Month: December 2008

  • Queues

    While I was waiting in a queue at the Post Office, I was remembered something I thought while waiting in a queue on the phone to BT.  If there are fewer people serving at the desks or answering the phones and more people in the queues, and this becomes the norm, the people queueing will…

  • system-config-printer 1.1.0

    I just made system-config-printer-1.1.0 available.  Below are some of the changes compared to 1.0.12.

  • CUPS, GTK+, Python, and threading

    I’ve been trying to prevent a Python GTK+ application (the system-config-printer printing troubleshooter) from appearing to freeze when performing CUPS operations such as fetching a list of available devices. Let me describe the problem.  In the libcups API the main worker function is cupsDoRequest() and this function blocks until the request is complete.  It may…

  • Ecofont

    This is a font called Spranq Eco Sans, based on Vera Sans.  The idea is that the little circular holes in the lines making up the letters can save up to 20% of the ink used for printing it out. I think the idea is to get people to think about how much ink they…

  • Super-8 cine film conversion methods

    We have some old Super-8 cine film reels and have been looking around at places that will convert it to something newer e.g. DVD.  It looks like there are two main methods: Frame-by-frame conversion, where each frame is scanned separately and the frame rate adjusted by occasionally doubling frames.  This seems to be quite expensive!…