Coats Sez

I’ve just discovered the internet radio capabilities on Linux’s VLC
music player. I’ve had this computer a year but have just now discovered
what I have been missing. Listening to good music while internet surfing.
I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before. I was playing with
VLC and noticed it had a menu option for “services discovery” so I clicked
that and in a bit I discovered I had a sweet list of radio stations. Being
a fan of older music I decided on a Beatles tribute channel. Beatles music
done by just about anybody and everybody. It’s great. Running on
http://72.26.204.18:6824 .

I may not want to go to bed and it’s already 00:37 in the morning. I am
a late-night type person though and I don’t have to get up in the morning
so I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m having too much fun.

VLC can be found at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ for nearly all operating systems.

teryc

I decided to have an easy Thanksgiving holiday this year so I bought
a pork roast instead of a turkey. A whole turkey or even a portion is just
too much meat for one person and I had the holiday by myself this year.
So, the night before I put the hunk of pork roast and some potatoes and
carrots in my crockpot about midnight and let it cook all night and finally
got around to turning it off around noon on Thanksgiving Day. It was sure
good. Pork was roasted tender and so were the potatoes and carrots but
not overcooked. Crockpots are really good at getting it just about right.
I had pork and potatoes and carrots for 3 days but it was good every time.
Yummm.

teryc

I was messing around on twitter tonight, clicking on the links
that people are following. I discovered that if you keep clicking
and following links you eventually make it back to your source.
It might take a while but eventually you find your way back. Of
course, I guess this is what social networking is about. I’ve just
never really noticed all the connections before.

My starting point was http://twitter.com/jennettemccurdy and I
found that just by clicking on one of the people she was following
and continuing to click following links I would eventually come
back. By the way, Jennette McCurdy is the little blond girl on
Nickelodeon’s Icarly show only she’s not a little girl anymore but
has turned into a pretty young woman. Who knew? But, I’m too
old to think about pretty young women, ha.

I just thought it was interesting to see the six degrees of
separation in action. I guess we really are only 6 handshakes
from the President(of the U.S.). Or maybe any President anywhere.

teryc

Gahhhhh! I didn’t know printing on a number 10 envelope was going to
be such a can of worms. The thing is, if a program has a bug or something
confusing in it, I seem to be able to find it quickly. Such was the case when
I went to use OpenOffice 3.1 to print a number 10 envelope for the first time.
It seemed like it was going to be simple at first. Click on “Insert”, then “Envelope”
and then fill in the blanks and then print it. But no, it wasn’t that easy. There
was in the window I was typing in a little rectangle which I supposed was there
to show me how the envelope was going to look as I adjusted the sender or receiver
address up and down or side to side. Only thing is, the little rectangle which
is supposed to, I guess, show something, DOES NOT WORK! It seems like
envelope printing dialogue in OpenOffice is not ready for primetime yet. Just
my luck I find what is probably one of the few things which does not work in OO.
Actually, it does work, but it is not intuitive. And the little rectangle doesn’t
work no matter what. I eventually was able to get things to work by downloading
an OpenOffice template for printing number 10 envelopes but even that I had
to adjust somewhat so it would print on the envelope near where it should be
printing. I offer up my version of the number 10 envelope template here for
download. It works for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I am not
responsible should your printer break. And I hope some day the OpenOffice
developers get the envelope dialogue to actually show something in the little
rectangle. And yes, I know if I want something to work I should fix it myself.
Believe me, if I knew how, I would. Here’s a zip file for you windows users.

The number 10 envelope is inserted into the c4680 printer with the skinny
end first and with the flap on top looking at you and attached on the right. It took
me a while to figure this out. I guess different printers expect letters to be
fed in a certain way. I must have wasted at least 10 envelopes figuring all this
stuff out.

teryc

I got all my webpages converted over to match my blog’s theme
called “Pyrmont V2″ and I thought why waste all that work just on
myself so I made up a template page for people using the WordPress
Pyrmont V2 theme, a page that can be a starter page for building your
website to match your WordPress blog’s theme. The webpage template
uses Pyrmont V2’s style.css file to do most of the work. You can see a
version of the template page at http://terrycoats.net/template.html.
The only difference is this template page uses my current background
with the small violet oval in it. You page you get if you download it
contains Pyrmont V2’s original background gif. Of course, if you like
the little violet oval in the background you can save a copy of it from
your browser if you want to use it. I like it because it gives just a little
bit of color. You’ll have to make or acquire your own favicon.ico graphic.
I supply just an plain orange icon.

The files are available as a zip file at http://terrycoats.net/pyrmontv2_webpage.zip
that contains everything necessary to make it work. I offer no support.
Everything comes as is but should not be too hard to figure out. I’ve done
most of the figuring out for you. Both the template page and the css page
validate thru http://validator.w3.org/ so everything should work in a
standards observing browser but I must confess I didn’t look at it with
IE, just Firefox, which is what I use here.

