todbot blog – Page 30 – Random experiments, circuits, code, rapid prototyping, sometimes things to buy, and the odd tune by Tod Kurt.

12 April, 2004

Adium beats Fire

With respects to multi-protocol IM clients on Mac OSX,
I used to be a big user of Fire,
since it was really the only multi-protocol IM client for the longest
time.

Now, Adium comes along and starts
using libGaim and also has tabs for its chat windows so that no longer are there
many many windows popping up all over the screen.

Out of the box though, Adium is kinda annoying: it has an iChat like word-balloon
layout (which you can partially turn off) and the contact list is kinda anemic.

9 April, 2004

Sony Ericsson P900 / T-mobile Redux

So after six weeks T-mobile was finally able to wrest control of my number from the cold dead hands of Cingular.
And thanks to MobileWhack’s P900 pages for
providing the correct settngs to get the P900 on the Net. It is very cool to be able to web surf, IM, and check
email anywhere I can get a cell connection.

28 March, 2004

Custom machining sites

Pololu Custom Laser Cutting offers an easy path for cheap and quick
machining of Lexan and other plastics.

For larger, more complex pieces, out of metal and other materials, perhaps
eMachineShop is a better choice.

17 March, 2004

Flash-based display for RRD data

RRDtool is a great gizmo for storing and displaying time-series data.
Normally it creates PNG or GIF graphs to display info,
but often I want to zoom in/out, turn on/off data lines, etc.
This is normally non-trivial. But a Flash-based UI for RRD display would make it easy.

16 March, 200419 April, 2006

Canon iR5020 / iR6020 printing on Mac OS X

At work we have this cool Canon copier that is also a printer. It has a duplex widget that allows one to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Of course this is fairly niche enough for Apple to have not supplied drivers explicitly for it, but the ‘generic Postscript’ driver does work well enough to print, just not duplex.

And of course the drivers listed on Canon USA’s page for the copier is just a bunch of Windows files. A websearch for ‘ canon iR5020 ppd turned up a Canon Aussie site that had a nice .sit file with a PPD in it. For future ease, I’ve placed this file here:
CNIR61U1.PPD

To use, just add a new printer, choose ‘IP Printing’ -> ‘LPD/LPR’ as the type, put in the hostname and print queue name, and then for printer model select ‘Other…’ and use the above PPD file.

Now I can print 2-up with duplex and get four pages on a single sheet of paper!

12 March, 2004

T-Mobile unlocking after 3 months?

I read this on Slashdot, so it must be true:
T-Mobile will allow their phones to be unlocked after about three months of service. Just send email to simunlock@t-mobile.com with your name, phone number and IMEI number and they’ll hook you up.link