Saturday, July 15, 2006
Tried getting OS X to print to my Windows printer. I had tried this several months ago using a tutorial on ArsTechnica that Chris sent me, and I gave up after I couldn't get it to work very easily. I presumed (incorrectly, I think now) that it had something to do with opening a port on my wireless router and the thought of trying to find the answer in that admin panel was just too overwhelming so I never bothered. Instead, today, after more searching for answers in Google, I found instructions on Apple's website called "Cannot locate a shared Windows printer" which said to hold the Option key while clicking "More Printers" (which I never would have figured out on my own—a hidden feature is a problem discovered) and then I was successfully able to find and add the printer. But now when I print from OS X, the status says Printing but nothing comes out, no lights on the printer blink. The share name is PRINTER. I find a document on the Apple website called "I try to print but nothing happens" and it points me to "Print and Fax preferences" which I think they mean system preferences and I find the print queue and it has an error displayed in it: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE followed some time later by "Unable to connect to SAMBA host, will retry in 60 seconds...ERROR: Connection failed with error." I realize I didn't follow the "hold-the-option-key" instructions correctly the first time around and got NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED. I tried another of the suggested formats for the Device URI and again got NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED. I tried another, and it worked! The format for Device URI that worked for me was smb://user:password@workgroup/server/sharename. The whole process of setting up OS X to print to my shared Windows printer took me 40 minutes. For anyone else trying to figure this out, it's helpful to open Console, open the /var/log item, open the cups item, and scroll to the end to see the printing system error messages that are being logged. After getting this to work, I wonder if Rendezvous aka Bonjour would have been useful in this scenario—I've heard about it, but I don't know much about it except that it's supposed to make these kinds of experiences a thing of the past. And didn't Wired magazine report that Sun was working on similar technology about a zillion years ago? The NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE and NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED error messages were also misleading in my case since the problem was with the Device URI and not with the login or password or share name or access settings. Paid bills. Lunch with Patrick: turkey burgers, french fries, tortilla chips. Archived documents. Shopped online. I've been needing a new alarm clock. I can't remember the brand of the last one I had, but I was happy with it up to the point of the second hand not turning properly and so it wouldn't keep time correctly anymore. I opened the face to try to fix it, but things only got worse from there and I ended up making things worse rather than fixing it. The clock arms and face had tritium painted on it, so I was afraid of doing anything else with it, so in the trash it went. The replacement I bought is very similar in that it is also a battery-operated, portable alarm clock with tritium paint. This one is made by Victorinox. I also bought an old Dan Savage book which was under $2 for used hardcover, a metal Oxo colander since one of ours broke a long time ago, and a Kitchenaid gravy separator. Patrick left for Wei's. I took a nap. Woke, cut my hair. Weight training: bench dip. Dinner at home by myself: tortilla chips, yogurt, leftover stir fry. Patrick said everything is ready for me for the next issue of Lodestar—we are late again (2nd time). He thinks we'll be back on track for the next issue. After dinner I decided I would archive some answering machine messages Patrick and I wanted to save. I tried a microphone we have but the resulting recording had a lot of weird noise on it. It wasn't a constant hum—sometimes the recording would be perfect but it included intermittent buzzes. I lifted the microphone base and rerecorded—I thought perhaps it was getting vibration from what it was sitting on (the Mac Mini)—but that did not resolve the problem. I tried a different microphone—exact same thing. I looked for solutions online and at first thought I needed a ground loop isolater, but after more hunting for answers in Google I came across recall700m.com which described exactly the same problem I was having. The owner of that site is more upset than I am to know that the Inspiron 700m we bought is defective. We don't record audio very often, and for this particular situation I can work around it by going back to Patrick's old IBM laptop which I'm sure will work as expected. But this does reaffirm my growing lack of favor toward Dell. This evening, I also learned about Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, TrueCrypt, and steganography (mostly from Wikipedia). After viewing a screenshot tour of Ubuntu 6.06 on osdir.com I must say that I am very impressed with it. I find it interesting to see what has been borrowed from Windows and what from Mac, and I am now interested in trying it out for myself.