Canon Lbp-1120 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron video tutorial

After the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 on my primary desktop computer, the printer kept working.

Just for the sake of trying, I’ve installed the printer on my new laptop and recorded the process using Istanbul.

The result is this 10mb video. Hope it helps.

PS

The first couple of tasks (downloading the driver, installing alien, and converting .deb files) are not shown in the video. Also, it took me a while to find my old ccpd file (you can get that file here), sorry about that, I should have prepared better. This was all done in one try.

Old, and still valid instructions (you can see me reading them while configuring the printer in the video), are here.

A nice way to write online tutorials

This is seriously cool. If it gets implemented, it will ease writing tutorials (at least for Ubuntu) by several factors.

Canon LBP1120 on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

edit: Hardy notes & video tutorial

I’ve somehow managed to install LBP 1120 on Feisty, but I had lots of trouble…

Seems to me that the version (name) of .ppd file is critical.

This is what I did:

I’ve downloaded the driver (version 1.30-1) from canon’s site. Tried installing it with my previous tutorial, but it didn’t work.

Then I’ve told the gnome add new printer program to use the CNCUPSLBP1120CAPTJ.ppd, which I used in 6.06, and it worked after that.

The rest of the procedure is same as before, just follow the tutorial, and if you have some questions (or if you want to add something), leave a comment.

Good luck!

Fiesty is here

I’ve installed fiesty, and managed to configure the modem. sleep now, printer in the morning.

WordPress.com+OpenID — some ideas

A little over a month ago, wordpress.com announced their OpenID provider support.

Since then, there has been some discussion about whether or not should wp.com become OpenID consumer, and what benefits wold that bring. People mainly concentrated on two things: commenting and ability to get an account on wp.com using OpenID.

I have a few more suggestions:

• Delegating. WordPress should be an OpenID provider, as should any URI provider, but they should also enable their users to use their wordpress uris with other providers.
• Collaboration. I’d like the ability to keep some of my blog posts private, or readable by small group of individuals, and they don’t have, and don’t want wp.com account. If they have OpenID account, I’d like to enable them to login to my blog and read content, or edit content, or contribute content…
• Usability. Comments were already mentioned, and I’d like to add that it would be easier to post a comment with open id, than the usual type name, email, website procedure (the openid way would only require entering a url, and clicking twice). It’s a usability thing, not a spam-fighting thing.
• Interoperability. This was mentioned multiple times, but it’s worth mentioning again. I like being able to leave comments on other blogs while I’m logged in with wordpress without having to enter my personal data manually. I should be able to do that on other blogging platforms too, using only my wordpress uri (but not without delegating); and others should be able to do that on my blog.

Hope to see some more OpenID love from WordPress team, and keep up the good work!

Mobile test

Posting from my new mobile phone! It works!

Watching FOSDEM videos

I’ve watched some of the FOSDEM 2007 videos. (the samba, jabber, and EU software patents talks, to be precise)

On the techncal side, these videos are the best conference videos I’ve seen. You can see the speaker and read the slides. But still, they could be better. The Theora codec really shows its weaknesses here. The quality is poor, and mplayer won’t even play it properly. We need a better patent free / open source codec, that’s implemented in every free player and in the commercial ones. I hope the Dirac folks will get this right, and won’t stop at alpha7 version. Also, the video could use some cropping, especially from the top, there’s a lot of bandwidth waisted in these videos.

On the content side, I’m impressed with Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame). Nice to have someone who’s focused on the technology, and not afraid to speak up when something is wrong, esp. in Linux. And what a great presenter

I can’t wait to get other talks as well…

Playing with new codecs (H.264)

The new H.264 video codec is impressive.

I’ve used it to recompress one of the Ruby on Rails screencasts (this one), and here are the results:

Original file: rails_take2_with_sound.mov

VIDEO: [rle ] 970×754 32bpp 5.000 fps
AUDIO: [mp3] 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 64.0 kbit
DURATION: 16min 11s
SIZE: 52MB

File after compression: rubi.mkv

VIDEO: [avc1] 970×754 24bpp 5.000 fps
AUDIO: [vorbis] 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 96.0 kbit
DURATION: 16min 11s
Size: 16MB

Video quality after compression is great (almost identical to the original), and it even takes less processor time to play the H.264 file.

I’m impressed.

OpenOffice.org 2.04 includes direct export to LaTeX

From the release notes:

The filter enables us to export (not too complex) Openoffice.org Writer files into the latex format. The filter enables us to export bibliography etries into the tex docbook format. Tthe latex filter is able to export the following content – Tables – Indexes – Headers – Lists (just numbered list bullet list will be transformed into numbered lists) – Sub- and superscript – Header – Footer – Foot-/Endnotes – Italic and bold text (underlines will not be exported) – By tex supported Fonts (Font sizes will be set to a default size) – Content of sections and frames (not the frames and sections themselves) – Math-Ole objects (formulas) Note: Because pictures are not exported, there will be a text information („missing link to picture“) at the respective position.

Sounds good enough for a start, I can’t wait to try it.

This is a feature I’m hoping to see in many programs.

We (the users) don’t want complicated programs to create shity looking documents, we want beautiful output.

Choose beautiful typesetting, choose to integrate LaTeX.

3-D telepresence

From Jon Udell’s recent column:

[...] Neither is your speech. Voice chat isn’t natively supported in Second Life, so the meeting I attended was augmented by a conference call — but that was mostly for listening to presenters. Conversation took the form of text chat, which renders as avatars typing on invisible keyboards.

hmm, this sounds like an episode of Ghost in The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, I’ve watched few years ago. And this:

Although there are options for recruiting
out-of-band VoIP channels, emotional realism will require closer
integration. Many years ago at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (now
the Media Lab), my former Byte colleague Howard Eglowstein was part of
a team that made videoconferencing work credibly at 2,400 baud by
focusing on animation of moving lips and eyes at the expense of other
facial features. The principle still applies. Environments such as
Second Life will need to be aware of the voice channel, animate lips
and eyes accordingly, and assign high priority to the rendering of
those animations.

looks like it was taken right out of Serial Experiments Lain anime.
Sometimes sci-fi books, movies and anime are really ahead of their time… One more reason to watch them.