Archive for the 'Links' Category

Want a free cell phone? Lessig has one to give away. Get a free phone from the Lessig Blog! I know I tried. You have to be the 100th person to complete the instructions. I guess he just doesn’t have any use for it. That’s pretty nice of him to give it away rather than eBay the thing. I guess I’m not as altruistic as he is.

I got an email today that said I had over $300 in “CafeCash” to use at CafePress.com. At first I thought that CafeCash was some form of fake money credit where each CafeCash “point” was worth, like, one cent or something. I figured it was a coupon deal of some kind. I decided I better log in and check it out, though.

It just so happens that I made a few designs for t-shirts sometime close to October of 2006. I intended to make the designs and have a few t-shirts printed for myself. Part of the process on CafePress is any design you upload is added to a store of its own. I made a store for each of my designs. I guess more people liked my design for a Linux t-shirt than I ever would have imagined. When I logged in it showed that I had sold over 100 of these t-shirts in the last 10 months! At the $3.00 markup rate for each shirt, I had made over three hundred dollars! The only reason why they had never cut me a check was because I hadn’t bothered to add in my address or social security number (for taxes). I’m starting to think that I had better hurry up and make some more of these designs for t-shirts.

I ran into this problem for the first time when I tried to configure a laptop running Windows XP to print to my Samsung ML-1710 printer connected to a Linux box on the network. I wanted to set this up without the added headache of using samba since I don't need any of samba's advanced functionality. I turned on error reporting and found that after I had added the networked printer in Windows XP the CUPS server was rejecting jobs based on my user name. This was the error message:

Everything I found online said to edit printers.conf and explicitly add the denied user to the list with AllowUser sedowler. I didn't like that solution. I tried adding AllowUser All, but that didn't work. I commented out all of the lines that began with AllowUser and restarted CUPS, and now it works as expected allow anyone to print no matter their user name.

I think there used to be a directive AllowUser All, but maybe it's been removed, or is a bug. I didn't ever explicitly add any of the AllowUser lines, I think the CUPS server automatically added users from Linux machines on the network when they tried to print, but for some reason didn't do that when printing from the Windows XP machine. That's the only explanation that I can come up with.

If you need more step by step instructions for configuring a Windows machine to print to a CUPS networked printer, try these instructions.

Today I was going to get a stationary exercise bike. Everything was all set. A woman named Julie said she would be picking one up from her mother-in-law today and that she would contact me about it. I didn't check my email until 6:30pm. She had already got the bike and tried to contact me to get me to come and get it. Unfortunately, when I called the bike had already been given to someone else. That's the thing about freecycling. You have to be fast.

I have never ever gotten anything through freecycling, because I'm never fast enough. Whenever I contact people they say that the item is already gone. It's a great concept if you are looking to get something for nothing, but it's even better for the one who is trying to give their items away. You can generally expect someone to be by in less than 24 hours to pick up whatever you might have to give away.

I must admit that I was more than a little bummed that I didn't get the bike I had been waiting for, but at least it didn't cost me anything anyway.

Alex has a penchant for taking the faces of his coworkers and putting them on pop culture icons like Shrek, or Princess Leia. Well, he and I have turned it into a competition to see who can make the best one. This was his idea after he noticed that I seemed a little bored. I rushed out here so quickly that I gave little to no thought to entertainment or hobbies. Anyway, here is one that he "rushed." I must admit that he has had quite a head-start at this stuff. I can do some things with the Gimp, but he really knows what he's doing in Photoshop when it comes to blending images together.

According to Samuel Shu of The Tennessean, flatulence forced a plane to land! This is unbelievable! Almost anything can bring an airplane trip to a screeching halt nowadays, it seems.

I can't remember how old I was when I got my first telescope, but I remember how much I enjoyed it. It was a small red telescope that was mostly plastic. It was the spyglass style that you always see in the pirate movies. It didn't have great magnification, but it was a fun toy, and it worked. I have only ever owned three telescopes in my life. The first was the red toy spyglass. The second one was a gift from my grandparents, and it was a lot nicer.

Shortly after receiving a telescope with a tripod and everything for Christmas my Grandfather and I took it out to the mountains that are home to the Palomar observatory. We didn't drive all the way up to the observatory, but we stopped on the side of the road about halfway up. There we set up the telescope and did our best to find interesting things I'd never seen except in books or on TV. I was able to spot Venus and could even see that it had phases like the Moon. Those are memories I will cherish forever.

The third one I bought while I was a missionary in Germany. I don't know what it was that drew me to it. It was another spyglass, but it looked nicer that my first one. It had an all-metal case and much greater magnification, too. We were riding our bikes around the rural area between Mühldorf and Altötting trying to find a bike path since we missed the train. The road was extremely narrow and dangerous to ride a bicycle on. We eventually got somewhat lost, and would have wasting a good amount of time had it not been for my spyglass. I was able to spot the important roadsigns from over a kilometer away and avoid traveling in the wrong direction. I became so known for my spyglass that the Sisters in our district gave me a little Kermit the Frog figure holding a yellow spyglass. They had drawn on my hairstyle and written my name on the base of the plastic toy stand.

Telescopes and binoculars make great gifts (Free UPS shipping on orders of $29.99 or more). People don't often think of them until they could really use them and then forget about the after the time of need has passed. Do your friends and family a favor and get them a telescope and help them create memories, too.

I've seen it happen so many times, and I always feel bad when it does. Have you ever had a picture of a person where the background is in focus and the person is all blurry? There is a solution, and it's called focal lock. It's something that anyone who ever takes a picture with a camera should know about and how to do properly. It's not a hard thing, but there are still many many people who don't know about it. I hope the suffering in the world might be lessened by this post.

I've heard it from many places, and it makes sense. The US government gives away free money for all sorts of things that a lot of people don't know about. There are a lot of websites out there that charge a fee to search for federal grants and loans. There is one resource that help people find federal grants and loans that doesn't charge a thing, and that is FederalGrantsWire.com. Give them a try before you start any new project that requires money. You might be surprised when you qualify to have your project funded partially or in full by Uncle Sam!

Yes, it is. Well, almost. You technically can't apply until January 1st, but now is the time to start thinking about it and planning ahead. It almost always seems to sneak up on me. I never seem to have the inside track on applying for financial aid... that is, until this year. There is a great free resource for information about applying for the FAFSA online this year. Not only does FAFSAonline.com have information about maximizing your award, but they also have some helpful MP3 guides to help anyone fill out the FAFSA. After you fill out the FAFSA and get it submitted you can get info about student loans and make sure that you know about every opportunity to get money for school. This will be especially important for me this year because I'm transferring to a university, and that means that the price of schooling is really going up for me this year.