Adventures in Tech

I have an old Samsung ML-1210 printer  that is more than 10 years old. Despite its age, the printer is still in an excellent condition: it prints high quality PDF documents reliably albeit slowly, and satisfies my needs. But because of its age, it is hard to find a working native driver for Mac OS X, as Apple stopped supporting the printer in Lion, and Samsung stopped supporting the drivers after 2005. I could of course retire the printer, and buy a new one that is faster, and cheaper, but I tried to find another route where I continue using my old trusty printer. Luckily, one exists through CUPS on Mac OS X, by using  ghostscript, foomatic-rip, and samsung-gdi . The packages on the page are for Mac OS X Lion, but I found them to work for later versions as well. The only inconvenience of using these packages is that you have to re-install them after every Mac OS X upgrade. With the latest Yosemite upgrade,  the packages broke because of sandboxing,  where foomat...

My Macbook Air started to show wear and tear after a couple of years of heavy use. Five of the keys on the keyboard broke and had to be replaced, despite my light touch typing--honestly, and the battery has moved from the warning that it needs service to retaining electric charge for shorter and shorter periods of time, to not holding a charge at all. For my next device I contemplated getting another Macbook Air with the highly enviable 12hr battery life, or switching back to a 15 inch Macbook Pro, and enjoying a more powerful machine, with a retina display and a respectable 8 hours of battery life. The prospect of more screen real-estate, and more processor power was too enticing, so I ended up getting the Macbook Pro despite the weight difference. Since I accumulated 3+ years worth of data and software on the Air, I did not want to repeat the process of reinstalling apps from scratch and searched for an easy way to migrate the data to the new machine.  Most of the online rec...

I am fairly disappointed in the quality of the Fitbit flex bands. After a couple of months of moderate use, the bands developed deep cracks and finally broke. There are a lot of accounts online and on Facebook from Fitbit users who have experienced similar issues, so the problem is widespread and not isolated. What makes matters worse, is that after ordering and getting a replacement band from Fitbit, a rash developed on my skin. I did not experience a rash with the prior band color, and my guess is that the material is different from the original one I had. Now I have two choices, either get another replacement band with the original color, and hope that it does not cause a rash, or give up on the Fitbit completely, and wait for some of the newer health tracking technologies around the corner. An iWatch perhaps?

There is something to be said about using computers before going to sleep, and the effects they have on how well we sleep at night.  The authors of the free software  F.lux  believe that one of the reasons for the sleep disruption after using a computer is the color temperature of the screen. They postulate that computer screens are designed to feel like sunlight during the hours of the day, which is great, but they don't change how they look at night, which is not so great. They designed and implemented the F.lux software to warm up the screen as the sun goes down. And to make things easier, the software can automatically read the location of the computer, and adjust the warming schedule accordingly. The software is free, and works on Windows, Mac, and the jailbroken iPads/iPhones. I have only tried it on the Mac, and while I cannot attest to any changes in my sleep patterns, I admit that the screen looks a lot more pleasing at night: warm and soft, unlike how it lo...

I am not an Apple fan, but I do like their computers, and recommend them to colleagues and friends for a variety of reasons. They are well designed, and in addition to an excellent user interface, they run a flavor of Unix--which makes the life of computer programmers a lot easier. But most importantly, Apple's customer support is impeccable, that despite all the hardware issues I experienced in the past, I still recommend Apple computers. Let me explain why. A year and a half ago, I bought a Mac Book Pro for work. At the time it was the first generation unibody laptop, that had an i7 processor, lots of memory, and lots of disk space. Alas, like first generation models everywhere, it also had a lot of hardware problems. The most annoying of which was the screen randomly turning dark, with the hard drive spinning out of control. The only way to get out of this state was by forcing a reboot by holding down the power button, and losing everything I have been working on. At first ...