After six months or so of being wowed by a little portable scanner in a doctor’s office, the spouse and I finally decided to buy one. I wanted one that’s compatible with Ubuntu, since that’s our main OS around home, so I did a little research, and found some info about the Plustek Opticslim m12 (it’s the same model that the “NeatReceipts” company rebrands for their own scanners).
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.
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 started programming over 20 years ago on an old Macintosh II computer that my father practically fished out of the trash at his job.
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.
I’ve been getting an Ubuntu server running recently (FINALLY), and in order to make it run headless (without keyboard, mouse, or monitor), there’s a few things one needs to do:
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.
Edit “/etc/gdm/Init/Default” to include the line “/usr/lib/vino/vino-server &” right before “exit 0”
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
Do a “sudo vino-preferences” and enable the necessary stuff
More to come, including the Minecraft configuration scripts!
Just installed Adobe Acrobat on linux and it’s not printing? Just giving you a crappy error message when you try to print?
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.
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!
However, none of the solutions works, and even on my version of Linux, Ubuntu 10.04, probably the most common one around, the .DEB files did next to nothing. They didn’t setup Ubuntu’s printer configuration so that the printer showed, nor did they enable the drivers to be found when I tried to install the printer manually. (The Brother HL-2270DW is apparently so new that Ubuntu doesn’t have any default drivers in its repositories.)
What did work? Selecting HL-2170W from the default drivers list in Ubuntu. Seems to work fine! :P
Just a few more that have been abandoned since the 4.0.1 patch:
Mapnotes
Apparently, MapNotes is no more. Trying to find an addon that will import my many years of notes that I’ve made with this addon. (It’s seriously been one of the most helpful for questing with alts.)
I have a long history with this addon — for the longest time, I used it WAY back in the day, and then with the release of TBC, it stopped working. Thankfully, there was “Metamap,” which imported MapNotes map points just fine. (Metamap doesn’t even have a Curse page — I used to have to download it directly from the author’s website.)
However, it in turn stopped working with version 3.0 of WoW, but MapNotes came back with a fan update! (A fan update is where a fan of a defunct addon is able to get in contact with the original addon maintainer, and gets them to give them control over it.) But, now MapNotes no longer works anymore, either, and I’m stuck trying to find a replacement. Looking at HandyNotes for now — apparently there’s some way to get it to import MapNotes points.
SellValue and SellFish
Long live SellValue! I used this addon for the LONGEST time, and it was an absolute lifesaver.
Out questing and need to know if that stack of gray shit you’ve been collecting is worth it to keep? SellValue would tell you how much it was worth (dependent upon prices you had seen before). This addon worked for the longest time, even though it hadn’t been updated since forever.
Even though it was still working wit version 3.0, I started using an updated addon called “SellFish” — however, as you can see, WoW integrated this functionality into the core game with version 3.2, so there’s no need for either addon anymore!
AnnoyRP
AnnoyRP was a neat little plugin everyone started using back in my heavy guild-RP days (god, that sounds so dorky). It had amazing functionality — based upon certain events in the game that you set it to notice, i.e. mounting up, casting a certain spell, it would /s certain things.
For instance, you could set it to say “Hi Ho, Silver, Away!” every time you mounted up (or a certain random amount of times, or even a certain random choice out of a group of phrases). As you can imagine, it was LOADS of fun.
It stopped working some time ago, but the author made Chatterbox to make up for it. Did the same thing, worked great. However, now the author has left WoW (back in July over the whole RealID thing, which sadly enough didn’t even happen!), so who knows? It seems to work fine for now, but that could stop at any minute with version 4.0.2 of WoW.
Used it for years — loved the waypoint lines that it would make on your map (tracking routes from one quest to another), and the waypoint arrow at the top of the screen. Now built-in to WoW, and there’s no need for it anymore. Even the dev is leaving it.
Also built-in to WoW now, although the implementation isn’t as good as the addon’s — you can’t look at someone else and zoom into them, for instance. This was one of those addons that, while being a mild modification to the game UI, you still found yourself using it nearly every single time you logged on.
Hopefully, there won’t be more to come! :P
Update!
One more: PerformanceFu. Hasn’t updated in about 2 years. Liked it because it would let you see some cool stats right from your FuBar – I’ve noticed that his seems to be built-in to the standard WoW button menu now. So long!
