March 14th, 2008
Who Cut the Cheese
Bud Light commercial from Superbowl 2008
March 7th, 2008
OS X Printing
One thing that invariably sucks royally on the Mac is printing. I think the situation is very similar on Linux. Drivers just aren’t made for other platforms. I haven’t taken the time recently to understand this but it bites me regularly. Basically I go through the process of trying to get a printer working on OS X and then by the time I have to do it again I have forgotten exactly how the stars should align and which jig I should dance to get it working. This time I am writing this down.
Dell 1700 or 1700n – This is a really great budget laser printer. I bought it for my home and generally it is way overkill but it’s super dependable. It was just a tad over $100 from Dell the reliability is rock solid. Nothing does text better than laser. I knew the Dell was just a repackaged Lexmark which helped me find this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=54053. Basically the 1700 is the same as Lexmark E332n for which there is a driver for multiple platforms. Here is a link to the Lexmark site that works as of this moment http://downloads.lexmark.com/cgi-perl/downloads.cgi?ccs=229:1:0:0:0:0. I also got this working through a Hawking PS12U print sharing device.
HP Deskjet F300 – A friend of mine was offering to feed me in exchange for getting his Airport Express to share an HP printer. We tried several default methods and ended up downloading a 182MB installer to get drivers. 182MB?!?! Moving on… we were able to print after installing the downloaded package and adding the printer. We couldn’t add the printer over Bonjour however, we had to pretend that it was not detected and force the driver installation as if it was connected locally.
March 4th, 2008
OS X VOB to DV conversion
Needed to rip DVD video files to edit in iMovie. First you need to pull the VOB files off the DVD using software like Mac The Ripper if it’s encoded. If not you can just drag the VOB files to your system. Then I needed to convert the VOB files with the least compression and loss possible. The best solution is to transcode them to DV files, which I think is MPEG4. Here are some of the products I tried before finally settling on Visual Hub.
good threads
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/27/120224
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=66356
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=592314
DiVA – free and crashed, requires not_so_free 3ivx
http://diva.3ivx.com/
Squared5 MPEG StreamClip – freeware and crashed
http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html
Open Shiiva – freeware and crashed
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openshiiva/
DVDxDV – was able to get good quality MPEG4 DV file but not flexible program
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22270
Visual Hub – final solution! top quality DV file and also does other things like IPod and PSP video files. I have purchased the license for $23USD
http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/tryit.php