Monthly Archives: July 2007

Patch to make libinklevel work with a Canon i950 printer

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This weekend, while cruising freshmeat.net, I happened upon libinklevel, from Markus Heinz. From the description:

Libinklevel is a library for checking the ink level of your printer on a system which runs Linux. It supports printers attached via parallel port or usb.

I downloaded and installed the latest versions of that and a complementary command-line tool called ink (uses libinklevel and is from the same author). No luck with my Canon i950 printer:

marc@tbird:~/sw/libinklevel-0.7.2$ sudo ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz

Printer not supported.
Could not get ink level.

After a few minutes of glancing at the code, I was able to get it working. Here’s the patch. Now the output of the ink tool looks like this:

marc@tbird:~/sw/libinklevel-0.7.2$ sudo ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz

Canon i950

Cyan:                          40%
Light Cyan:                   100%
Black:                         10%
Yellow:                        70%
Magenta:                       10%
Light Magenta:                100%

While I was modifying the code, I noticed that there was a #define constant called MAX\_NUMBER\_OF\_MODELS, that needed to be updated whenever one adds or removes printers to the existingPrinters array. This was a little cumbersome, so I modified the code to not need that. Here’s the patch.

I will of course send these patches to the author, Markus Heinz, so that the Canon i950 can work “out of the box” with the next version of libinklevel.

CableCARD problems again

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Once again, we’re not getting some of our channels. Yesterday we couldn’t get Bravo; tonight we get Bravo, but not Comedy Central.

We’ve had problems like this before and it usually requires calling Comcast and giving them a bunch of numbers for our CableCARDs and having them give them an electronic kick in the pants.

I’ll call Comcast tomorrow.

Annoying.

Update: The TiVo was saying that CableCARD 1 was not functioning properly. After calling Comcast and scheduling an appointment for Saturday and futzing around with the TiVo which was acting really weird (getting confused which cards were inserted or not), I rebooted the TiVo and all seems to be well now. Crossing fingers…

Water softener

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Our new Kenmore water softener was installed yesterday. I sanitized the brine tank with chlorine bleach (as detailed in the instructions) and then loaded it up with a bag of potassium chloride and kicked off a regeneration. So far we haven’t noticed our showers feeling any different, but that might be because there’s still a bunch of hard water in the water heater tank and we need to cycle through it before we experience truly soft water.

links for 2007-07-21

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