purchases we have made.  I am in printing heaven!

The printer was instantly recognized by our laptops as soon as I plugged it into our wireless base station.   I downloaded the driver from Canon and was good to go (no extra “special” software to “help” me print, just the driver, yay!)  I printed off my first page.  It took no more than 5 seconds.  The printing process barley added a few percentage points to my CPU usage.  It practically launched the page at me when it had finished!  Yes!  Supposedly, this printer will print 4″x6″ photos in one minute.  It also prints in a much higher resolution.

So, moral of the story: HP, while it may be cheap and fancy-looking, isn’t worth the hassle.

Thank You, Gilmore Girls!

Thank you, Gilmore Girls, for not only being a great show, but also for supporting my technology habbit.

Those who knew me in college know that one of the highlights of my week was TV Night. We’d all get together, get some Chinese takeout, and watch awesome shows, like CSI, Third Watch, Friends, and Dawson’s Creek. I ordered those shows in order of manliness.

Those who knew me in college will also note that I enjoyed Dawson’s Creek. I admit it, I am a sucker for evening soaps. “But, Derek,” you may ask, “Now that Dawson’s Creek is over, what show can possibly fill your TV viewing void?” I would respond, “GILMORE GIRLS.”

My man points just plumeted. I need to eat 5 Chipotle burritos to make up for that. It’s true, though. I took a bit of a TV hiatus when I first moved to Virginia. Partly because I had no one to spend TV Night with, and partly because I was holding out on buying cable/watching serious TV until I got a TV worthy of showing it. That never happened. What did happen is that I met Julie and she and I and her roommates would watch Gilmore Girls, Nanny 911 (later replaced by Supernanny), and Wife Swap.

At first, I only casually watched Gilmore Girls, but the more I watched it, the more I liked it. For me, it’s Lorolei’s wise cracks and both of the girls’ obscure references that make it worth watching. But then I get sucked into the story.

So how does this relate to technology?

My only complaint with TV is that it generally stinks.  In the Internet age, there are plenty of ways to filter out all of the garbage and get to the stuff you want.  For example, RSS feeds allow me to bypass busy homepages and just quickly skim through the articles.  The AdBlock plugin for Firefox allows me to turn off all those annoying ads on any site.  Popup blockers to a pretty good job blocking popups.  When you watch TV, you’re forced to sit through their ads and sit through cruddy shows just to get to the good stuff.  Plus, if you’re not at a TV at the prescribed time, you miss your stories.

What’s a nerd to do?

The solution to my problem came as my company got a new contract.  We were recently hired by another company who makes TiVo-like devices to get a software package called MythTV working on their hardware.  I watched in envy as my coworkers got to “test” the system on a 32″ LCD TV. 

I was intrigued.  Later, I visited my parents and found that they had purchased a new plasma TV.  My dad also had an old PC sitting around.  I put 2 and 2 together and decided I would put together a MythTV box for him.  I then realized that with the right TV tuner card, I could run MythTV on my old PC that’s just been sitting around lately.  SWEET.

I mentioned getting a TV tuner for my birthday to Julie.  She was equally intrigued at the possibility of recording the Gilmore Girls while we’re at band practice.  If I were president Bush, this would be like an “electoral mandate” to start a war. In my case, this was a mandate to put together a Personal Video Recorder!

At this point, after about a week’s work, I have a machine that can watch TV and record.  Now I just have to get the TV Output and the remote working and I’m all set.  Hopefully I can do this by 7:00 tonight. 

Fun With Google Earth

If you haven’t tried out Google Earth yet, you should. It’s free. It’s a program for Windows and Mac that lets you fly around a 3D globe and look at satellite images. It even has 3D terrain, so you can get a cool view of places like the Grand Canyon.

