Coherent Blahs

After my last Canon i960 broke down, got a Canon MX860 all-in-one. The first hiccup was finding the drivers.  There was no supported driver available for this at Canon USA support site. Strangely, there was a supported driver for Linux available at Canon Australia site.

Although the driver allowed me, with a bit of tweaking, both printing and scanning over wired and wireless connections, the print dialogs didn’t have all the necessary config knobs. This is due to missing functionality in the PPD file for the printer that has been distributed with the driver.

Google to the rescue. I found this discussion with the solution:

FYI, add this to /etc/cups/ppd/Canon-MX860.ppd 

and You can set resolution, quality and greyscale 

snip ------- 




*OpenUI *Resolution/Output Resolution: PickOne 

*DefaultResolution: 600dpi 

*Resolution 600dpi/600 dpi: "<</HWResolution[600 600]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 1200dpi/1200 dpi: "<</HWResolution[1200 1200]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 2400dpi/2400 dpi: "<</HWResolution[2400 2400]>>setpagedevice" 

*CloseUI: *Resolution 




*OpenUI *CNQuality/Quality: PickOne 

*DefaultCNQuality: 3 

*CNQuality 2/High: "2" 

*CNQuality 3/Normal: "3" 

*CNQuality 4/Standard: "4" 

*CNQuality 5/Economy: "5" 

*CloseUI: *CNQuality 




*OpenUI *CNGrayscale/Grayscale: PickOne 

*DefaultCNGrayscale: false 

*CNGrayscale false/Off: "false" 

*CNGrayscale true/On: "true" 

*CloseUI: *CNGrayscale 




snip ----- 

I had some problems with the newer releases of Firefox. And Google just enabled extensions for Chrome browser. Time to switch. And boy, am I happy!! It renders the websites much MUCH faster than Firefox, imported all my bookmarks, and most importantly, search keywords, from Firefox.

I did face one problem though. On my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS laptop, it didn’t support Java out of the box. Flash worked fine, but no Java.

However, found the fix pretty easily on the web. You need to do the following if you are facing this problem:

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

Not all Emails are made equal. And some have the priority that they cannot wait.  Given that, I was looking for a way to filter out mails, and get a quick notification on some high priority Emails.
Since I have an Android phone, the best way for me to get notified is either through SMS, or through Google Talk. SMS costs money. So, I wanted the notification to come over GTalk.
My work Email resides on an Exchange server, and it has no way to filter an Email and generate a GTalk notification from it. So, I had to look for some client side solution.
Looking around the web, I found GTalk uses jabber as the underlying protocol, and I can use xmpp libraries to communicate with it.
(continue reading…)

I installed the wpTogo app on my phone, and now mobile blogging is a reality. This is my first post from Android!!!
So far, I’m loving the phone. It’s really really convenient to be connected all the time. Exchange sync with pushmail worked flawlessly. I’m getting the hang of the onscreen keyboard too.
T-Mobile dropped the donut update, and the performance is even better now.

YES!! I finally took the plunge and got the TMobile Mytouch (HTC Magic) handset running Android. So far am quite impressed by the handset, not so much with the T-Mobile service.

I still have my AT&T set, and at home, T-Mobile call quality is much better than AT&T. However, at my work at Juniper Networks, T-Mobile coverage is pretty bad. Inside the building, the data coverage always falls back to EDGE instead of 3G.

The silver lining is… TMo is setting up a tower very near the work building. So, hopefully this problem will go away.

Coming back to the handset, I like the feel of it in hand over Iphone (which feels much larger and difficult to operate using one hand).  The keyboard is a little sluggish, but hopefully that will be fixed with the Donut release come tomorrow. The phone looks super cool. I’m still getting used to all the features.

Apps that I added so far are:

Will cover some of them in later posts.

Now, this is really weird. I was searching for one place to get the list of all the states so that I don’t have to type it up for something I’m writing, and look what I found.

Look at the Sponsored Link section. Bing is putting Ads on Google!!! Huh!!!

I just got the Costco Magazine, and it clearly mentions that Mytouch 3G will be available in-store from August 5th. Even better, they will give you 35$ service credit.

Here is the ad from Costco Magazine:

Mytouch at costco

This was too good to pass:

I have uploaded the Yellowstone trip GPX and GPI files at the Yellowstone travel page.

Apparently, T-Mobile is going to announce their next Android based Google phone early next week. I was at my local Costco today, and asked the cell-phone kiosk guy off-hand about the availability of the phone at Costco warehouse. He said it will be available for purchase in August, and went ahead to mention that the whole lineup of handsets at Costco will be refreshed around the same time.