The code comes with a GPL license as that is how I got the original
code. There is a copy of the GPL V2 in the zip file.

teryc

It’s amazing how you can think your pages are perfect but then you
run them thru http://validator.w3.org/ and see how things really are.
I’ve just spent hours just trying to get my index.html page to validate. I change
one thing and two other things go bad so I have to go back and try to fix it
all over again. It’s not so bad if you have coded the pages yourself as you
kinda know what you have done but if you are editing someone else’s work
it can get hard trying to figure out what they have done so you can change
it to where it will validate. I finally got my index.html page for my webpages
to validate but I’m about worn out now. I ran the style sheet thru the css
validator and that opened up a whole new can of worms. Please, people, run
your pages thru w3’s validator before you put them on the web as website
templates or blog templates. It’s not that hard to do and it’s free and just takes
a few seconds.

teryc

I’m doing fairly well at quitting smoking. I quit smoking in the middle of
September and it’s coming up on the middle of November so I’ve hung in there
for about two months now. It’s not over yet, though. I still feel like smoking
just about every evening and every time I make a cup of coffee. I think I’ll be
able to stick it out until I’m in the clear. I sure hope so. Tobacco is getting as
expensive as marijuana these days. One of these days little baggies of tobacco
are going to be sold in back alleys and on street corners because the price of legal
tobacco with grow too high. Right now an individual can grow tobacco but if too
many people take up the hobby of having a garden of it you can be sure “they”
will put a stop to that as well.

teryc

I spent a lot of last night converting my existing green-themed webpages
over to match my wordpress theme. Took me a while but once I got going I kept
it up until I was done. It involved mainly copying and pasting stuff into the wordpress
theme template page I made and doing a little bit of editing on each one. I had
some trouble with the pages I had that had picture albums on them but eventually
got it to work. I had to strip out a lot of javascript stuff though. I’m still not satisfied
with how the album pages look but I’ve got basic pages up and can change the pictures
as I get time and figure out how I want them. Two of the album pages have the
pictures in a single column and I don’t like that but I haven’t thought up the css
code yet to put ‘em where I want them, preferably in two columns without wrecking
how the existing page looks. Oh, well, plenty of time, I guess. That will be my next
project, though, getting the album pages like I want them.

teryc

I’ve begun converting my webpages to resemble my wordpress
blog’s theme. I decided I didn’t like the colors of my webpages and
liked my wordpress theme better so it made sense to make both the
blog and my webpages have a similar look. I didn’t really know how
to do this though so I had to study it a little bit. I knew I could use
wordpress to make some webpages but I wanted to use html and
not php. I still like editing the old way with a text editor.

After searching around on google for a while trying to see how
others had done it I think I finally figured it out. While viewing my
blog’s front page I used my browser to save it as a Web Page, complete.
This gave me some files to work with locally so I could edit the html and
get my webpages to start looking like my blog pages. I began by stripping
out bits of html code a little bit at a time, paring the page down to
get to where I had a page I could use as a template to base all my
webpages on. It took a while to do this as I didn’t want to go too fast
and mess it up. I cut a little bit at a time and then would reload the page
with my browser to see how it looked. After a lot of editing I finally
got down to a page I could save and use as a template. The sidebar menu
on the right and the entire page looks just like my blog pages now.

This will take some time to do. I got a basic index page made and
made an “about” page by copying over from my existing “about” page
but I got tired and have given it up for the night. When I’m done, though,
all my pages will finally have a common theme, both blog and webpages.
It’ll go faster though now that I’ve got my template page made. Here’s
an example “aboutme” page I’m working on:
http://terrycoats.net/test.html.
I’ll have all my green webpages looking like this when I’m done. I hope
things are looking ok so far anyway. I haven’t fired up Vista to see how
it looks in IE but in Firefox nothing seems amiss.

teryc

I got me one of these today. The C4680, that is. I had been thinking
lately about getting a printer, doing research on Google on which printers
work good with Linux. Everything I read said HP printers had real good
support on Linux so I did some searching to find out which ones might be
able to do the job for me at reasonable cost. I just wanted to print letters
occasionally and also send people some photos every once in a while. The
stores locally with HP printers in stock were Staples, Office Depot, and
Walmart. I went to Walmart first to see what they had and they did have
some printers that were on my list but I didn’t want to buy the first thing
I saw so I decided to make a trip to Office Depot and look at their selection.
The two stores are only a few blocks apart.

Office Depot had the biggest selection of HP printers and several that
were on my list so I looked and thought for a while and finally decided on
the HP C4680. Not too cheap but not real expensive either. The C4680 was
$92.41 with a promotional discount. I also bought some photo paper, general
purpose paper, and some extra ink cartridges. The C4680 uses the 60-series
black and tri-color ink cartridges. I also got a USB cable as this printer
does not come with one.

After I got my printer home I got the instructions out and read thru them
to get an idea of what to do to get started. I mainly wanted to know how to
load the ink cartridges. A lot of the instructions assumed that the user is
using Windows so I just skimmed over those parts since I use Ubuntu Linux
here.

The printer was not hard to set up. I plugged in the USB cable and hooked
up the power supply and turned it on. The printer has a builtin LCD screen
and I just followed the instructions on that to get started. It walked me thru
installing the ink cartridges and printing a test page to use in the scanner
part of the device. The test page was to align the printer’s print heads. After
I got done with that I booted up my computer to see what would happen. I
got booted up but after doing some checking I could not find the printer
recognized anywhere. After a bit, though, I realized that was my fault. I didn’t
have the cups system started. I ran Ubuntu’s Bootup-Manager and enabled
the cups system and told it to start it up. After a few seconds I got a popup
window which told me that my printer had been recognized and did I want
to print a test page. My printer was even recognized by model number. I
had it print the test page and my printer started up and printed a page with
the Ubuntu logo and some color tests on it. Hooray, I’m in business!

It took me a while to figure out how to print photos and get them centered
on the photo paper but I’ve never had a printer before and am a newbie at
it. I eventually got it though so now I can write letters and send photos to
relatives and friends.

So, now you know that this model printer will work on Ubuntu 9.10 Linux just fine.
Oh, and the scanner part of it works just fine with the xsane scanner program
also. I did some test scans to check it out. The hplip driver on this system
is 3.9.8-1ubuntu2 so this is the driver I know works. I have no idea about
older drivers.

teryc