If you’re on one of those special midget keyboards (a laptop?) that lacks useful buttons like Home and End, you’re probably looking for Shift + Fn + Left / Shift + Fn + Right.

There are a bunch of ways you can remap the key bindings, but in the interests of staying sane when working on others’ machines, it’s probably worth changing your muscle memory instead of your bindings here. It’s also worth noting that Vim users can use ^ / $ for beginning / end of line respectively.

So all I want is an enum field. Or a multiple choice box, easy to get in Excel.

Neither of these are available at time of writing. The term “enum” has only been mentioned on any OO.o mailing lists pertaining to Base nine times, ever. And it supposedly connects to a MySQL server. Yeah, right.

I guess it’s back to rapid prototyping of a web interface to deal with data entry, or using Excel/Access… sigh. This was meant to be the quick and easy (and open source) solution.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great quality and magically never crashes and all the rest of that marketing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wander back over the other side of the room here and install Windows on my equally-powerful system for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your monitors. I can pick up an equivalent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offering… and if I’m content with a meagre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seriously, it’s completely unjustifiable and no-one in their right mind should be prepared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new harddrive and various software licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly everything I can do here I can do in Windows (haha — does anyone else notice the beautiful inversion of that argument? I actually think I’ve been running Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except anything requiring a terminal. That’s almost definitely my greatest frustration, but no matter. I need software that doesn’t run in Linux and is too intensive to work well in virtualized conditions. Best option for me would be to get a whole separate computer, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Windows I’d probably get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Kernel patches are the only thing taking this down, basically.

Moral of the story… something like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

I had to call up to find out what browsers they officially supported, only to be told that support was limited to Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both platforms. Firefox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not particularly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The application sniffs for a Java Virtual Machine and refuses to load without even providing an error message if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explicitly and exclusively for the Sun virtual machine… so anyone who doesn’t use that platform for whatever reason (licensing, ethical, platform) — even if they have another fully compatible virtual machine — can’t get access.

My solution? Disable Java (not JavaScript) altogether using the Web Developer’s toolbar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no reason or excuse for this behaviour. If this fits into some perverted notion of security, I’m not comfortable having my money there. If it’s the product of an incompetent web team… well… they’re an incompetent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t working, then explicitly asked for a report to be forwarded to the web team. Please lots of people do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account number during the phone call!)… this service is unneccessarily stupid at present!

On a plus side, their phone service is good fun. I couldn’t find a support number quickly, so I called the dragondirect number provided on a letter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “support”, I just hammered “9” repeatedly. Works on a lot of PBX systems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 seconds, who then put me straight into the queue for web support. Good stuff.

Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)

And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)

• Font rendering. This is how ClearType should have worked years ago.
• Improved standards compliance. The Sunrise Family site (live) now works with IE7 near-perfectly (i.e. no more or less broken than most other browsers. On par with Firefox, worse than Opera and Safari.) Happy happy happy!
• Zoom. Note this is SEPARATE to font sizing. But it’s still a little broken.
• Homepage tab group isn’t an extension or extra software that needs to be added. Whenever you add a homepage, IE prompts you if you want to make this your ACTUAL homepage or add it to the opening group of tabs. Playing catch-up, sure, but a good feature nonetheless

Against:

• Font rendering. It’d be great if it could intelligently antialias only san-serif fonts, and not process fixed-width or serifed fonts, which it invariably makes “fuzzy” rather than clearer. Also, font rendering seems to be smaller by default, which is both a good thing — it’ll force designers to make their base font sizes bigger — and a bad thing — in that, obviously, those designers that don’t conform will be subjecting users to painfully small text :-(
• Interface. Kudos for thinking outside the square, or whatever, but I reckon people are going to struggle getting used to this. I know I will, but that’s probably because I switch between at least five different browsers daily and expect them to all behave about the same. I get confused when going between Mac and PC, mostly, because the keyboard shortcut bindings change from Apple/Start — I’m using a KVM — and control + [key] change, so Internet Explorer moving anything around is bad for me, unless everyone else follows suit.
• Broken zoom resizes images + elements in HTML fine, but on one of my sites struggles resizing the background on the body (or maybe html?) element. Also, it doesn’t keep (all) centered sites centered once you zoom. This will obviously have to be fixed for the final release, too. I searched their newsgroup and couldn’t find anything so I posted something about it quickly. Vote for it, please :-)

You can see the printer in that photo — it’s a fair bit smaller than the G85 was (before you go searching — because I know you actually care that much — I’ve only ever fleetingly mentioned that printer on here before. A quick search just turns up a whinge about drivers, from last July.), probably between two thirds and a half its size (in terms of bulk — it has an equivalent footprint, or maybe a bit shallower).

So what’s this thing do? Printing, scanning, faxing. Duh. It also has PictBridge stuff (which I doubt I’ll ever use), memory card slots, an LCD display, and network support.

I’m still uncertain which of the last two is cooler, but I’m leaning towards the network support.

The main control panel is very well planned out, and highly usable.

The LCD screen tilts backwards and forwards (into a recessed area within the printer), and is backlit.