After finally deciding to upgrade my venerable HTC G1 (which I reviewed here initially) that had served me well over the past year and a bit, I decided to go with the Motorola Droid. It’s not the fastest anymore, and it sure as hell ain’t the prettiest (neither was the G1 — what is it with me and ugly phones?), but it’s the new Android phone for me.
Why the Droid?
Why the Droid? Well, it’s already been out for about six months or so, and has developed quite the hacking community. Even my favorite ROM for the G1, the Cyanogenmod, has a version available for it.
It’s easily rooted (mine was rooted in about 24 hours).
It comes stock with a 16GB SD card — very cool. No need to upgrade this thing right off the bat like there was to the G1 and its pitiful 1GB card.
It has loads of customkernels for it, some enabling the stock 550MHz chip to be overclocked to 1.3GHz, and even some that run at the stock 550MHz but with a much lower CPU voltage (enabling your battery to last much longer). This phone isn’t going to be left behind in terms of speed for a while — I’m betting Motorola is even going to issue an update for it one day that will up the speed of the processor just a bit for newer versions of Android.
It has a hardware keyboard — not a very good hardware keyboard, sadly enough, but it’s good enough for things like low-level hacking of the ROM and telnet/ssh/console sessions, which is what I needed it for.
[This is probably my biggest gripe for the Droid — the hardware keyboard seriously sucks. The keys are all flat, not spaced apart, and it’s honestly quicker to type with the onscreen keyboard, which I find myself doing nearly all of the time. The G1’s hardware keyboard was an absolute dream to type on compared to the Droid.]
It’s received fairly steady Android updates, and now is one of only a few devices running Android 2.1 (including the HTC Incredible and Nexus One), so it’s pretty certain to keep getting updates in the future. This was one of the biggest problems with the G1 — even though it was once Android’s flagship device, the G1 was made before the “recommended” specs for running an Android device were fleshed out, and thus, not only is HTC not bothering to produce any more updates for it, it physically can’t receive them anyway, due to hardware limitations.
The entire phone, from top to bottom, is supposedly released under open source rules at https://opensource.motorola.com — while this doesn’t benefit me directly, as I don’t spend the time to make my own custom ROM’s and kernels, it will most assuredly help the hacking community in the future when and if Motorola does drop support for the Droid.
And finally, the price! It’s been out for six months and is now cheap! Ha ha! :P  I got the “professional” bundle (as you saw above), including a rapid car charger, car mount, and desk mount, for a wonderful price.
The Unboxing
The Very Tiny Unboxing
Well, there wasn’t much of an unboxing at all, to tell you the truth. The Droid was packaged in some of the smallest packaging I’ve ever seen — the phone was nearly the size of the box, and took up most of the space. Other than it, the battery, the tiny wall adapter for recharging, and a single mini-USB cable, that was it!
That’s one small difference between the Droid (and all newer phones, soon) and the G1 — the Droid uses the newer (thought still standard) “mini” USB cable, which is much smaller and flatter than the older “micro” cable. Make sense?
[It’s all because the EU decide a few years ago to make all manufacturers of cell phones in the EU market standardize to one type of cell phone recharger system — I have to admit, I like it. No longer will you need give different cell phone chargers for your entire family, if they’ve got five different types of phones — on will work. It reduces waste quite a bit.]
The battery door on the Droid was a bit of a pain to get off, but when I did, the battery snapped into place and I was well on my way to Android 2.1 goodness.
The First Week
What were my impressions of the Moto Droid after my first week?
The Good? Well, number one, it’s definitely more compact than the G1. Even though it actually weights a few ounces more (probably because it’s a solid chunk of metal), it still feels lighter, and it’s definitely much, much thinner, even with a hardware keyboard. It feels solid in the hand, with a good degree of heft.
The battery lasts about as long as you’d think for a smartphone — nightly charging will become a ritual in your house. Still, not bad — like I’ve said before, I wish I had a laptop with a battery that lasted a full day.
The screen is… well, the screen is out of this world. The DPI is twice as high as most of the previous crop of LCD screens like the G1, and you can really tell — icons are incredibly clear and distinct, text is very easy to read, and pictures look amazing. Not as deep as an OLED screen like on the Incredible and the Nexus One, but pretty damn nice, nonetheless.
Software-wise? Well, one thing that I noticed right away when I needed to install my favorite Android applications is the speed at which they installed — fast as hell. On my G1, I could install one application at a time; it technically allowed me to install more, but I’d be damned if it didn’t almost freeze up when I tried to do that. On my Droid, I’m installing three or four apps at once.
