Author: jackadmin

What is the difference between all those damn drivers? This question has been asked by many and it usually goes unanswered once a user realizes that no matter which driver they download, it still just works on their machine. But the question still lingers, at least in the back of my brain, and every time I download a driver from HP’s website, I see the same 3 choices… PCL5, PCL6, and PostScript. So finally, I googled that exact question above and found some answers. I’m going to break it down for you here:

• PCL5 – The most widely available printer command language. It is almost *pure* text, and therefore easily programmable from any OS platform. However, the most recent printers coming out might not be 100% PCL5 compatible or not compatible at all.
• PCL6 – A somewhat advanced version of PCL5 that used a compressed protocol instead of *pure* text. Unfortunately, this protocol can be buggy over a network. If you are having trouble printing over a network with PCL6 you may want to try PCL5 or Postscript instead.
• Postscript – This language is often built into printers. It was developed by Adobe and was previously the most used printing protocol. Postscript is supported by a lot of utilities, especially obscure ones on Linux distributions. It is generally more resource hungry, but that is because it is in plain ASCII and somewhat human readable.

Even though PCL5 and PCL6 are HP technologies and Postscript is an old Adobe technology, many printer manufactures use those instead of developing their own printer languages because of the popularity of PCL5, PCL6, and Postscript. HP themselves have shifted towards using PCL6 as the future and have started releasing more and more printers with less and less support for PCL5. Unfortunately, the PCL6 format is not perfect due to its error-prone structure and is ill-suited for “noisy” network environments. In networks such as those, you may be better off installing a PCL5 driver that will continue to soldier on through the network unreliability, printing garbage documents occasionally, but getting a few successful print jobs completed as opposed to a bunch of aborted PCL6-driven failures may be worth it.

So all in all, go with Postscript for the most widespread compatibility (especially in a Linux environment). Use PCL6 with your newer HP printers. And use PCL5 for those medium-to-old aged printers or if you are in a “noisy” network environment and are getting a lot of print failures with PCL6.

If you’d like to read more about the differences, I pulled most of the information in this port from a forum post I found on HP’s website.

And arguably one of the cheapest ways, too. I recommend a combination of Route 53 and S3 buckets, both services provided by Amazon AWS.

Together they cost about $1-2 a month for a static website with no database backend.

Here’s how you set it up:

1. First, register a Domain. You can do this with Route 53 or through a registrar of your choice. For this tutorial I will be using an extra domain name I’m not currently using. This domain name is petraitis.info
2. Next, login to your Route 53 control panel and click on Create Hosted Zone. There you will enter the domain name you just registered and click Create.
3. You have successfully created a new hosted zone. Route 53 will take you to a screen that shows your registered domain name along with the 4 new Nameservers it has associated with your domain name. You will use these later on with your registrar to hand off DNS resolution duties to Amazon’s Route 53 (instead of your registrar’s default DNS).
4. There was supposed to be more to this, but it got scrapped. Here is the command you would need to enter in a post-update hook script to auto-deploy any updated branches to your S3 bucket:

gathered from here: https://circleci.com/docs/1.0/continuous-deployment-with-amazon-s3/

And by butt I mean b.u.t.t.(broadcast using this tool). I’ve held off on writing these #howitsmade posts because I wasn’t so sure I liked how my current setup was faring. The radio’s stream software has changed a lot since it’s inception, but I think I’ve found my favorite, butt.

I downloaded it on a whim after a general search for streaming tools. The plugins I had downloaded for Winamp were useless when my Winamp installation became corrupt. I figured I could spend who-knows-how-long on uninstalling-reinstalling until that bitch worked again, but instead I decided to see if I could figure out how to stream *EVERYTHING* from my PC, not just all songs through Winamp. That’s how I stumbled upon butt. It is capable of this and pretty much nothing else.

I have the butt software streaming my “Stereo Mix” recording devices on Windows 7. It is connected to an IceCast server I’m running on the same machine. IceCast is a great tool that’s also extremely easy to set up. You just edit a config and run a batch file. That batch file starts up a server on your PC that just streams out whatever mountpoint you have configured up to it (in this case and many others, butt is also a mountpoint).

The second part of this post, and probably the coolest aspect, is that I can control the foobar2000 I replaced Winamp with, remotely from my phone or any other Android device connected to WiFi. Oh and if any of my computer-savvy friends decide to try to fuck with me knowing that about my network, I will just put the server on a separate router and replace all your phone browser’s image requests with dildos while you’re in my house.

Anyways, now that I was using foobar2000, I knew that I had access to better-programmed apps and plugins. The first thing I went searching for was a remote-controller app for android. I found one called foobar2000 controller. It works perfectly. All it requires is a small <1 MB companion app to be downloaded to the media streamer PC and then it’s just a matter of configuring the app on your phone to point to the PC and you’re good to go. I can change songs with about ~1-2 sec delay in my home. I want to try VPNing into my network through my phone’s cellular data network sometime and try controlling the radio playlist from the wide world. But that’s a project for another day.

Another one of my long term goals is to get a “Current Artist – Song” update on the IceCast public interface for my stream. I had it working before with Winamp and the tools recommended to me in the first tutorial I read about internet radio streaming. It doesn’t help that many of the Winamp plugins they recommend, like Edcast, are unsupported, hard to find, and ultimately defunct and barely functional at times. BUT, that being said, Edcast was able to add the song artist and title information to the data it sent to IceCast. I need to figure out how to get my butt program to read the now-playing metadata associated with foobar2000, if that’s even possible… I can’t wait to start polluting my Google Search history with “now playing F.U.B.A.R. butt plug-ins”…

Courtney Barnett.

Indie Rock. Melbourne, Australia.

Out of the woodwork comes an Australian girl with a sharp wit and a dreamy indie sound to back her deadpan delivery. I don’t know what does it for me, her curiously creative combinations of spoken word brain dumps or the deadpan delivery of some very clever rhyme schemes in her songs.

But it doesn’t matter what does it for me. What matters is whether or not you would enjoy some of her songs. Here’s one:

Courtney Barnett – Avant Gardener