Lucy chases a stick at Clover Point beach in Victoria BC with a GoPro strapped to her back.
I just came back from the Montreal Linux Symposium (formerly the Ottawa Linux Symposium) and realized I had ranted about the same thing I rant about at work all the time: the 4 things that I want on an embedded board in order to make my development work easier:
Over the last 6 years I’ve used a lot of computer projectors. Some projectors were a little brighter or had better contrast, some more acurately reproduced colours, and some were a lot smaller and portable than the rest. They all also provided different options for attaching a video source: VGA, Composite, DVI, Component, HDMI. However, I’m not going to talk about all that today. What I’m going to talk about are the projectors which also had a serial or USB connection to the the attached computer.
We just bought a new HP OfficeJet J6480 multi-function-device. It’s a network (wired or wireless) connected printer, scanner, fax, copier, with a duplexer and page feeder. This is the story of how we got it and how it worked in conjuction with Linux and OSX computers.
At the end of 2008 our HP OfficeJet 7310 multi-function printer/scanner/fax started having problems. The scanner started to make the left side of all scanned images green. This of course meant that the scanner, copier, and fax were basically useless, which left the printer. Getting it fixed cost more than a new printer (it was beyond waranty), so when it started to choke on print jobs, it was time to get a new one.
Like most people I have lost data in the past; hard drives failures, Windows viruses, etc. I’ve found it takes one big data loss for people to see the value of good backups. So it was for me. I saw the light in 1998 when I lost much of my archived data to an infected networked Windows computer. I didn’t run it very often, but when I left it running over night for the first time, the virus ended up deleting all the user files on my UNIX file server. Since then backups have been very important to me.