Dissociated Press

I’m starting to think that the toner cartridges in my HP OfficeJet 5610v are all sorts of magical or something.

As a general rule, I don’t like inkjets — I got tired of replacing ink cartridges in my first printer pretty quickly in college, and I had nothing but bad experiences with inkjets in the places I worked as well.

So, I plunked down the $400 to get a laser printer (this was circa 1995 or 1996) and that bad boy — and the original toner cartridge! — hung in for about five years, four moves, and zillions of pages of college reports. When it died, I bought a networked laser printer (a Brother 1270N) in 2000 that I still have, and I’m only on the second cartridge.

But, I needed a printer at my home office while I was waiting for my stuff to arrive from Denver, so I grabbed the OfficeJet for about $100 and figured it’d be good for about 50 pages (if I was lucky) before the greedy little thing would be begging for more ink. (Like I said, I don’t like inkjets.)

I’ve been using this one for a few months now, and it’s still going strong on the original cartridges — and I’m using it while proofing the print version of Linux Magazine and you know that’s sucking up a lot of ink. I’m not sure how many pages I’ve printed so far, but I’m sure it’s in the hundreds.

It gave me an error about low ink in the black cartridge a few weeks ago, but I popped the black cartridge out and slapped it back in, and it’s been printing like a champ on the same cartridge ever since. So, yeah, I’m starting to wonder if I got the ink cartridges with an extra dose of magical ink or something.

It also works well with Linux — I plugged it into an Ubuntu Gutsy box and before I knew it, a little dialog popped up to tell me that Ubuntu had configured my new device, thankyouverymuch, and it was good to go. Nifty. This model also has a scanner and fax, and it’s a nice set it and forget it fax — you just plop down the pages, press a few buttons, and it will scan or fax them without any manual intervention.

So… that’s the long way ’round saying that, if you need a printer and don’t want to spend the extra dosh on a laser (still my first preference), you might look into one of HP’s OfficeJets.

I may have to try this… 43 Folders has a post on cleaning keyboards by putting them in the dishwasher.

I’d usually wince at the prospect of putting an expensive (well, semi-expensive — the ergo keyboards aren’t cheap…) piece of hardware into the dishwasher, but after looking at my keyboard, it’s clear that it needs a little love in this area.

I’ve tried cleaning my keyboards before using various methods (canned air, monitor wipes, and pipecleaners to get the inevitable gunk under/between the keys…) and it’s helped a little but not enough to really seem clean.

I have a few PS/2 keyboards that I’m probably not going to be using much anymore, I think it’s time to toss one of those in and see how well it survives the process. Then I’ll give it a shot with a keyboard that’s in active rotation. Worst case scenario, it’ll be time to get a new USB ergo keyboard and I’ll be out $50 to $70… and I’ll still end up with a clean keyboard. At least temporarily…

OK, I’ve been surfing around a bit, but my Google-Fu is failing me somewhat. What’s the best distro (i.e., works right out of the box, if at all possible) for a MacBook? This is a recent vintage MacBook, with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM.

I’ve been searching, but I keep running into docs that are old, or don’t seem to address the latest versions of the MB or the distro, or that have a string of instructions a mile long to enable various things like wireless.

I could just line up a half-dozen distros and spend a ton of time trying each, but I’d just as soon whip one distro on and be done with it.

One of the things I abhor about U.S. culture is that, more often than not, a love of learning and knowledge is shunned — being an intellectual or bookish person often means being picked on in school and mocked and/or avoided in later life. We claim to appreciate intelligence, but our culture really tends to discourage those who would do too well at any particular endeavor.

When I was working in a car-seat factory in my early 20’s, I usually brought something to read for the coffee and lunch breaks — that was nearly 50 minutes a day of prime reading time I wasn’t about to pass up.

I still remember the co-worker who walked up to me, when I was still relatively new at the company and my bookish reputation not yet cemented, and asked “why are you reading?”

Not “what are you reading?”, which was a question I was used to asking of others myself, but “why are you reading?” She wasn’t the last person to suggest that spending my break time with a book was less socially acceptable than standing outside sucking a cigarette or swapping bar stories.

I got to thinking about this after stumbling on “Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive,” a discussion of the author’s embarrassment at having a love of learning obscure languages:

But occasionally we turn to ritual for another reason: because our favorite activities are just too embarrassing to do in public. My obsession, reading textbooks on foreign languages and memorizing obscure grammatical detail, is ritual of the latter persuasion. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I did it in public, I wouldn’t have any friends. But if I didn’t do it at all, then I couldn’t tell you that Ancient Greek had a noun declension for objects found in pairs. Like shoes, or maybe breasts. And what fun would I be, then?

…

The fact of the matter is that foreign-language primers and grammars are my version of a bodice-ripping pirate romance: a guilty pleasure I’d love to hide but can’t quite make go away. I relish conjugation tables and declension charts. I thrill to morphophonemics, glottochronology, perfectiveness.

How sad that someone with such an interesting hobby feels that it’s something best left undiscussed. I know I’d rather discuss Greek noun declensions at a social function than, say, American Idol.

It’s doubly sad that there are people who wouldn’t find this an endearing personality trait. Heinlein’s maxim (”specialization is for insects”) aside, the world needs people to dive into topics like language to help us better understand other cultures, and other people, and to make advances in technology. If Linus Torvalds wasn’t a geek, I’d probably be doing something very different today for a living, and probably not having quite so much fun.

In general, it’s a good thing that so many people are driven to hyperfocus on a particular area of study — either professionally or as a hobby — otherwise how would we make progress?

I think people should feel free to geek out without hesitation or embarrassment, whether they’re geeking on computers, science, books, or underwater basket weaving… the folks who have a consuming interest in learning about one or more topics are the folks who are fun to talk to. They’re the ones who have something to teach and something to discuss beyond the normal small-talk chit-chat that’s so boring.