Friday, December 31, 2010

Will electric vehicles be better for the environment.

Lately I've been wondering, just in the back of my mind, if electric vehicles will really be better for the environment. Here's my (albeit synical) rationale. They say that crude oil (petroleum) will run out before coal. Apparently we have hundreds of years of coal reserves in this country, but very little oil. So will electric vehicles allow us to run on a carbon emitting fuel longer? I hope not - but I still want a Nissal Leaf.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Kindle for PC on Linux

I just got Kindle for PC running under Wine (on Linux). It works great! - nearly as good as my Windows partition. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04, Kindle for PC 1.3.0 (30884), and Wine 1.3.9. My trick was to do a complete Wine removal, rm -rf ~/.wine, install Wine 1.3.9, and then the KindleForPC-installer.exe. I did not need to specify that the Kindle app be run as a Windows 98 program. The only thing I see wrong is that the blue underline under hyperlinks in the book have a fixed width (longer than the word). My guess is this is a font issue.

Many thanks to the Wine team. I'm off to read now...

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Automatic Netflix Queue?

I wonder if I would like an automatic Netflix queue. One where a Netflix algorithm decided what movies to put in my queue. I wish there was a "Netflix Labs" like Google Labs, where experimental features lived and we could try them out.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Using a D-Link DPR-1260 Print Server for Macs

Even though the D-Link DPR-1260 doesn't officially support any other OS other than Windows, it's actually fairly easy to set it up as a print server for a Macintosh. Here's how:

  1. Follow the setup guide to get your DPR-1260 on wireless. I have a router that allows me to reserve an IP address for a specific device (by MAC address) which I did. Windows computers that need to print don't need the DPR-1260 to have a fixed IP address (because they use PnP I think), but Mac's do need one (or dynamic DNS).
  2. Just plug in your printer to the DPR-1260 - no further setup required. Go to the status tab and you should see your printer under ATTACHED DEVICES.
  3. On your Macintosh open the Print & Fax Settings, and press the Add (+) button to add a new printer configuration
  4. Leave it set to "Line Printer Daemon - LPD"
  5. Specify the IP address of the DPR-1260 (i.e. 192.168.100.100).
  6. Select the Queue (the name changes and should be retrieved from the DPR-1260)
  7. Set whatever name/location you desire.
  8. Select your printer driver.
  9. Press Add.
That's it! You should now be able to print.

Also, there's a handy D-Link DPR-1260 Admin Emulator.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Fixed my Scanner

So something I did on my Windows machine made my Canon CanoScan LiDE 60 scanner stop working. My guess is it was probably a Windows Update since I rarely use the Windows side (I’m mostly Linux). It took me forever to figure out the solution, but I finally learned that I needed to add C:\Windows\twain_32\CNQL60 to my system PATH environment variable.

Go figure!