My HP Printer Driver has MPD

My HP printer driver has Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Why? Because while my printer – an HP Deskjet F4185 All-in-One – scans and copies everything just fine, its printing functionality is seriously messed up.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I want to scan a photograph: I’ll put the photo on the scanning glass, turn the printer on, wait a bit for Vista to recognize the USB-connected device, run the HP Solution Centre software, and click the ‘Scan Picture’ button. The scanner with then do a quick scan of the entire scannable area after which I will select the bit I want scanned and will click ‘Accept’. The photo will now get scanned and saved to the ‘My Scans’ folder. Nice and simple, eh?

Now, let’s try printing a document: I’ll start Microsoft Word, type in some text, and click the print icon. This will pop-up the print dialogue box and I’ll select ‘HP Deskjet 4100 series’ from my list of printers. I will then wait about 4-5 minutes while Word “connects” to the printer. Once it does, I’ll click ‘Print’ and my document will get printed immediately.

Yes, for some reason the scanner driver connects and communicates with the computer just fine (and pretty much instantaneously) but the printer driver takes ages to do the same thing. Now if that isn’t MPD – in the computer software sense, of course – then I don’t know what is.

The good news: This is a “known issue” that HP is working to resolve.

The bad news: They haven’t fixed it yet.

The interim solution: Either I be willing to wait 4-5 minutes to print every document (which will be a real pain) or I copy the document(s) I want printed over to Nadia’s netbook (an Acer Aspire One that’s running Office 2007 on Windows XP) and print them off in just a few seconds.

Such is life.

Public Webcams: More Melbourne Cams

After writing about all those public webcams, I thought I'd look around for other Australian feeds and, sure enough, there are plenty more out there:

Also, I found a few other webcam lists that are worth checking out:

And finally, if you really want to geek out, NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor (STS 126) is currently delivering equipment to the International Space Station (details here) and you can watch everything they're doing live on NASA TV :)

Public Webcams

I love public webcams that show you what's going on in the rest of the world in realtime. And while there are plenty of practical applications for such video streams -- like checking surfing conditions on remote beaches, keeping an eye on traffic, or general security and surveillance -- I particularly love the ones that are there either for tourism and marketing purposes or simply there for the heck of it. For example, I love the new Shiba Inu Puppy Cam that's been making the rounds of the websphere recently.

There are lots of public camera feeds (or streams, whatever you want to call them) availble on the Internet and one of the best places to find them is via the EarthCam website. Otherwise just search Google for, say, "live webcams" (remembering to ignore the adult ones) or download something like Webcam Saver that shows you a whole bunch of streams from around the world as your computer's screen saver (though this software is trialware so you have to pay for it if you want to keep on using it). If you want more specific user-created streams, check out Ustream.Tv and maybe Justin.tv as well.

Australian Webcams

There are a number of Australian webcams too, and though the live Melbourne skyline camera is currently inoperative, you can see awesome time lapse montages of the city -- showing an hour's worth of photos taken over the previous hour -- on OMNIConnect's Melbourne Webcam page.

For more practical stuff, you have the Port of Melbourne cameras that show you shipping traffic from the Shipping Management Centre in Melbourne and surf conditions from the Port Lonsdale Lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. You can also view the latest traffic conditions within Melbourne on the CityLink website: click on the 'CityLink Webcam' link at the bottom of the right column of the CityLink home page or view all the video streams on this page (which refreshes every ten seconds but doesn't have any labels on the photos).

Good stuff.

UPDATE: I wrote about some more webcams in a follow-up post.

New Keyboard

I spend a lot of time on the computer and do a lot of typing so, as you would expect, keyboards are very important to me. Unfortunately, the keyboard that came with the new desktop PC that I bought was terrible. It was loud and clacky, it wasn't very comfortable to type on, its multimedia keys were both irritatingly-placed [1] and only minimally configurable, and its Home-End and Page Up-Page Down key pairs were in a non-standard location.

So today I finally got sick of it and bought myself a nice, comfortable keyboard that I am really enjoying typing on. I got the Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 which is comfortable, well-designed, completely configurable (if you download the IntelliType Pro software that goes with it), and low-cost. I've used it in the past so I knew what I was getting though, in general, all of Microsoft's hardware products are pretty awesome.

Ah yes, life is good.

[1] For example, its sleep button (which would put the computer into the new Vista sleep mode) was located in the top-left corrner where you would normally find the Escape key. It took me a whole week to stop putting the computer to sleep when all I wanted to do was close a dialog box! Most irritating.

TED Marathon in Melbourne

There's a TED Marathon being held in Melbourne on 13 December. Check out its Upcoming event profile for details but, basically, it'll be a "public screening of videos from the annual TED conferences held in Long Beach, California, with an opportunity for discussion between videos." The organizers also plan to launch a website where you can suggest specific talks for the screening. I'll let you know when they launch that.

