September 2011 Archives

Long story short, I'm setting up a shiny, new iMac with OS X 10.7 (aka Lion) for my graphic artist mother whose 2003-era G5 decided to die catastrophically and quickly.

Once I figured out the ancient SpeedStream modem's PPPoE issues with her formerly SBC, currently AT&T DSL connection, got her Ethernet-equipped HP LaserJet 4000n printer on the same network as the iMac (once I figured out the printer's IP address through printer-top button-pressing voodoo), all that was left was bringing the HP Scanjet 6300c scanner to life.

It shows up in the detailed view of "About this Mac." But no software is automatically downloaded (that's how OS X 10.7 configures printers and scanners, apparently, and it dealt with the LaserJet 4000n that way).

The USB-connected scanner appears to be dead. To OS X 10.7 anyway.

Thank you, you 40 people who "like" the Click Technology Blog Facebook page, which now has an easier-to-remember-than-seemingly-random-numbers-and-letters vanity URL:

The presence of this Facebook page in no way constitutes an endorsement of Facebook, which I'm still plenty squirrely about. It does support my position that social networks are excellent places in which to promote content you actually own and control, and that is one of their greatest uses.

As you can see, most of what is on this page is my Twitter feed, much of which originates in my Identi.ca feed. If Google+ and Facebook ever manage to federate in any way, my G+ content will be here, too.

I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).

Call it counter-intuitive (or less than intuitive), but once you bring a PDF into LibreOffice, you edit it in LibreOffice Draw.

It's amazing. You can modify the text in the PDFs, move them around, bring in additional images, create text boxes and fill them.

Then you can export the whole thing as a multi-page PDF. Did that. Looks great.

Like the title says, LibreOffice Draw is my new favorite application. This week anyway.