Not bad, Mr. Mieville, not bad. I didn’t know if I’d like a non-Bas-Lag book by China Mieville, but Embassytown was a very interesting world.

Set in a world far, far in the future long after the human diaspora (after faster-than-light travel is discovered), Embassytown tells the story of a group of humans who have taken residence on a planet inhabited by a race they call only the “Hosts.” The name is given in deference to the permission the humans have obtained to live on the Hosts’ planet — a permission obtained with some difficulty, since the Hosts’ do not recognise other creatures than themselves as being sentient.

There’s also a brief B-plot about the “Immer,” which sounds a lot like the “Immaterium” present in the Warhammer 40K universe… :p Basically it’s a sort of sub-space that a craft can enter to travel long distances — very, very long distances, such as from galaxy to galaxy, halfway across the universe. The main character is one of the rare people who can pilot ships through the Immer, as most peoples’ minds go “slack” and they vomit uncontrollably the entire time they’re inside of it.

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Found one on Ebay, bought it (for 1/3 of the price of a NeatReceipts model), and plugged it in… and of course it didn’t work.  This is the world of Ubuntu with proprietary peripherals, of course.  The “Simple Scan” program that’s built-into Ubuntu recognized the make and model, oddly enough, but it wouldn’t scan, throwing up an error message whenever I tried.

I did a little bit of searching, and found a site that talked about it: http://www.fishandcross.com/blog/?p=844

Apparently, all you need to do is download the driver file mentioned from the site at http://gkall.hobby.nl/gt6816-07b3-0412.html and copy it to your /usr/share/sane/gt68xx folder.  Then, just start up the Simple Scan program again, and scan away!  Works really well — doesn’t auto-crop or anything like the provided Windows software does, but that’s cool.  I’ll take it.

To Visitors:  If you’re visiting this page, trying to find information about how to get this scanner to work, and you’re trying it years after this article was written, I can’t guarantee these instructions will work — if you know Ubuntu, stuff changes from version to version sometimes.  Hacks and fixes that’ll work one year won’t always work the next.

I largely credit that old computer to where I am today — it wasn’t just the Macintosh’s ease-of-use and small learning curve, it was also, literally, the spirit of the designers and tinkerers that worked at Apple computer that existed in that machine.

The Macintosh was a computer that you could delve beneath the surface, when you wanted to — you could modify code, the way applications worked, the modules and extensions that started up when the machine booted — you had, when you wanted to, access to all the tools that the designers themselves used to create that very Macintosh you were using right then and there.

There’s a whole generation of programmers who got their start in this very way, and for that, I do have Apple to thank.

CELEBRATION OVER, CRITICISM BELOW:

And that’s the very reason why Apple’s current practices today kinda scare me. Apple’s products today are precisely not about giving the user tools and control — with each new version of MacOSX, each new iPhone that comes out, there’s less and less that tinkerers like me can do with it.

There’s less and less that the next generation of tinkerers can do with it. How would the next Steve Jobs design anything on an iPod Touch? On an iPad? How would a budding application developer get anyone to use a new application he’s designed, when people can only install apps via a curated, policed, application “store?”

I thank Apple for starting me on the path to where I am today, but I thank companies like Google for keeping that spirit alive, when it becomes increasingly evident that Apple either isn’t able to or just no longer wants to.

1) Enable Auto-Logins (optional)

All depends upon how you set things up, but you may want to run everything easily through a default user account — just go to “System > Administration > Login Screen”, and set it up.  (These instructions are for the GUI of Ubuntu, of course — I’m not a CLI-queen, and would rather edit things quickly through an interface that I’m familiar with than search forums for hours trying to find the esoteric commands necessary to do this stuff manually, sorry.)

2) Enabling Networking With Automatic User Login

Now, you may have set up automatic logins, but noticed that you always have to enter in your account password manually anyway once your network tries to connect — took me a while to figure out this one, but just go to “System > Preferences > Network Connections”, and in the type of connection you’ll be using, make sure the option for “Available to all users” is selected at the bottom.  That’s it.  I feel dumb for not figuring this out long ago.

3) Enabling VNC to Run Headless

As per the instructions I found here, you have to

1. Edit “/etc/gdm/Init/Default” to include the line “/usr/lib/vino/vino-server &” right before “exit 0″
2. Edit “/etc/gdm/custom.conf” (or “/etc/gdm/gdm.conf” if older than Ubuntu 10.04) and add “KillInitClients=false” — this will prevent any existing VNC clients from being killed if you do login on the server physically
3. Do a “sudo vino-preferences” and enable the necessary stuff

More to come, including the Minecraft configuration scripts!

When you print, instead of selecting the default printer, just select “custom” and type “/usr/bin/lp” into the box that appears to the right.  Printing will continue normally.

Just one more thing in the list of easy fixes that never make it into releases of Linux.

[via Can print from most apps, but not from Acrobat reader, and not duplex from Evince - Linux Forums]

Just a little tip on how to get your familiar Windows XP “no logons” necessary behavior in Windows 7.  Basically, you just type “control userpasswords2” into a command prompt, and uncheck the checkbox!

God, I can’t get enough of CJ Cherryh’s world. This book follows the life of a group of miners who live their lives in the “Belt” here in our own solar system. The theme of “heavy time” — necessary time they must spend in 1g gravity aboard space stations in between mining runs (there’s no artificial gravity in this world) — is ongoing throughout the novel.

It’s a story set in the time before the Company/Union wars, when life was tough for those ruled by the Earth Company, and personal ships in the belt were largely at the mercy of directed “beams” of energy (caught by large sails) sent from mining station HQ’s. The people are hesitant about the future — they know the strength of the Union that lives in the “Beyond,” as they call it, and they live in constant fear of some great big rock being dropped into their system at relativistic speeds, aimed straight towards Earth.

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Was a very good book — very good continuation of the last one that focused mainly on Rand (this one was all Mat and Perrin). Like I’m sure some others may feel, I felt that the final, glorious showdown between Mat and those that lived in the world of the Aelfin and Eelfin was a little… rushed. Still good, just rushed. I mean, we had been waiting for this showdown and the possible rescuing of Moraine for a long, long, long time (when did she disappear — the bloody 5th book?)

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Great book — I’ve got to read more of this series. It’s part of the "Ringworld" universe, but doesn’t deal with that story line directly. It’s a bit of a side-story dealing with, well, the dealings of the Puppeteer race and their dealings with humankind before the Ringworld was found. Great writing, great characters.

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Honestly, this book is like "The Jungle" for our times, just it takes place in PC farms in Malaysia, India, and China. Interspaced a few times throughout the story of the characters are a few chapters about the economic principles of an increasingly multi-national world, written in a easy to understand fashion. The chapters that take place in China seem authentic with the current economic conditions there (low-educated workers streaming in from the countryside to be taken advantage of in the city-based factories).

The chapters in China with "Jie" (the pirate-broadcasting girl) — her introduction at all, really — seem a bit contrived, but hey: it’s a story. I’ll forgive it, and it helps move the book along.

I particularly liked the chapters dealing with the MMORPG "headquarters" — I can almost imagine a room like controlling World of Warcraft, subtly changing game mechanics and coefficients to keep players hooked.

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