Before our wedding/honeymoon, I was constantly checking Google Earth to see if they would update the satellite photos of the Cancun area so I could get a better idea of where we would be going (OK, maybe I’m a bit OCD). I was disappointed because at the time, they only had detailed photos of the Cancun airport. Yesterday, I found out that Google rolled out a massive update to their imagery, so now they have nice, detailed pics of Cancun and the Riviera Maya. This morning, I put together a “sightseeing tour” of our wedding/honeymoon. Once you have Google Earth installed, right-click this link, choose “save as,” save it to your desktop, then open it and a series of placemarks will be loaded into Google Earth. Each placemark has a description of what happened at each location. Have fun!

P.S. For a really spectacular view of Chicago, turn on the “3D Buildings” layer in Google Earth by looking in the left-hand list under the “layers” section.

Great Weekend & Fab New Gear

This weekend was pretty darn nice. On Friday, I attended Richard’s birthday party at my old house in Annandale. He made us some great spaghetti and it was nice to see everybody again. Being in Reston, we hardly get to see anyone anymore.

***Here’s some technical mumbojumbo. If you’re bored, skip down a few paragraphs***

While I was there, Jeremy up and gave me his old G3 iMac that was sitting around. He said he didn’t want to invest the time to get OS X running on it (since it needed a firmware update). I gladly took it from him and set it up this weekend. It turns out it didn’t need the firmware update after all! It’s a 400MHz G3 and it came with 384MB of RAM and a 10GB hard disk. It came with OS 9.1 on it, so I upgraded it to OS 9.2.2 and installed OS X 10.4. Amazingly, 10.4 works great on it, in lieu of the fact that it’s 6 years old. It’ll be great to have a machine with OS 9 on it for Julie’s older music software. My challenge now is to get my MOTU Fastlane USB MIDI adapter working on it so she can plug it into the piano and write music using the keyboard.

All of the software updates were performed at my parents’ house. When I got it home last night, I pulled a 256MB stick of RAM from my old PC and popped it into the iMac. Voila! Now it has 512MB of RAM! I also pulled the Airport card from my iBook/web server to put into the iMac. However, the iMac needs a special daughter card to allow you to plug in the Airport PCMCIA card. I ordered the daughter card last night so it should get here in a few days.

Last week, I also purchased a new 100GB, 7200RPM hard drive for my PowerBook to replace its old 4200RPM, 80GB drive. It became clear that I need a way to back up my 27GB of music and 11GB of photos. The drive actually became corrupted at one point and I was lucky enough to be able to boot my PowerBook into target disk mode and copy all my music and photos to Julie’s iBook. I decided I would get a new drive for my laptop and put its old drive into an external firewire enclosure as a backup drive.

I had started to replace the drive last week, but it was fruitless. The last two screws holding in the drive were screwed way too tight, causing me to strip the heads of the screws, rendering them useless. I tried epoxy-ing some screws on top of the tight screws in the hopes of being able to turn the tight screws using fresh, epoxied-on screws, but that didn’t work. I took my PowerBook to my parents’ place on Saturday, and my dad took a dremel to it and ground a new slot into one of the screws and ground the head completely off of the other. Mission accomplished! My PowerBook now blazes its way through the arduous tasks I throw at it. It really does make a huge difference. I just can’t believe Apple is still only offering 5400RPM drives as standard in their new MacBook Pros. There’s really no reason to not use a 7200RPM drive. Especially if you’re into video.

***End of technical mumbojumbo***

So in addition to some fab new gear, Julie and I had a great time in Fredericksburg this weekend. Julie, my mom, and my sis got a spa treatment while us men (my dad and I) did cool computer projects and ate BBQ. For dinner, we went out to Ristorante Renato to celebrate Julie’s birthday a week early. It was pretty tasty. Some of the best lasagna I’ve had.

On Sunday, we went to Westmoreland Berry Farm way out in the Northern Neck in the farm country. It was such a beautiful day and the country out there is fantastic. We picked some huge, juicy strawberries and then had some strawberry-shortcake-ice cream sundaes with whipped cream. Very tasty!

Then we had to drive home through I-95 traffic. Ugh! Worst. Highway. Ever.

Word Up

Something that’s annoyed me lately: You check your email and open a message from someone. The message is a memo about something or a laundry list of tasks to complete. Instead of just writing the memo or the list of tasks in the email, the sender insists on putting it inside of a Word document.

