A Canon for the New Year

I gave my last HP printer the axe yesterday. After struggling with my D135 all in one printer under XP and finding the only piece that worked under OSX was the printer, I decided once and for all to kiss off HP. My Epson 1280 is still my faithful workhorse color printer but for my all in one, I went with a Canon MP950. OMG.. the pictures are awsome that come out of this printer. You can not see the dots even on standard quality. The printer has Canon's high end scanner with a card reader and a six color dye ink tank for color prints and a doublesize pigment ink tank for text documents. The Canon will also use every drop of ink in the cartridge before it stops printing, unlike HP, Lexmark and Epson. The printer also does duplex printing and has dual feeds so that the photopaper can go straight through and the normal paper can wrap from underneath in a paper tray.

Did I mention it supports OSX? All of it works under OSX, the printer, the scanner, the OCR software, all of it. And it works pretty well. The installation is a bit kludgy, I had to make an alias for the MP Navigator application and put it on the desktop myself. No Big deal but it's these little things that can drive the non technical person to drink.

The printer is very quiet and pretty fast considering. It's big, about the same size as the D135 but not as tall and no faxing from the printer. But the Mac will fax and since the scanner works, I just have to fax now from the Mac rather from the keypad on the D135. Minor complaint but I can live with it.

I ran a test of scanning a page of printed text and the OCR picked it all up and the formatting but missed the smily face and the @ symbol in a HTTP address. Again, minor complaints but this is the SE version of a better package so it may be worth upgrading later on. But for free, it worked really well.

Scanning pictures and emailing them was painless, very easy and quick to do. There is a slide/film adapter but I have not tried it yet.

The printer is PictBridge compatible with the plug right in front. The printer also has a nice LCD screen but it doesnt tip back far enough with the printer at waist level to see it, I have to get down on my knees or in a chair. The onboard menus are easy to use and make sense of.

A subjective perception is that the printer very "solid" feeling when you use it, it does not have the cheap and flimsy feeling that the HPs have.

Now I need to see how thirsty this beast is when printing pictures. The Epson is terrible which is why I have a CIS system attached to it. The HP was not any better and it was very expensive to feed on top of things.

Yippie Ki Aye

Name that movie ;) Anyways, what we have today is a niffty tool for ten bucks that is called "Podner" and can be found at Splasm Software. This is a super easy to use converter of video to the video iPod format with both quick and dirty or multipass high quality conversion if you have the time. You do not have to be a command line junkie or a geek to use this applet which makes very useful for the non-techie Mac user in the family. Yes, I know apps like STreamclip will do the same for free but the interface on this one is so damn friendly :) I have converted DV, raw vide from my miniDV camera, MPEG from the digital camera and some QT files, all converted witout a hitch (pun intended). If you use it 10 times, it's a buck a clip which is a pretty fast ROI. Check it out!

Just a follow up. I used Podner to convert a copy of a show I had captured with my homebrew PRV in MPEG2 format. The show is 30 minutes and I used the double pass for quality. It took about four hours but the show was very clean and sharp and is now about 700 meg in size. I'm trying converting the show to QT first in order to get some editing and then crunch it to see if I can get some more speed out of Podner.
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Happy New Year

Santa was good this year. I got Postfix running on a new (used) Mac mini and I'm about ready to bring it up as my production email server. I was able to find a mini for 400 bucks with 1.42Ghz, 80 gig drive and a gig of RAM. No wireless but I will survive :)

A 30 gig video iPod found it's way home with me thanks to my bro. Whoooweeee.. very cool widget. The first thing was to cover up the face with some extra PDA screen protection. I have to say I'm impressed by how clunky it makes my old 10 gig Gen3 look which in it's day was the hot item. No firewire though, whats up with that crap? My eldest daughter got her new Harry Potter Photo iPod so it's a iPodding family this year.

I'm playing with some new backup software called "Dobry Backup". Clean interface but the testing so far is still up in the air. Now I will admit trying to backup 30 gig over the wireless is pushing things a bit so I will get the iBook onto a wired connection and let it rip. I've also been playing with Camino and I have to say I like it alot.

Have Postfix will Travel

My bro turned me onto a site that offers some very slick software for the Mac. How you would like to configure Postfix (email server for those who dont know what it is) in less than a minute? But wait, there is more! How would you like to have a ROAMING email server so long as you have a internet connection? Sounds pretty slick huh? Go to Mac@work and check out Postfix Enabler. And the best part? ten bucks is the cost, a measely ten dollars or the price of a decent 6 pack of "good" beer :)

Here is the discription from the site "Postfix Enabler helps Mac users set up a totally-functional buzzword-compliant mail server in less than a minute, the Mac Way. It sets up SMTP, POP3 and IMAP services, with or without SSL support. It even sets up SSL test certs so that you can test the SSL connection. It enables SASL Authentication so you can connect to ISPs who require the SMTP connection to be authenticated. Or, the other way around, it allows you to turn on SMTP-AUTH on the server, so that you can authorise remote users who need to send mail through it."

I love the "buzzword compliant" phrase. That pretty well sums it up. You can bet that in the coming days, I will setting up a Postfix server on my iBook to test the roaming server.

Enjoy!

It's a bit like Xmas

Its the that time again, Christmas time. So what do you give the dad who has everything? Why you get out the Mac, the Giffen iMac USB interface and go buy (really? did you keep yours?) a turntable( phonograph for those who dont know what a record player is). In my case, I had to go out and buy a decent record player off Ebay. You know it is a sad statement when the spiffy direct drive Technics record player you wanted as a kid is now a 75.00 give away on Ebay. Oh well, at least I finally got it :)

So I had my dad take all his bluegrass and country records and mark up what songs he wanted transfered onto CD. It took a bit of doing to get it all working right. The turntable had some LOUD sixty cycle hum until I figured out to tie the ground wire of the turntable to the UPS. Presto, the hum is gone and all that remains is the clicks and pops.

I tried the software that Griffen includes but it is junk. A much better solution is the software that comes with Toast. It's called "CD Spin Doctor" and it is very easy to use from the beginning. Once you have ripped thed track, it then offers a three stage "fix it" panel to remove the clicks, pops, hiss along with expanding the sound and an equalizer board to fine tune the rip. This can be important since some of the older records were mono with two channels blended to be a fake sterophonic. With the panels, you can clean this up and get a nice bright sound.

Once you have the tracks all spiffied up, you can use Toast to make the CD. Rock and roll!!! It is alot of work but it does make a nice gift for someone who is technology challenged but doesnt want to lose a record collection.

In my case, I did not need any pre-amps or special widgets that I have seen advertised. I had plenty of volume to drive the mic input for a clean but not distorted sound. I could not hit the red bars but then I really did not want that kind of input.

The Griffen iMic works great most of the time. Sometimes I would have to restart the recording due to the iMic dropping bits and garbling the sound but that was rare.

Now I just need to decide what to do with my new/old turntable once this project is done. Some friends may decide for me since I've already been asked if I can transfer their albums next. I really should charge for this, at least to keep the wine bottle fresh :)








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