Rocky (again)

Installing foo2slx proved surprisingly painless. Of course, I did it the hard way by putting it in /opt rather /usr. Even then, I got the CUPS print page printed in colour in under 10 minutes.

I then did a little calculation. A complete set of toner carts are 220 $ (plus shipping) for 3000 pages. That's roughly 7.25 cents per page. Using Lexmark toner, roughly 15 cents per page. Refilling by the carts by-hand brings it down to 3 cents a page pus my wasted time. So no matter how you look at it, this is an expensive toy. I think I'l put a kitty jar next to the printer to collect money on each print.

Rocky

A client gave me a brand new used printer. A brand new used colour laser Lexmark C500 network printer. I shall name it Rocky. Because it's a good deal heavier then Gunilla, my BW laser. In fact of all the computer's I've owned, the MIPS RISC/OS computer and maybe the IBM Model 90 where the only ones that weighed more then it.

It works. At least, the web server works and it will print up test pages. It being a first generation POS it uses some secret sacred line protocol that will require a bit of work to get running under Linux.

And 2 of the toner cards need cleaning. But that is just going to be fun.

But the really annoying part is that I'm going to have to spend a day or 3 doing colour calibration, because I'm that kind of compulsive that if I'm going to print out pictures, I want them to look good.

Pretty

This is what I want my next office to look like.

Google does it again

Impress me, that is. Look at this:

Not only do they flag recipe as a special search type, but they allow me to refine my search by ingredient, cooking time and calories. OK, that last one is stupid and the list of ingredients they do allow me to exclude/include are a bit short, it's still impressive.

While on the subject of Google, take a look at this:

See that subtle little blue bar above "Web"? What's more, they only waste 130 pixels before getting to search results.

Microsoft wastes 145 pixels, which is not bad considering how much more fluff they have.


And Yahoo! wastes 190 pixels. And has blinding blue links that I kinda, strangely enough.

Pixels are important. Everyone seems to have made the mistake of buying a wide screen LCD, vertical pixels are at a premium.

Trust the librarian

Daniel of course nails it right on the head.

Nice one, Microsoft

For the last 2 weeks or so, I've been staring at and thinking about the UI to my new startup's flagship product. Beyond the Beyond pointed me towards a piece by the Windows Phone 7 metro design language. So I Googled up some examples. And I find this really beautiful website.

Now, if there's something I enjoy more then complaining about computers, it's complaining about Microsoft. Not only that, I've been staring at websites for the last +16 years. Rarely has a website design made me go "woah, yes!" Black/white/grey/orange? Liberal use of whitespace? Visible clutter approaching zero? WOAH! YES!

What's more, the videos of the Metro design language I've seen make it look really nice. I would call it what happens when you mix Helvetica, iOS and the minimalism of the 1972 Munich Olympic pictograms.

PS: I was going to post a link to Apple's iOS 4 page, but I had to spend a few minutes refusing all the cookies they wanted to set. Fuck 'em.

Nice one Google

I might complain about computers a bit. OK, maybe I complain about computers a lot. But last night something jumped out at me that is Just Right. I was trying to find details of a Western Digital hard drive. I'd forgotten that they have wdc.com, as opposed to to the completely unused wd.com. Anyway, I googled "western digital" and noticed the following:

YES! That is so useful, it makes you wonder why they didn't have it before. Or did they and I only just noticed.

Also works: Asus, CPAN, boardcom, youtube. (Woah, 'you' returns youtube. OK, maybe not so strange, considering who owns youtube.)

I wonder what it takes to get the site-search treatment, because the following don't work: Linux, Perl, Apple, Wacom.