Mac OS 10.5 Leopard Share USB Printer With Windows

Several things “broke” when I migrated from our old iMac 17″ Flat Panel (Tiger) to our new iMac 20″ Aluminum (Leopard). Bound to happen with a double jump in technology: PowerPC to Intel and Tiger to Leopard.

One thing that broke was sharing an HP DeskJet 6500 USB printer attached to the Mac with a Windows 2000 laptop on the network. I had accomplished this in the past using CUPS and creating a secondary printer. This did not migrate across, and I had forgotten about setting up a secondary printer and, besides that, CUPS has changed.

And I had the same problem with my new Parallels setup (a migration of the Windows 2000 laptop.)

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Smallest Ever Advent Calendar Made

14 December 2007

Advent calendar

The world’s smallest advent calendar?

© D Neumaier, J Biberger and F Goetz

calendar-200_tcm18-109056.jpgA group of nanotech specialists in Germany have got into the Christmas spirit by making what they believe is the smallest ever Advent calendar. It would take about five million of the miniature calendars to cover a postage stamp.

PhD student Daniel Neumaier, one of three members of the University of Regensburg’s micro- and nanostructures group that created the calendar, told Chemistry World, ‘We wanted to have a nice picture of Christmas on our home page. We waited until normal business was done for the day in the clean room. Then we went in and did it. We were just having fun.’

The rectangular Advent calendar measures 8.4µm by 12.4mu.gifm and is etched onto a semi-conducting gallium arsenide wafer coated with Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) – used to make Perspex. The doors for 1 December through to 6 December are open, with six different images including Santa Claus, a bell, a snowman and a church. The smallest images on the calendar are the glass panes on the church windows, which measure about 20nm. At the bottom of the calendar, ‘a Merry Christmas wish from Nanonic’ is written in German.

snowman-120_tcm18-109055.jpg

Snowman

A snowman around 2 micrometres tall

The team used an electron microscope guided by a computer program from Nanonic- a start-up company founded by three Regensburg doctoral students. The microscope’s electron beam breaks the bonds of the PMMA resist, etching the semiconductor below.

But after the calendar was drawn by the electron beam and the remaining PMMA removed chemically, it was still difficult to see, Neumaier said. To improve the contrast of the image, the lines were etched in using an ion beam.

The team needed two attempts to make the calendar. ‘The whole process lasted about two hours,’ Neumaier said, noting that the time stamp shows the image was completed shortly after 11:30pm on 4 December.

Dieter Weiss, head of the working group that includes the three calendar makers, told Chemistry World he had suggested they might want to try something festive after he saw a news story in the German press about a 55mu.gifm-tall Christmas gingerbread man created by the Research Centre Jülich.

church-120_tcm18-109054.jpgChurch

Church with windows 20nm across

‘That is huge,’ Weiss said, adding that he e-mailed his team suggesting they could do better. Weiss believes his team’s advent calendar is the smallest in the world, but admits he has no hard evidence to back that up. ‘I searched on google and could find nothing smaller,’ he said.

Weiss admitted that several other labs around the world could make similar nano-scale images but said his lab is a global leader.

‘As far as precision of making such small structures, I think we are pretty good,’ he says. ‘For us, the calendar was a joke – but it is based on serious science.’

Ned Stafford

iMac 20 in Ellenwood

imac 20

Claire came and asked me last night, “Where is Ellenwood, Georgia?” I told her it was near where I worked. She’s excited. Claire has been tracking the new iMac 20 across the country.

We don’t know why it decided to spend 3 days in Reno, Nevada. Maybe it did some gambling.

Lotus Notes Mail Archiving

Trying to set up a policy that will archive e-mail older than 365 days on the server. It wasn’t obvious in the instructions what triggered the archive process. Finally realized it is the “-a” option for the “compact” command. This was set up in program document and scheduled to run Sat, Wed at 4:00 a.m. I also found I had to manually archive a couple of documents for the archive database to be created.

Spent a lot of time on a policy document, but in the end, I don’t think that is being used at all because it is not being pushed into the client database. (Using a custom template.) So it is the client archive settings that enable the compact -a command to work on a given database.

The “mail” in this line means only look into the mail directory. The -b means to

Load compact mail -a -b

Link.

Gmail Up to 5 Gigabytes

I just noticed that my Gmail mailbox now has 5 gigabytes up from 2.5 (and the original 1 gig.) Gmail also now allows 20 mb attachments, which is good for a collection of large photos or a small video. I am currently using 10% of this space with over 5,000 e-mails. I went looking for my oldest e-mail which was an exchange 7/1/2004 with Ted about whether or not it was his finger in a photo of a dik-dik.

dik-dik.jpg

Ted: “Actually it isn’t. I noticed that that picture made the rotation and

since I did take the picture and post it on a blog I figure it’s okay.

There was a woman standing at the fence and the dik-dik walked up and

jumped up on the fence to say hi. I would rather have just had a picture

of the dik-dik but it shows how friendly and small the dik-dik is by

having the hand. Susan said that woman’s hand was yucky looking, but you

can’t really tell from the picture.”

Playing With New Macs

Kelly and I are sitting in Best Buy as I type playing with the new iMacs on the new Leopard operating system. “They’re giant” says Kelly referring to the 20″ and 24″ screens. (She is on the 24″ right now.) After playing with it for a few minutes she said, “Our Mac is old. I don’t even know how to do most of the stuff in here.” Of course, she really does because she is over there building a Garage Band song right now.

Mr. Picasso Head (5)

Kelly sent me this picture that she created with the Mr. Picasso Head website. I have no idea. Thank you Kelly.

picassohead.gif

Then mom sent me this one. It’s catching…

picassohead-jgc.gif

And then this one came in from Miss Bear:

clairebear-picasso-head.jpg

Susan’s contribution to what is obviously becoming a cultural phenomenon. This could change what we see coming out of Paris next spring… even affect the 2008 elections….

picasso-susan.jpg

From the curator’s private collection.

picasso-jeb.jpg

Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)

Verizon sent met a notice with a letter and flyer explaining how important it was for them to gather and share Customer Proprietary Network Information, and how if I did not “opt-out” within 30 days, I would in effect be consenting for them to do this.

What it really means is they want to sell personal information like what numbers I call, where I drive and travel, and how frequently I use the network, and they don’t want to get in trouble for sharing it… whether on purpose or by accident.

Read more about it at the FCC here.

I called the opt-out number at Verizon and disabled sharing of CPNI for all numbers on my account (including Ted’s.) Call 800-333-9956 if you use Verizon and want to protect your information.

So this adds to the growing list of reasons I don’t like Verizon.

Voyagers Still Chatting

The farthest manmade objects from the sun are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, both launched in 1977. This article is about the equipment that has to be maintained to keep talking to them.

They are supposed to call home until 2020. One calls once per month and the other calls every day. Not sure why the difference. I thought one of these 2 were the basis for V’ger in the first Star Trek movie, but I just read it was a fictional Voyager 6. (We only made two.)

If we can have “pong” emulators, why can’t our laptops have Voyager emulators? (Ted?)