Saturday July 24 2010
Got my new MacBook Pro a week ago, and had to reinstall the driver for my trusty old Samsung ML-1610 laser printer. I bought it years ago for less than 50 euros and it’s still going strong.
It’s a great (and cheap) printer, but Samsung doesn’t officially support it for Mac OS X (Snow) Leopard. Which is kind of strange, because it’s quite easy to get to work! Just install the 10.3 drivers for the ML-1710, choose the 1710 driver for your 1610 printer and it will work in 10.6 just fine.
You can find the driver on Samsung’s website. It’s not available on the US site, but it is on the Dutch one. Strange again… but it’ll work!
Saturday May 22 2010
I’ve had my iPhone 3G now for about 2 years, and it has gotten slower over time. I noticed that it had nothing to do with runnings apps or ‘being too full’. Restarting it or removing unused apps didn’t make it any faster, for instance.
I’m thinking that the culprit was SSD fragmentation. Obviously the iPhone doesn’t have a fancy controller like the Intel X25M and constant use might leave little free blocks available for writing.
After a quick backup & restore in iTunes (right click your iPhone, choose Backup, wait, then choose Restore from Backup) the iPhone is snappy as new – even when it’s chock-full of apps!
Update: Especially for iOS4 with a 3G, turn off Spotlight if you’re not using it! You can find this setting under Settings/General/Home button. Makes a big difference.
Did it work for you too? Let me know in the comments below!
Wednesday October 28 2009
Sometimes you wonder what century we’re living in. Things that should be simple and ‘just work’ often don’t.
I whipped up a quick CSV export function, which results in files such as:
"name","department","phone"
"john smith","accounting","555 1234"
Pretty standard. UTF-8. Double quotes (") in fields repeated ("") to escape them. Works fine in Apple Numbers, Excel for Mac and my Excel 2007 on Windows XP (VMWare).
However, a coworker was unable to open the files. Also using Excel 2007, on Vista in this case. After many fruitless attempts changing the format, such as unquoting certain fields, changing line endings to \r\n/, it appears that a Dutch Excel 2007 handles CSV files differently than a US Excel 2007… The European localized version only accepts fields terminated by semicolons, whilst the US version needs fields terminated by commas.
This makes CSV export for Excel impossible to create reliably, unless you add some sort of radio button to ask if somebody runs a US or European version of Excel. Or if you do some browser header sniffing and hopes that this person doesn’t run the browser in a different language than Excel… (which is quite often the case in The Netherlands).
Only resort – add an extra button: Export to Excel XML. Gahhhhh…
Anyway, I hope this post is helpful for someone who runs into the same problem as I did.
