The Joy of Good Drivers

September 09, 2005 by Eric Richardson

The printer I ordered two days ago came in today (it acutally would have come in yesterday, but a film shoot blocked the building and Fedex didn't deliver). I brought it up to the apartment this evening, and just set it up. Within five minutes I was printing. Installing the Samsung print utilities took 30 seconds and worked perfectly with LPRng, which I installed instead of my mortal enemy CUPS. I just printed the $50 mail-in rebate form, and I'm about to print the invoice.

The ML-2010 does curl the paper a bit, but I think if I get heavier paper it'll take care of that.

Midnight Ridazz: The Heavy Metal Ride

September 09, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Today was the second Friday of September, so that means it was time for Midnight Ridazz. The theme for this month was Heavy Metal and the route took us from Echo Park west on Sunset, up Hillhurst, east on Los Feliz, and evntually over to Eagle Rock. I actually made a cursory attempt to show up in costume. Point to keep in mind for the future: a leather jacket doesn't breathe at all when riding a bike.

Despite getting hot and sweaty, I did make the 10 miles or so of this month's ride in blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a yellow headband. I'm not sure if that's at all heavy metal, but it was the best I could do on short notice.

I think my favorite parts of this ride were the three or times when I stopped to cork an intersection. If you're not familiar, corking's when a few riders will stop and block cross traffic so the group can continue through a changing light. Yes, it's illegal, but when you've got probably 500 bikers in your group you can't afford to let lights break people up.

It's funny watching people in cars as this mass of bikes just keeps going by. I was up at the front of the ride when we hit Los Feliz and I think Griffith Park. I stopped in front of a car sitting at the light waiting to cross, and a couple others joined me. The guy in the car yelled at us to get out of the intersection, and one of the riders told him to calm down, there were going to be a lot of us coming through. He honked and yelled a bit more, but then as more and more bikes kept going through I think he just started laughing. What else can you do when a nearly ten minute stream of cyclists passes by you at 10:30pm?

Anyway, it was another great ride. Anyone with a bike in LA needs to check Midnight Ridazz out.

Fun Fun Javascript

September 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I spent a good bit of the afternoon and a lot of the evening learning enough Javascript, XML and XSL to get dangerous. This is for a project that I think could be really cool. I spent today hammering on the user side, and now over the weekend I'll really dig into building a cool modperl backend. Hopefully that means I'll have something to show within a week or so. I hate waiting. I want things to just work now.

Update on the Printers

September 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So basically after I had decided that the ML-2250 was going to be best for Kathy I ended up having to wait until the following day to make the order. And in that time newegg lowered the price of the ML-2010 $20 to $109 (sale still going until 5:30pm tonight). And then there's the $50 mail-in rebate, so really it's a laser printer for $60. That's crazy.

So I bought two.

Well, I ordered one for Kathy, and then because the price was so hard to pass up I decided it was time for me to enter the ranks of those who own printers.

Just to mix things up, though, I ordered one from Amazon and one from newegg, since they both had the same deal going. I figured it to be a little bit of a race to see which would show up first. Neither has shipped yet, but they should today or tomorrow.

Pricing Printers

September 05, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I'm looking into printers for Kathy, since her Epson still refuses to play nicely with Linux (even though the model is supposed to be compatible). She's decided that she doesn't really need color, which means I get to look into black and white lasers. Kathy prints a lot of papers, so I think in the long run the cost savings from laser will be substantial.

I hadn't realized until today, though, just how cheap black and white lasers had become. One really tempting option is the Samsung ML-2010, which newegg has for $79 ($129 minus $50 mail-in rebate). It's not at all a bad looking printer, and like all the Samsung lasers I've seen it includes Linux drivers in the box, but I'm thinking that we'll probably end up going with the Samsung ML-2250, which newegg carries for $148 ($168 minus $20 "instant savings"). The difference is in toner capacity -- the 2010 lists 3000 pages, while the 2250 lists 5000. Both toner cartridges are roughly the same price, in the $70 range.

The ML-2250 also supports adding a network card and Postscript support if you want to do so later on. That's not a consideration for Kathy, but it's something I'm a big fan of. These prices make me want to finally buy a printer. Well, a good printer... I've had a Lexmark z43 sitting under my bed for the last year, but I'm over having to fight inkjets.