I bought an HP C6380 all-in-one printer the other day and just noticed something weird. The time it takes before it starts printing is exponential to the number of copies I want to make. How stupid is that? If I want to print the same page 20 times it shouldn’t have to take 20 times longer for it to figure out what to do before printing, should it? Just calculate everything once and use the same calculation 20 times. There is obsiously something I don’t know about writing printer drivers, or the drivers are just bad. Scary.

I really like ScribeFire. It’s a blog authoring tool in form of a Firefox extension. The features I like most are:

• There’s no need to log on to the admin interface in WordPress or whatever blog software is used. Multiple blogs are supported.
• Posts can be authored and saved offline to be submitted later
• In split screen mode, it’s possible to write a post at the same time as browsing the web.

Do you use ScribeFire?

I just have to write this post right this now, it can’t wait because tomorrow it won’t feel like does now. You’ll know what I mean in just a few seconds, read on.

Read Post ›

Today Google released their brand new Open Source browser called Chrome. I have downloaded it and used it for about an hour now and my first impression is great.

The install was smooth with few clicks and it imported my settings - browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox.

It’s sleek, quick and with useful features that are not immediately obvious but noticable as you start using it. It’s easy to use and feels intuitive.

Read Post ›

When I was in a UK Vodafone shop querying about their mobile broadband and said I would use it for Linux, the shop assistant said that it might work but it would in that case require some effort. Vodafone officially support Windows and Mac OS but I knew that the Huawei E169 works with Linux so I couldn’t think of a reason why the Huawei E170 or Huawei E172 from Vodafone wouldn’t.

I got myself the package and the thing is, it works brilliantly and is really easy to set up!

Read Post ›

I just noticed that a Windows machine I rarely use almost had its Internet Explorer updated.

Read Post ›

I’ve had my Eee for a few days now and just tried to run Eclipse on it. For fun as an experiment, to see if it works. I will probably never do any Java developement on this tiny machine but it does work, without problems although I haven’t tried any project of size. Anyway, here’s what it looks like. I kept some common views open so you can see how that looks like but hid the toolbar, with the toolbar it got a bit too cramped. In the second screenshot the appearance is set to the excellent Extended VS Presentation plugin.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a text editor written in Java. I’ve thought about making my own editor for a long time and since a while it’s one of the things I dabble with in my spare time. There are a few good text editors written in Java out there already like Jext and JEdit, so does the world need yet another one? Well, probably not, but I like the challenge and figured it could be a fun exercise so I’m having a go at it. That’s not saying I don’t take it seriously.

So, what’s the current status? I started with the actual text editing component(the part that response to user input and outputs text in an area displayed on screen), which is the most important part of the editor. If that’s no good the whole editor will stink and no one will ever want to use it, including me. I could have chosen to use an existing component for this part but again, curiosity led me to start from scratch, hopefully it will be at least as good as existing solutions. Time will tell how (un)wise that decision was. At the moment the component works but lacks quite a few features. Currently I’ve paused almost all work on that and focus now is on the bigger picture, more on that and other details soon.