The whole reason we have HTML-formatted email is so people can write out their pretty lists and images within an email, without forcing the receiver to open a $100 application just to read your message.

So, please, before you type up that memo in Word, ask yourself: do I really need to use Word?

Here are some pros and cons of using Word:
Pros:

• Word has fancy features for tables of contents, bookmarks, page numbering and headers, etc.
• Word is great for very large documents
• Word is great for “official” documents, like reports and application requirements documents

Cons:

• Your recipient must have a program that will open Word files
• Your recipient will be forced to save the file to their local disk, then open wait while Word opens the file
• Word files can carry viruses on Windows machines
• Word files consume more disk space than HTML emails
• You can use your email program to search through all your emails for things, instead of having to rely on Google Desktop Search or Windows File Search or searching through each Word document, one at a time

Not directed at anyone specific, just venting

Tasty!

Dan was kind enough to point me to del.icio.us. It took me a while to find out that del.icio.us = Delicious! Well, it certainly is quite a tasty site. You can download a small utility for your browser (usually it’s a bookmark) so that when you’re on a page you like, click the bookmark and fill out a small form to add it to your list of delicious links.

You’ll notice at the bottom of my side bar, I have a feed of my latest delicious links.

Technical Difficulties - Movable Type 3.2 and SELinux

If you’re sick of people blogging about their blogs, then skip this one. I know I am.

Amir ibn al-Kastner

Sorry, I’ve been a terrible blogger lately. If my lj were a kid, I’d be arrested for neglect.

On Thursday, I leave for Florida for my second cousin’s wedding! I’ll get to golf and see family. Yay!

So, here’s a run-down on the Matt visit:

1.) I saw Ben Stein at the Watergate. I wanted to say “hi” or something, but I’m too much of a wuss

2.) I got to play some more Ferrari F355 Challenge at Dave & Buster’s. It’s the coolest racing game ever! It has a clutch and manual shifter!

3.) It was an excuse to finally try some new restaurants.

4.) I finally saw Kill Bill vols. 1 & 2. I bought the first one on DVD the night it opened, and then we saw the midnight showing of vol. 2. Very good movies! (and oh yeah, Uma is hot!)

That’s about it.

So anyway, it’s been a relatively relaxing week. Got to catch up with my local friends (finally saw Matchstick Men - was OK) and ate at a cool place with my parents. It is called the Flat Top Grill and is just across the street. If you’re in Minneapolis, you should eat at Khan’s Mongolian Barbeque - Flat Top is similar, only it tries to be trendy and upscale, whereas Khan’s is good old stir fry (with more buffet options).

I finally have my own internet connection, but I can only use one computer at a time on it, as I have no router set up. I could go home and resurrect The Beast (a crappy old computer from 1995) or I could buy a fancy new Airport Extreme base station. Hmmmm… Actually, I bet a first-generation Airport would be just as good configuration-wise. Hmmmmmmmmm….

Some ‘fads’ around here are Thai food or Pho. A bunch of Thai restaurants have sprung up. You’re not cool unless you’ve had Thai food! I’ll have to try it some time.

Pho (pronounced, “fu”) is, as far as I can tell, some kind of Vietnamese soup with a bunch of stuff in it. I suppose I could look it up….OK, it looks like Pho is basically a step above Ramen.

I have been to The Queen Bee - a Vietnamese restaurant. They had some wicked pork that tasted like beef jerky, yet very tender; amazing orange chicken; and fish that had a sesame chicken-like sauce that was also incredible.

There is a Kirspy Kreme factory not too far away. I’m awfully tempted to go one morning. From what I hear, if you go in the morning while they’re still making the donuts, they will serve you donuts straight off of the donut-making machine’s conveyor belt. They are allegedly very warm, gooey, and delicious.

All this talk about food. You’d think I’m starving, but I guess I really have nothing else to talk about. I guess that happens when all I eat is pita and hummus and soup and the occasional Stouffer’s french bread pizza.