Posts
Using an HP P1006 printer in Linux Mint 18
Over the years, one persistent problem with using HP printers in Linux Mint has been the conflict between the drivers provided by CUPS (the standard Linux printing system), and HPLIP (the HP software that provides proprietary drivers for some of the company’s printers).
November 8, 2018
Updating ThinkPad BIOS from Linux
Updating a ThinkPad BIOS usually involves booting a floppy or CD-ROM containing PC-DOS and an update program, or running a Windows-only updater. Neither of these is an option on a machine like my ThinkPad X200s, which has no floppy or CD drives, and is running Linux only. The various options available to Linux users are discussed in the ThinkWiki BIOS upgrade page . The one option that worked for me in the X200s case is to boot the CD-based updater using Grub2 .
September 28, 2018
Microsoft buys Github
For a while now I’ve been publishing my free software projects on Github. But last month Microsoft purchased Github , and that alarmed me.
July 26, 2018
Mailing labels in Linux
Once a year our library sends out appeal letters to donors, using mailing labels that we print ourselves. The librarian keeps a list of donors in a spreadsheet that records their names, addresses, and past donation amounts. Formerly the librarian attempted to use MS Office to generate the labels, but this was an error-prone and time-consuming operation. I prefer to automate processes like this using scripts and open source software instead of GUIs, so I took on this task.
June 22, 2018
Cervantes on Criticism
The following explains much of the commentary on Youtube and other forums on the internet: “Men who are famous for their talent, great poets, eminent historians, are always, or almost always, envied by those whose particular pleasure and entertainment is judging other people’s writings without ever having brought anything of their own into the light of day.” – Cervantes, Don Quixote, Second Part, Chapter III
June 13, 2018
Disable low toner error in Brother printer
Our library has a Brother MFC-8950DW laser printer / copier device that started complaining recently about its toner cartridge being low on toner. The cartridge was nearly new and the print quality was still quite good. Then a couple of days ago, the printer stopped printing, saying that we needed to replace the cartridge. This was clearly ridiculous. After some poking around I found this video that showed how to disable the low toner error and get thousands more pages out of the cartridge:
April 24, 2018
Using the Coce book cover cache with Koha
Earlier I described how I installed the Koha library software system on Debian 8. Koha can display book cover images in search results by fetching the images from Amazon, if you enable the OPACAmazonCoverImages preference in Koha. But Koha needs to query Amazon to get the URL for the images. Furthermore, clicking on the image sends the user to the Amazon site for the book in question. I believe this behavior is required by Amazon’s terms of service, and I consider it incompatible with the goals of a public library. To avoid the use of Amazon entirely, and to speed up the queries for image locations, I installed Coce , a cover image URL caching server.
April 15, 2018
Extending MicroEMACS with Ruby
Years ago, when I had planned to rewrite MicroEMACS in Ruby, the motivation was to have support for Rails built into the editor. Eventually I did add some very minimal Rails support without rewriting the editor. But it was never quite satisfactory. Some things that are easy to do in Ruby, such as converting singular names to plural or camel-case names to underscores, are not easy in mimimal C, and I did not attempt all of them. The solution was to allow new commands to be written in Ruby.
April 15, 2018
Progress in California
I thought it would be interesting to compare my income and costs as a fresh college grad in 1976 with those of today. Are things really so much more expensive in Silicon Valley now than they were way back then? When I graduated from the University of California in 1976, annual tuition was $630. I was able to pay these fees by working a crap summer job at a warehouse in Redwood City. In 2012, the annual tuition was $14,460. So tuition has increased by at least 2295 percent.
March 23, 2018