Thinking inside the boxThinking inside the boxDear Samsung,- September 27, 2007 Your ML-3051N is a lovely little 'network printer. Hopefully, it will serve us well in the next few years as a replacement for the thirteen year old HP Laserjet ML we bought (for about five times the price: a native postscript printer was rather expensive in 1994) a long time ago. And you even mention that it can talk to Linux! But still, I have a few things to talk to you about: as you mention Linux, it's a tad odd that you enumerate various flavours (RH 8 to 9; FC 1 to 3; Mandrake 9 to...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/26#samsung_ml_3051n Overdue smtm bug fix releases 1.6.9- September 11, 2007 Some time ago, Yahoo! Finance made some changes at their backend for the provisioning of png images which are also displayed by smtm. Version 1.6.9, which just went to Debian's master site and will go to CPAN in a moment, finally updates the code for that. My apologies for taking so long, and thanks to Michael Kurlin, Clinton R Lambe, Ian Seow and possibly others whose mail I haven't kept who sent me patches and heads-ups.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/10#smtm_1.6.9 Another option for MythTV schedules- September 11, 2007 Yesterday I mentioned how straightforward it was to setup an account with SchedulesDirect to obtain tv schedule data for the MythTV 'software pvr'. For completeness, a 'free as in beer' screen-scraping alternative is provided by the zap2xml Perl script together with a (free) registration at the tvlistings.zap2it.com site. Instructions are on the zap2xml page, and all is left to do is to combine the calls to zap2xml.pl and mythfilldatabase in a single shell script -- which is easy enough to...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/10#more_mythtv_schedule_options MythTV data service switch- September 10, 2007 One of several things I never got around to blog about is my experience with MythTV (which, in case you don't know, turns your pc into a tivo, given a suitable tv decoder card and the mythtv software). To make up for the lack of a more detailed post, let's just recap: I had set it up a little over two years ago, on what was then a 'possibly temporary' Kubuntu box. Well the box is still there and still running Kubuntu, four releases later, and MythTV only got easier as Ubuntu now includes the...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/09#switch_to_schedules_direct Chicago Half Marathon 2007- September 10, 2007 This morning was this year's Chicago Half Marathon, the race I often refer to as 'my favourite' after having participated in 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003. But this year I somehow managed to convince myself I had already registered, when I had not. Doh. But due to a friend's unlucky injury, I could re-use his registration and still race. Weather was once again gorgeous, but maybe a little on the hot side. I tried not to push myself too hard given the two big races coming up in the next...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/09#halfmarathon_2007 Another Herbie Hancock concert- September 3, 2007 Herbie Hancock was in town to open this year's Chicago Jazz Festival with a concert at the CSO last Thursday. This time he came with a mostly-electric setup featuring Nathan East on bass, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and Lionel Loueke on guitar. I found it at times a little heavy on the synthesizers, but it was evident that Hancock and the band enjoyed themselves during the two hour set. A nice concert, all in all, and again very different from his last two concerts.http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2007/09/02#herbie_hancock_sep2007 |