Dave Holland's weblog

HP LaserJet 2600N and Debian

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:02:00 +0100

Just documenting a gotcha I found while setting up my shiny new LaserJet 2600N with Debian.

The instructions say you need Ghostscript 8.54 or later because 8.15 has colour-handling bugs. Great - Debian has 8.54...

dave@zenda:~$ dpkg -l '*gs-gpl*' | grep ii
ii  gs-gpl         8.54.dfsg.1-5  The GPL Ghostscript PostScript interpreter

But wait, my printouts look vile. Colour is blotchy and washed out. Some time later - what's this?

dave@zenda:~$ gs --version
8.15.3

Oh. There's another version of Ghostscript installed...

dave@zenda:~$ dpkg -l '*gs-esp*' | grep ii
ii  gs-esp         8.15.3.dfsg.1-1etch1 The Ghostscript PostScript interpreter - ESP version

Ths fix is to do update-alternatives --config gs and select the gs-gpl flavour. Now I have lovely prints and the colours look fine.

Hopefully this will save someone else the hour's head-scratching over poorly-coloured prints which I spent!

Sausages per mile

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:26:33 +0100

As part of National Bike Week, my employer is offering free breakfast to staff who cycle to work. Excellent! Shall we do some sums?

My cycle to work is just over 3 miles. It takes me about 25 minutes depending on the prevailing wind and how long it takes me to cross a busy roundabout. That classifies me as a "leisurely" (a.k.a. "unfit") cyclist. These sources more or less agree, that consumes about 113 calories.

A grilled sausage provides about 118 calories, according to these sources .

This would be astonishingly convenient if I had eaten a single sausage for breakfast. However I actually ate two sausages, a hash brown and fried bread. I don't think my cycle ride home is going to outweigh my surplus breakfast. Oops!

Me-me-meme

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:32:51 +0100

I don't do memes often, but this one could be funny and/or interesting.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. Anything you want, good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised about what people remember about you.

Er, comments aren't enabled here so you'll have to email me instead and I'll add the best/worst here...

Surveillance

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:37:09 +0100

Excellent quote on the surveillance state from Cory Doctorow:

Outside of dramatically failed experiments like the Soviet Union and East Germany, policing has never been a business of gathering data on every single person and arresting the guilty ones. This doesn't catch guilty people, it ensnares the innocent and acts as a kind of monetary black hole, absorbing all the cash we can toss into it, growing larger and more voracious by the day.

Cable

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:58:49 +0100

Is this the world's most expensive Cat-5 cable?

Another round-up

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:15:13 +0100

The last one of these was a while ago...

"PG" means the text is available from Project Gutenberg.

Envisioning Information
Right Ho, Jeeves (PG)
The History of Mr Polly (PG)
The Stolen Bacillus (PG)
The Baroque Cycle 1 - Quicksilver
The Baroque Cycle 2 - The Confusion
The Baroque Cycle 3 - The System of the World: Set aside a while for those three. Great fun, but the epic scale meant that I almost needed a cribsheet to follow the plot.
Harry Potter 7
Use of Weapons: I enjoyed that. What Iain M Banks should I read next?
Space Merchants
Starship Troopers
Lady of Mazes: This Amazon review sums it up pretty well: "an artificial world is peopled by humans who have some sort of software filters which control what they experience. Hence it is possible to have two populations existing in the same place but experiencing different realities." Yow!
Twisty Little Passages: A bit heavy going, to start with at least, but a fascinating angle on interactive fiction as a development of the riddle.
How to build a time machine: Take one wormhole...
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care: All musicians who play non-fixed-tone instruments should read this. Actually, the rest should too. It's given me new ideas on tuning my violin.
Arcadia at Versailles: Noble Amateur Musicians and Their Musettes and Hurdy-gurdies at the French Court. c1660-1789 - A Visual Study: Amazing the things you can find in the University Library!