• Paper-out detection

    You wouldn’t expect it to be difficult for a printer driver to detect that the printer is out of paper. Having spent several days trying to work out the Linux usblp kernel driver, I have all but given up trying to fix it myself. Hopefully someone will show interest in the bug report I filed.…

  • Happy Danes

    The BBC Magazine is running an article about Denmark, and how “happiness” surveys show that they are generally happier than the rest of us Europeans (I’m including Brits in that). But, in classic BBC style, they need to tell both sides of the story; except in this case I’m not sure what they’re trying to…

  • Printer status feedback

    The print job manager applet is now part of system-config-printer, starting with Fedora 7 test 3. I’ve been working on making it better for after Fedora 7 is released, specifically by getting it to tell me when the printer is out of paper, low on ink, on fire etc. It uses the IPP printer-state-reasons attribute…

  • New print job manager

    A weekend hack I’m really pleased with. Frustrated with the “eggcups” print job manager after getting it all confused again, I wondered how difficult it would be to implement a proper print job manager in Python, on top of the “pycups” CUPS bindings I wrote for the admin tool.

  • Mother’s Day inventor tried to uninvent it

    I never knew that: The fight to copyright Mother’s Day.