I find TED talks hugely inspiring, thought provoking, moving, and informative and watch almost all the videos the TED people upload every week. I also hope to attend an actual conference some day...but who knows when (or if) that'll happen. For the time being, though, a local screening of TED videos is a pretty awesome idea and I hope everyone who reads this blog decides to attend.

This Sucks

This sucks.

Issues with Windows Live Writer

First, the awesome Windows Live Writer -- which I'd recently upgraded to the even more awesome Windows Live Writer Beta -- no longer works with my blogs. Every time I add a post using WLW, all the HTML angle brackets get stripped from the code so you get a lot of junk.

For example, if I was to post the following line of text using WLW:
Hello World! Google.com

What would appear on the blog would be:
pHello World! a href="http://google.com"Google.com/a/p

Which, in HTML, would have read:
<p>Hello World! <a href="http://google.com>Google.com</a></p>

So take the HTML version and strip off all the angle brackets that actually make the HTML tags what they are and you get what actually gets posted to the blog.

No one's quite sure why this is happening (though some people have found temporary workarounds) or whether it's a WLW, WordPress, or other technology (e.g. PHP) issue. However the issue itself has been documented on the Microsoft support forums. Here's hoping they find a fix soon because I much prefer WLW to writing blogs posts using WordPress's blog post writing interface.

Issues with WordPress and/or Fantastico

Second, while researching the WLW issue, I upgraded all three of the blogs hosted on the insanityworks.org domain to WordPress version 2.6.3. I do all my blogging platform upgrades through the Fantastico script library system that my web host provides for this purpose and I've never had issues in the past. This time, however, while both Nadia's blog and this blog got upgraded just fine, something went wrong as I was upgrading my professional blog so that's now out of commission. I've contacted my web host's support people for help and they're restoring it to its previous version but this does mean that my ACME blog will be down for at least a couple of days. Which sucks.

R.I.P. Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, one my all-time favourite authors, passed away a few days ago.

I loved his books and the way he wrote them: they were exciting, inspiring, and a whole lot of fun. Indeed, I've read all his fictional works though I've only read one of his non-fiction ones (must remedy that). I've also watched almost all of his films and remember being blown away by 'West World', 'Jurassic Park', and 'Twister'. Heck, I even remember the ending scene from 'The Andromeda Strain' which I watched on TV back in the mid-80s! I must now watch the three films that I've missed.

You can read more about Crichton here:

Rest in Peace, Michael.

Tetris!

I love Microsoft: The original Windows 3.x version of Tetris (the one made in 1990) runs just fine in Windows Vista :)  I've actually been carrying that version of Tetris -- all 76kB of it -- around with me since the mid 90s. Of course it requires quite a bit of window resizing to get it just right on a 22" wide screen!

Why do I and so many other people care so much about this game? The good folk at Graph Jam said it best:

Reasons to Play Tetris

A friend and I even organized regular Tetris tournaments at our undergraduate college during the late 90s which were hugely popular. Also, Tetris is the only game I've ever bought for my mobile phone. Yes, I am addicted.

Though, really, Tetris is less like a drug and more like a good cup of tea: it's perfect for any occasion. Whether you want to wake yourself up, relax before going to bed, keep your hands busy while talking on the phone or listening to a podcast, or do something when you have nothing else to do, Tetris is always the answer.

So thank you Microsoft and, more importantly, than you Alexey Pajitnov for creating such an awesome game.

New Desktop PC!

Back in April 2007 (in my third post on this blog, in fact) I wrote that my laptop had died and that I was stuck using my mother's ancient, somewhat-battered laptop. My plan was (and still is) to get a job and then buy myself a nice, high-end tablet PC.

However, over the last couple of months, my mother's laptop started acting up so I had no choice but to find a replacement for it. I didn't want to buy a tablet PC because I don't yet have a job so I'd rather not dip into our savings too much (and I'm not willing to buy anything but a high-end tablet PC). Instead, I bought a cheap desktop PC that I could work on in the interim and upgrade in the future. I was always going to buy a desktop for home use, I just hadn't planned on doing that right now. But as plans tend to do, this one changed so now I am the proud owner of an HP Pavilion desktop PC:

New Desktop PC

It's reasonably low-end as desktop PCs go: with a 2.4GHz Dual Core Intel Pentium Processor instead of a Core 2 Duo and, importantly, integrated graphics instead of a separate graphics card. Fortunately, this isn't much of a problem because I don't plan on getting into computer games, high-end graphics editing, or power intensive computing just yet. I do plan on recording and editing videos and doing some basic graphics editing but all that will work fine on this system. In fact, this setup runs the Windows Vista Aero interface without a hitch so it's not like I'm suffering here!

