Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

PC World in Dublin are flogging off HP Photosmart 7760 printers for 145 euro this week (which is virtually free by Irish standards), and I was needing a new printer anyway, so Julie popped over to get one for us yesterday afternoon. It put a nice a big scratch down the middle of every photo it printed though, so I had to go back and exchange it this morning…

Print quality is fairly impressive, despite some faint paper feed marks on photo prints, even on the exchanged one. It’s quiet and fast, it has a nice little screen for previewing and cropping, and it’s kind of cool just to be able to plug your camera card straight into it and set it going.

Sent the final draft of my Interfaces article off to the editor yesterday to wield her red pen. Spent much of this morning trying to debug whatever is causing my new wireless router to timeout my VPN connection to the office every five minutes on the dot (given that it works great if I bypass the router and connect my laptop straight to the modem)… was hoping there might be an obvious “xxx timeout = 5 mins” setting somewhere, but sadly it looks like it’s not going to be quite that simple…

Gah, turns out there’s nothing (much) wrong with my broadband connection on Linux at all… in fact, the only thing that doesn’t seem to work is ping! But it never occured to me to try anything else when I couldn’t ping anything, like just firing up Epiphany and loading an actual web page… d’oh! 🙂

(So, anyone know what would cause ping not to work…?)

Failing miserably to get my broadband connection working on Mandrake 10.0 at the moment, for some reason. With everything configured by DHCP, the Prestige 623 router/modem works a charm under Windoze, but booting into Linux with the same config results in zero reponse when I try to ping anything, although name resolution is apparently working perfectly. Not even a “network unreachable” or “unknown host” to show for my troubles.

Answers on an e-card please…

The broadband revolution finally caught up with me yesterday when IOL activated my free three month trial account. (Since the lease on our apartment expires in about three months, this seemed like a good way to try it out without having to sign up for a year, as ISPs are wont to do.)

Been getting average download speeds of around 490kbps so far, which isn’t bad on a 512kbps link I suppose, particularly given Eircom’s wet string approach to the telephony infrastructure here.

After a decidedly average steak (which took a decidedly longer-than-average time to arrive) at the Big Horn Steak House in Kristiansand last night, we headed up the road to the equally un-parochial Paddy’s to quaff a few more ales. For an Irish theme pub it was surprisingly understated, although the fact that none of the Irish contingent were going anywhere near the Guinness was a bit of a giveaway.

Getting hungry again now so looking forward to tonight’s barbie– provided Jeff doesn’t feel the need to do the cooking to show everyone how it’s supposed to be done…