Archives for 2010

AirPrint to Airport connected USB printers

2010/12/18 By staze

Since iOS 4.2 was released, and AirPrint with it, I’ve wondered whether we’d see an update for the Airport Extreme and Airport Express that would allow AirPrint to USB connected printers, but finding any information on it yielded just speculation about the issue.

So, having never done it before (short of emailing my displeasure about the Xserve being discontinued a bit ago), I shot off an email to [email protected] asking.

What I sent was:

Steve,

AirPrint seems like a pretty darn cool technology, but it seems rather limited in scale at the moment.

Will we see the ability to AirPrint to printers connected to Airport Extreme/Express base stations over USB anytime soon?

Thanks!

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Silliest hack ever…

2010/12/15 By staze

At work we’re working on a new website in Drupal, and setting up Apache Solr as our search backend. Solr, being Java, runs ideally in a Tomcat installation.

But trying to get Solr, via Tomcat running reliably in Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 was proving to be a bitch of a challenge. Tomcat would start, but trying to access Solr would indicate that it couldn’t find solrconfig.xml or /solr/conf in cwd=/. Well, duh. Tomcat is in /Library/Tomcat.

So, the hack? Edit /Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh and put (near the top) “cd /Library/Tomcat”.

Done and done. No idea why it wasn’t setting the cwd (current working directory) to /, but, changing directory in the startup script fixed it.

Like I said… Silliest hack ever.

Prius 2007, 4 years later

2010/12/09 By staze

4 years ago today, we got our first new car. We had put our name on the waiting list about 3 months earlier (early september). It was not a foolproof process, but we got the car we wanted, and have had very few problems with the car since.

We got the car with 3 miles on the odometer, and since then, we’ve driven an additional 57,493.4 miles (as of the time of writing). That amounts to 14,373 miles per year (which isn’t too far off the “normal” 12k miles per year most manufacturers claim. With those miles, we’ve put 155 tanks of gas in the car (1277.12 gallons), or $3804.33 worth of gas (which is an average of $2.98/gal). The lifetime average mileage, based only on those numbers is 45.02MPG. The actual current calculated MPG based upon the MPG of each tank, is 45.21MPG, so, pretty close.

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