In other areas, it's a pretty kick-ass system: with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 360GB 7,200RPM hard drive, a CD/DVD reader and writer, and the usual set of ports, card readers, and networking options. The best part: it came with a 22" wide screen LCD with a 1680x1050 native resolution :)  After using a 15" screen for a couple of years and then a 12.1" screen over the last year this big screen is fricking awesome!

In fact, the whole system is pretty awesome and I'm having a great time using it. Woo hoo! :)

Tablet PC Update: Good & Bad News

If you've been reading this blog for a while then you'll know that I'm dying to get myself a high-performance tablet PC. I can't afford one right now but, as soon as I can (which I'm hoping is very soon), I plan on getting myself a Toshiba Portege M700. Regarding that, I have some good news and some bad news.

Exchange Rates

First, the bad news. I was planning on buying the M700 from the US (by ordering it online from Portable One) because the configuration available in Australia is both underpowered and overpriced. You can get a significantly more powerful configuration for an overall lower price (i.e. even after you add customs fees and international courier charges) if you order one from the US and have it shipped to Australia.

However, after the recent financial market "issues" and the US-Australian dollar exchange rate changing, ordering the M700 from the US will now cost me a few hundred dollars extra. Bummer. Here's hoping the exchange rate swings back the other way when I do actually getting around to ordering one of these :)

An Upgrade!

On the other hand, there's some really good news. Toshiba recently launched a follow-up to the M700: the M750! The new model is physically similar to the old one but, under the hood, the M750 kicks just a little more ass:

  • The processor (still an Intel Core 2 Duo) has been upgraded from the T8xxx line to the P8xxx line so instead of, say, a 2.4GHz T8300 processor you would now get a 2.4GHz P8600 processor. What's the big deal about that? The P8600 will let you use Windows Vista 64-bit and will give you access to all 4GB of RAM instead of the 3.2GB you had access to with the T8300.

  • The RAM has also been given a speed boost from 667MHz to 800MHz and the standard hard drive speed has also been bumped up from 5,400RPM to 7,200RPM (though I would've ordered the higher-speed hard drive with the M700 anyway).

  • The graphics engine also gets an upgrade so, instead of the Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, you now get the 4500MHD which is not only twice as fast it also supports full HD video (1080p) natively.

  • You also get a gigabit LAN connection, a newer Bluetooth version (which faster transfer speeds), and a combined USB/eSATA port (eSATA is great for external hard drives as its data transfer speed is much faster that USB transfer speeds) which is also a sleep-and-charge port (this lets you charge accessories plugged into this port even if your laptop is off).


All in all, the M7xx series -- which was already one of the most powerful tablet PC lines in the market -- now packs an even greater punch with the M750. And the best part? This new, upgraded M750 costs the same as the old M700! Awesome.

[Quick caveat: The M750 isn't selling in custom configurations right now and is, so far, available only in the US and Canada. Also, it doesn't yet have a multi-touch screen -- i.e. with both pen and touch input -- but I'm hoping they'll add that to this model very soon.]

UPDATE: According to Craig Pringle, the M750 has a dual digitizer that has both active and resistive touch. This means you can use both a stylus and your finger on the screen. Excellent.

Full Episodes of 'Heroes' on Yahoo!7

The third season of the excellent NBC TV series Heroes started last week in Australia. And, in an incredibly awesome move on their part, you can now watch full episodes of the show on Yahoo!7 :)  Woo hoo!

Now if only Channel Nine would let you watch full episodes of The Mentalist on nineMSN and Channel Ten would let you watch full episodes of House on ten.com.au. Oh well. Some day...(hopefully soon).

James Nachtwey's story

In 2007, photographer James Nachtwey won the TED Prize which awarded him $100,000 and "one wish to change the world". His wish was:

I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.

On 3 October, Nachtwey's story will break -- both online and around the world. Melburnians can view his story at Federation Square while the rest of you should check the TED Prize Event Location page to see if it's being shown at your location (it's on in 16 countries). If not, you can always view it online:

For more:

I Really Like 'Rush'

I am "seriously" impressed with Channel Ten's new police action/drama Rush. The premise is fun (and makes for lots of good action), the writing is good, the storylines are interesting (yes, I know, we're only two shows in but it looks good nonetheless), the characters are interesting, the cast is excellent (plus Claire van der Boom is gorgeous), and the production is fantastic (I love the immersion that handheld camera work gives viewers).

The best part: all of the show's episodes are online along with a bunch of other behind-the-scene videos -- that too for free! Channel Ten really kicks ass for doing this for so many of its biggest shows.

And speaking of good cop shows, I also like Channel 7's City Homicide but its broadcast timing is such that I haven't watch more than a few episodes of it. I guess I'll have to wait till it comes out on DVD.