The GPS lock-in is much quicker, too — 2-3 seconds instead of nearly 10, and the wifi lock-in, too.
The “multimedia dock” and car mount are also both very cool — somehow, the Droid “knows” that it’s docked in each (don’t ask me how, as even I don’t know), and loads up specific apps that respond to each; the “Car Home” app for the car mount, and the “Desk Clock” app for the multimedia dock. I’m glad I shelved out the extra money for the official Moto accessories, at least in this respect.
The Bad? Well, the home screen operations — paging left and right between app screens, launching the app tray — are kinda slow and jerky. I know, I know — a little thing, but still. When sat next to an Incredible or a Nexus One, you can really tell. Even with the Sense UI skin on top of the Incredible, the Incredible is still zippier.
In good company.
Also — the lack of a trackball on the outside of the phone that you can access without opening the hardware keyboard has started to nag me, just a bit.
I like using the software keyboard to type a lot of text, and when I make a mistake and have to put the cursor back to the where it was, merely tapping on the screen can sometimes take a few tries to get the cursor exactly where you want it. With an external trackball, you could just roll it a bit and get the cursor exactly where you want it (I got quite used to doing this on the G1).
Final Thoughts
I like it. It’s a good successor to the G1, so much so that I almost wish they had called it the “G2.” As it was, Google, Verizon, and Motorola put a lot behind the marketing campaign of the original Droid, and it shows — “Droid” has now become a part of most people’s lexicon, insomuch as they at least know the word and know that it stands for a very nice phone (that’s not an iPhone).
I still need to get a nice case and screen protector for it, but all in all, it feels right at home.
Picasa (or Google) offers nothing in the way of little blog widgets (unlike Flickr’s great support for everything), nor is there really any third-party support for this kind of thing out on the web.
I don’t understand why, since — at least to me — what Picasa offers for free is so much better than what Flickr offers, still, even to this day. :
Every third-party WordPress plugin I’ve tried either doesn’t work, doesn’t work right, or needs so much configuration on the server side — and I’m talking about editing raw PHP here (unacceptable) or creating farking CURL scripts for the server (why did you even release this plugin?).
Her code works great, works fast, requires almost no configuration (besides your Picasa username), and uses JQuery, so pretty much anyone can edit and customize it.
Which I did. ^_^ Though the code works, it doesn’t appear to always grab your latest photos from Picasa. (I’m guessing it has something to do with the “max-results” flag in the URL string — you have to restrict the number of photos that Picasa feeds up for you to get the latest.) I also made each photo be a link to the Picasa page where it’s at, as well as cleaning up the code a little.
There’s basically two parts:
First, put this code in a widget text block where you want it to be in your wordpress blog (this is also where you can edit the style):
Second, put this code either right after the widget, or wherever you put your JavaScript (if you choose to put it in another place, like a footer):
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
/*
**** Uncomment this line if you are using other JavaScript libraries
**** (Prototype, Scriptaculous, etc.)
*/
// jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
/*
**** Change your Picasaweb username here,
**** as well as how many thumbnails you want to show
*/
var _userName = "captainskyhawk",
_count = 6
/*
**** Choose your thumbnail size here:
**** "0" for small, "1" for medium, and "2" for large
*/
var _thumbnailSize = 0;
/*
**** Script Code
**** No need to edit any further
*/
jQuery.getJSON("http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/"
+ _userName + "?kind=photo&thumbsize=72c&access=public&alt=json&max-results="
+ _count + "&callback=?",
function(data){
jQuery.each(data.feed.entry, function(index, pic) {
jQuery('<a href="' + pic.link[1].href + '"><img src="'
+ pic.media$group.media$thumbnail[_thumbnailSize].url
+ '" alt="' + pic.summary.$t + '" /></a>')
.appendTo("#picasaStream");
});
}
);
});
</script>
Just change your name in the code from “captainskyhawk” (that’s me!), and it should work!
After six months or so of being wowed by a little portable scanner in a doctor’s office, the spouse and I finally decided to buy one. I wanted one that’s compatible with Ubuntu, since that’s our main OS around home, so I did a little research, and found some info about the Plustek Opticslim m12 (it’s the same model that the “NeatReceipts” company rebrands for their own scanners).
