Tonight I was picking up some groceries on the way home from work at the Superstore on Dundas and Trafalger. On my way in with my green bins a guy was standing with a shopping cart that had a computer with a touch screen mounted on the handle. He showed me how to flip through the current flyer and how to search for products in the store and off I went.
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I purchased a Canon PIXMA MX860 printer after the holidays during the boxing week sale. I have been looking for a printer/scanner/fax for the house for a while. We’ve lived without one for 3 years but every now and then I want to print or copy a document and it has become annoying enough that I’ve decided to do something about it. A co-worker made fun of me for wanting a fax in this day and age. While I agree with him, every now and then a fax comes in handy – like dealing with realtors.
I was looking for a laser all in one, but the cost of those with wireless network and a fax is north of $400 CAD. Way more than I was comfortable paying for a home office machine.
This device has great reviews – there were a few negatives concerning the print quality but for $100 CAD on sale from Best Buy I can’t see how it gets much better than that.
The big issue I found after unpacking it and loading in the print head and inks is that there is no way to configure the networking of the device from Linux. I had to use the packaged window application to get the device set up on my LAN since I have secured my wireless network. But once the device joined the network I haven’t had any problems printing. I haven’t tried scanning with the Canon drivers (europe location) yet but will up date when I have to figure that out. Sane might already have the drivers set up to go.
For those looking for something to do, you could probably try to sniff the communication of the printer on the USB port. Another thing that would be great is to sniff out the communication of ink levels and other admin tasks between a windows machine and the printer. My install of cups doesn’t seem to handle the feedback.
I haven’t tried the fax, scanner, or media readers yet but the copier and printer work as expected.
I modified our PPD file to do grey scaling by default to save on colour ink. If you want a colour copy you have to change the advanced setting. I can post the change to the PPD file if anyone needs it but you can find them online.
Tonight I forgot my skates at home for my hockey game in Burlington. After discovering that at the rink I started to drive home Eastbound on the 403/QEW just before the Kerr Pontiac dealership. I noticed a ball of light with a tail falling out of the sky down to the earth directly in front of me some time before 8:57pm – according to my vehicles clock.
It wasn’t very big — distance would have been a factor in estimating size and speed — but the tail was pretty long and it extinguished itself about 10 to 20 seconds before I estimated it should have impacted the ground. I was able to stare slack jawed at it for about 5 seconds after noticing it out my wind shield until it went out.
I have no idea what it could have been, but the trajectory was definitely downwards towards the earth but it wasn’t directly down, it had a really large smooth arc towards the north side of the highway. I’m guessing it could have been a firework, some debris from space. I have no idea. And I also don’t know where to report something like this. Maybe I imagined the whole thing.
Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.
For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?
The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.
As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.
Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.
We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.
Remember when your Mom used to make you write a list to Santa. Well now in the digital age I can do it online, update and make changes up to the night of Christmas. Of course that doesn’t mean I won’t get a lump of coal, but what can you do:
If it looks like most of my gifts could come from MEC – you’d be right.
That’s right, I saw snow. That means it is time to start work on the winter beard.
Sorry Lo, but I have the means to keep my face warm. I know at least one woman that likes me in my beard, and it isn’t my Mom (although she might). Chantelle is a sucker for the beard as Grant will attest to.
I took a step back from all the convinces of modern day life and bought a fountain pen.
Not that I’m giving up electricity and computing or anything but this pen is somewhere in the middle. It uses a medium nib (the tip part) and ink cartridges instead of filling a well in the body of the pen from an eye drop dispenser. I can buy a well adapter if I ever wanted to use scented ink or blood to “seal a deal” — but I don’t see that happening in the near future.
I did a little research on introductory pens and found a site that recommended a Lamy Al-Star pen as a great starter pen that is rugged for daily use and the ink writes really well on moleskin paper – which is my notebook of choice.
So far I’m happy with it — when I opened the pen and punctured the cartridge I got ink on my fingers.
Good ol’ Bobby Tables. A good giggle from XKCD.
This one had a few of us rolling on the floor laughing at work today.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.
But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.
On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.
Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html
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