Sunday, August 10, 2003

Laser Goodness -- 8:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've wanted a laser printer for a long time. I'm really sick of sinking money into inkjet cartridges. I just happened to be looking at the Samsung ML-17xx printers yesterday and saw that they even come with a Linux driver! Whilst perusing the Best Buy (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) ad this morning, I saw that they had the ML-1710 for $99 after rebate. Talk about a steal. It is mine.

My only gripes with the printer are that it doesn't come with a USB cable, it only comes with a 1000 page "starter" cartridge, and I have to load up their driver configuration app to print something on legal paper (thankfully, I only do that once a week).

Other than those minor quibbles, I really like it. At $99, the printer is basically free since I won't be buying ink for a long time. Installation was a snap. I mounted their CD, did the old sh /mnt/cdrom/setup.sh routine, then ran linux-config to add the printer (which it automatically detected). Print test page. Done. I've never had an easier time setting a device in Linux. I fired up OpenOffice.org's spadmin and pointed it to the PPD file for the printer and I was printing in no time. I'm using the Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 driver in WordPerfect 8 for Linux on the advice of this guy. It works great.

There is some banding on it when printing complex graphics, but the only graphics I print often are clip art which aren't affected. Text is nice and crisp and prints lightning fast. Color me sold.

UPDATE! After a reboot, now a window comes up everytime I send a print job to the printer so I can adjust any settings (including paper size) that I want. Cool. Why can't more companies support Linux like this?

Saturday, August 9, 2003

Blues All Day -- 1:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm listening to a number of blues discs that I downloaded from EMusic. I made a quicky m3u file so I could play them all randomly. That's over eight hours of music. With their new variable encoding rate, all of them fit on a single CD-R. Very nice. If you are interested, these are the disc names. All of them are compliations of lesser-known blues musicians from around the country. Blues Guitar Spotlight, Chicago Blues and Chicago Blues 2 (both are two disc sets), Blues for a Barbecue, Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues (acoustic), and my personal favorite Texas Blues Guitar Summit. My favorite tracks are Eddie C. Campbell's Cha-Cha in Blues on the first Chicago Blues disc and Andrew Jr. Boy Jones' Fast Woman on Texas Blues Guitar Summit. It makes me wish I could actually play my guitar.

Resurrection Project -- 1:33 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Slashdot posted about this guy who fixed a dead hard drive by replacing the logic board. Naturally, some /.ters posted about how they do this seven or eight times a day. Still, I think it's a cool (and surprisingly simple) hack. I would've quit.

Having said that, my monitor is starting to give indications that it is going the way of all flesh. Naturally, the warranty ran out about 1/2 year ago. Granted, it is a relatively inexpensive monitor, but I don't revel in the idea of replacing it. Maybe I'll have to use some of my child tax credit check for a new one before this one croaks.

Jedi Academy Interview -- 10:03 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Action Vault interviewed Raven's Kenn Hoekstra about their forthcoming Jedi Academy. Here's a snip on the current status of the game, as well as when LucasArts first talked to Raven about another Jedi Knight game:

Discussions with Raven to do another Star Wars game began late in the development of Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and we started working on Jedi Academy soon after finishing Jedi Outcast.

Currently we are post-beta, working towards gold. The game is slated to come out this fall and will be released worldwide - by LucasArts in North America and Activision in the rest of the world.

I just hope this will run under WineX as well as Jedi Outcast does :) Thanks Blue's News.

Past Two Days' News

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