Has anyone had any experience with a wireless print server? I have a USB printer (Samsung ML-2010) connected to my desktop, but my desktop's wireless connection is flaky. I also don't relish leaving the desktop on 24/7 when we primarily need printing nights and weekends. A refurbished Netgear WGPS606 has a very attractive feature set at a great price, but doesn't review well. The Linksys WPS54G reviews a little better, but might have issues working with Vista.

Another possibility would be to use the Cube as a print server. It would suck a lot less power than my XP desktop. The bad news is the networking, though there are a lot more wireless USB adapters in the world than there are wireless print servers.

Thoughts?

I've been using PNM files for many years. The earliest use I can recall was the Digital Stump. More recently, I've treasured the PGM portion of the spec as a super-simple format for grayscale raster image data. The format uses a text header that can be generated with a single fprintf. Plenty of free software is happy to accept 8-bit PGM files. More recently, we've needed to generate 16-bit images. OK, the PGM specification clearly states what to do: crank the maximum value for a pixel past 255 and write two bytes per pixel. What could be simpler?

Turns out I haven't yet found an image viewer that understands these two-byte-per-pixel PGMs. Netpbm, the first name in PNM manipulation, doesn't come with a viewer. gthumb crashes. kview can't handle it. GQview displays a broken image icon. GIMP won't read it, though that appears to be because GIMP can't work with anything image channel that exceeds eight bits. Our proprietary image manipulation package at work is internally capable of arbitrary bit depths like twelve and sixteen, but its PNM reader is only good with bit depths up to eight. A member of that project only needed a few minutes to make it generate 16-bit PGMs in accordance with the spec when I asked yesterday, but it was going to be a major headache to make the modifications to read the data back in.

So I see from the change log that 16-bit support was introduced to Netpbm in 2000. Why is everyone else so far behind? Can anyone suggest a similarly easy image format to spit out that still offers 16-bit?

mab42 is visiting this weekend. I asked him to bring some Mac stuff to try one more time to Scrape the Damnable Cube. You will recall that I've been trying to replace OS 9 for many months now. Matt brought a Mac keyboard, a Firewire cable, and some install media. The first shocker was that an upgrade disc successfully rebooted the machine and loaded the installer. This was a first. Unfortunately, that particular disc was a 10.4 upgrade requiring a working 10.3 install, which we didn't have. Argh! We were just about to try an install via Firewire, but Matt remembered that he had yet another 10.4 disc with him. That one did pretty well, but turned out to be damaged, which caused the installation to fail part way through. The failure, delightfully, seemed to be in the X11 module, so we skipped that component. Voila!

The Cube now runs OS X, albeit slowly. We were able to get it to play Homestar Runner content and various video file types. Now I'm working on getting xscreensaver working. It works. Whee! And I just scared the crap out of Matt by activating the BSOD screen saver, which immediately showed an OS 9 crash. Perfect! :-)

As someone who's been rubbed the wrong way by Apple products many times, I am no longer surprised when they think they know better than I do what I should be doing with my computer. Today at work, somebody asked for help uninstalling various memory hogs. Why did Quicktime need a system tray icon? Why was there an iTunes helper in the process list? We navigated our way in the registry to the startup section. I was about to suggest deleting the entries for ituneshelper.exe and qttask.exe when the phone rang. I went back to my office and learned that deleting the registry entries is a futile gesture . . . the next time any of those programs get run, they reinstate the registry entries. Nice! Way to empower the user, Apple! The correct workarounds are apparently to rename the helper executables or to put semicolons in the registry entries so as to comment them out.

So per alynch's suggestion, I downloaded the 15-day trial of Norton Ghost 10. While I have relied on Norton for many, many things over the years, I'm inclined to think they blew this one. I know Ghost is great for copying whole drives and backing up whole drives. The problem is that a whole drive is the smallest unit it's willing to work with! I don't need backup copies of Linux installer .iso files, for instance, which add up quite rapidly. I'd like to save c:\installers, but not c:\installers\linux. Is that so much to ask?

