CmdrTaco's Journal: Printers, AD&D, and whatever else comes to mind

So Kathleen has been wanting me to buy a printer for nearly a year now. Its a long story, but we've really been needing one since we moved. SHe used to have access to this awesome one at her old job, but now we need to actually have one at home. So I've been researching various options. Needs to work with OS X 10.2. I'd be cool with faxing & scanning functionality built in, but we absolutely must have it connected to the network. We don't have a dedicated box to use as a print server, so I need an HPDirect or some sort of comparable printer server. We've looked at print samples at the store. Browsed some opinion websites. And what it comes down to is that there really isn't a good way to get this information. Like a row of checkboxes with things like "Fax Capability" and "Mac Compatible" and you click submit, it shows you price lists and URLs to learn about the matches. Many vendors have things like this, but for their products only. Its just more work than it should be.

Rolled up my character for Big Rob's new AD&D campaign. He's a stout little halfling thief, who happens to be a bit, well, deaf. And evil. Need to flesh out his back story and think of a name. This campaign ought to be fairly wacky. Good times shall be had.

So my OS X adventures continued with a sort of side quest... I decided to try out Quicken. I've been using gnucash for several years, and like it, but Quicken's bank connection stuff is really nifty, and its reporting tools are quite nice. Unfortunately, while gnucash is really cool about importing QIF files, it doesn't want to export them. So I had to cobble together a program to convert xac into qif files so I wouldn't have to rekey 2 years worth of bank statements and credit card info. Ended up kinda working, but man what a mess. Probably should have instead written it as a report for gnucash... would have been much easier.

Readers suggested looking into CamelBones- a perl/os x interface lib that might allow me to develop GUI mac apps as easily as the GTK::Perl apps I've been writing for the last couple years. I just love hashing out quick little GUI proggies to do stupid things (download album cover art for MP3s, front ends for various MP3 players and so on) and would love the ability to do similiar stuff under OS X. If only there were more hours in the day, or I slept less. Either way.

Season premiere of Angel was pretty good. This weeks firefly was the strongest episode so far as well. And The Sopranos was also very entertaining. There's just a lot of good telly available these days. Once again, I need to extend the number of hours in the day.