Its viewing angle is pretty mediocre, but it’s good when you’ve got your head in the right place/adjusted the screen properly.

Now that I’ve got the trivial stuff out of the way with lots of pictures, time for some more exciting and slightly-less trivial stuff with even more pictures! The network feature!

Yeah, okay. We’ve all seen a plugged in network cable before. Probably even seen a network cable plugged into a printer before. So why’s this special? To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Let me count the ways” — okay, so I’m not quite in love with it. (Thank goodness).

For one, this is a dirt cheap consumer printer. Well, probably a little more than dirt cheap. But squarely in the home/SOHO market, so the network support (it does USB, too) is out of the ordinary.

Not only is the presence of a port out of the ordinary, the software side of things is also surprising. HP, of course, have their own “JetDirect” network printer protocol. Which isn’t IPP, and isn’t some crappy Windows share. It’s supported on Unix systems thanks to HP’s co-operation with the open-source community, and on Windows/Mac systems, HP bundle software to deliver this functionality.

Still nothing special? Okay. How about this.

You can not only use this network printer to print, but also to file share and network scan.

Yeah. Cool, huh? Whenever you plug a card into the memory slots, it will appear as a network drive on Windows systems with the HP software installed (with one caveat, but I’ll get to that soon). I’m not sure what happens with Mac computers, but I imagine it’d be similar — we haven’t got any of those here for me to test with, a situation I’m planning to remedy in the near future.

Whilst on the topic of those memory slots, it’s also possible to scan on the device direct to the card, so you don’t even need a computer with drivers for scanning. Also, much in the same way as many consumer scanners have a button you can press to activate scanning on your computer, this device similarly allows you to do that — only you’re given a choice of which network-connected computer to send the scan to!

Scanning needn’t be so complicated, however. The first thing I did after installing cartridges was to setup the network inteface manually to ensure the device had a static IP and couldn’t get lost on the network. In my usual compulsive geek-investigator state, I scanned the ports of that IP (I picked 192.168.0.4, the lowest static IP still available on my network — we also use 192.168.0.101 to 200 for DHCP, but that’s a story for some other time) and discovered that in addition to the JetDirect and Windows file sharing ports, there was also port 80 open.

Score! I thought, as I hadn’t expected anything so civilised as a web interface on this thing.

I loaded up the page, and was greeted with this:

It gives miscellaneous information about the status of the printer, along with links to various other functions. The most important of which is “Scan”.

Clicking through to “Scan”, I’m greeted with a simple enough screen that offers a choice of image type, and document size. One thing that does suck here is that A4 isn’t an option for the document size, so it’s impossible to scan the full size of the plate with the web interface. Standard desktop scanning software has no problems, this is just a usability flaw in the web interface.

You can preview your scan in this page, as shown in this screenshot…

…before progressing to the actual scan.

This next bit had me confused. At first, I thought it just didn’t like Firefox — so I walked over to a Windows computer and gave Internet Explorer a go. Same problem. It said the scan had completed successfully, but I couldn’t see anything. Internet Explorer, however, offered a more intrusive explanation of what had happened, proudly proclaiming that it had blocked a popup window.

So, back to Firefox, I added 192.168.0.4 to the list of allowed popup sites, and all was merry.

The experience has been a mostly positive one, with one exception. Their Windows XP software sucks. That needs some qualification — it only sucks if you’re using it in an environment that has been administered correctly. If you’re Joe-my-computer-is-full-of-spyware-from-running-as-administrator-Smith, then you’re in luck (for once): it’ll work fine. But, if you’ve setup user accounts (as could be expected, even in a small network environment) that aren’t running as Administrator (even the Power User group doesn’t work), then you can’t print or scan or read the contents of flash disks in the printer.

As I write, there is no known solution to the problem, and what I’ve read would suggest that HP are denying such a problem exists. Well, it does, and it isn’t solely because of inept administration.

In all, a good device marred by a few software flaws. If you’re looking for a network printer for a non-XP environment, be that earlier versions of Windows or Mac OS X or a *nix environment, I’d say it’s a great buy. Bonuses are the ability to use the flash card reader on all connected computers, network scanning, and an LCD preview display.

In terms of print quality, the colours are okay, though key (black) isn’t wonderful. I’ve only tested on 60GSM paper, though, so that’s obviously a contributing factor in my judgement. I doubt the quality would be of concern to most users, at any rate. It’s more than adequate for most desktop tasks.

*carefully unticks “PingBack” check box*

That’s better. The comment in question recommends SpellBound for anyone commenting on other, or operating their own, blogs. It’s a nifty little plug-in for Firefox, which checks the contents of the active textarea or field of a form when the user presses Ctrl + Shift + F7 (Cmd + Shift + F7 for Mac people), or right-clicks the area in question and selects “Check Spelling”.

I don’t need to tell you this — their webpage does it, just fine. Usage instructions are on their front page, so go download it and stop making spelling mistakes when posting content!

Now, if only someone would develop a plugin that validated the code in comments as WELL as spellchecking… my life would be perfect!

(Well, not really… significantly improved, though.)