In Googling for Ghost and "exclude", I found out that it's possible to skip directories and file types . . . by creating a text file and passing its path in on the command line. On the command line? Yes, I know how to set command line parameters for desktop icons, but what about things triggered from the registry? Worse, that skip mechanism only works for files on FAT partitions, and all of the drives with data are NTFS. Argh!

In the forums where folks tried to diagnose the strange behavior of Norton's exclusion feature, somebody bragged about Acronis TrueImage. It's cheaper than Ghost, and provides a GUI for exclusions. I read the manual, and as far as I can tell, it will only exclude by file name extension, not by directory. Argh!

Per ijk's suggestion, I installed the Microsoft-supplied backup whatsit. The external hard disk is FAT32-formatted. FAT32 can't handle files larger than four gigabytes. The Windows backup whatsit backs up to a single file, which means it can't do more than four gigabytes per backup. I suppose I could try to divide my backup into tasks of 3.9999 gigabytes each, but that's not going to happen. I'm not sure if I feel entirely comfortable reformatting the disk as NTFS for the simple reason that Windows would never let me go back. I'd have to call on the awesome power of Linux once again. There's also the small matter of feeling confident that future versions of a Microsoft product will be able to read files from a previous version. I'm increasingly leaning toward a simple copy for most files, and something fancier for the registry and applications. Or am I missing something with regards to strategy?

I just bought a lovely external hard drive with which to back up my main desk machine at home. Unfortunately, I thoughtlessly selected a model that doesn't come with any backup software. What does anybody else use? I'm hoping for something that will back up the operating system, the applications, and the registry. Suggestions?

( Windows won't repair my corrupt Windows-formatted hard drive, but Linux will! )

My Father visited this weekend, and he used my drill to shatter the head on the stripped screw. We removed the interface board from the back of the DVD drive and found a switch to pick between master and slave. A ha! I'd previously read that Macs won't boot from optical drives set to "slave", so I toggled the switch and reassembled. The system now got stuck at startup with a blinking question mark, meaning it couldn't find any bootable drives. OK, that must mean the hard drive's jumpers also need to change. I found a document that showed the master and slave jumper settings for Maxtor and IBM drives that had shipped with Cubes, but the position of the jumper on the back of this drive didn't match either configuration of either drive. Huh.

At this point, I read about pulling the hard drive out. Wouldn't you know that the hard drive is attached to the heat sink with T8 screws instead of the T10s I'd encountered thus far? A little trip to Radio Shack netted me a ratchet set with a T8 head for $10. I pulled the hard drive, expecting to find IBM or Maxtor. It is, of course, a Western Digital. Huh. The drive didn't have a jumper diagram on the label, so I went to their web site. It had not been jumpered to master or slave or even cable select. It had been jumpered to one of two "I'm the only drive on the bus" positions. "WTF?" doesn't quite capture the shock. How had the DVD drive ever worked with the hard drive set like that? I set the hard drive to Slave and powered up. I was at least back to a previous step: no way to select the DVD as the startup disk. OK, I pulled it all apart again and set the hard drive to master and the DVD to slave and tried one more time. Nope.

Have I mentioned lately that I hate computers?

Although it's still conceivable that I would unearth a misplaced jumper on the Cube's DVD drive, at this point I'm starting to think about alternatives. Ideal candidates cost less than a new copy of OS X and provide the ability to watch web videos. Flash capability is high on the list to allow viewing of Homestar Runner and YouTube. That wipes out most things that bill themselves as entertainment hubs. A Mac Mini is out because that would be rewarding Cupertino for making machines that thwart my every move. That, and it would cost upwards of $600. Mini PCs are moderately interesting, but still hundreds more than I should spend for something that will be used this infrequently. Modding my Xbox to run Linux sounds kinda cool, and would certainly help with the geek cred, but I think I have one of the late models that require a hardware hack. Even then, I think Flash might be a challenge. Come to think of it, is Flash even available for PPC Linux? Apparently not.

The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking Wii. The browser is Opera and it supports Flash. The gaming capability, though not high-def, promises to rock. I'd have to give up on playing .rm files without hooking up the laptop, though. I'm stuck, though, with the twin problems of cost and unavailability. Hmph. Scraping the Cube: Part X might be a while.