HP Photosmart 2610 and XP printing as a restricted rights user

Yes indeed, no longer do you need to run Windows as an Administrator, free to install spyware and other paraphernalia so often associated with the awfully dangerous world that is the Internet. Or something.

Reasons for not wanting to run as Administrator vary (for me, it’s mostly a background in Unix that has educated me thus), but no longer, thanks to a helpful reader, do we have to suffer under the regime of HP’s drivers and automated installation that renders printing as any user but administrator impossible. (Previously elucidated here).

Well, someone had to solve the problem eventually (and, knowing the way things go around here, it wasn’t going to be HP’s notoriously pathetic driver/software team), and that someone was Danlio in the comments of my review! Wooo!

A slightly edited version follows:

Just open the printer settings. (Right click on “HP Photosmart 2610 series, then click “Properties”).
Click on the “Ports” tab.
“Add port”
Select “HP Standard TCP/IP port”.
Click “Next”.
Enter the correct IP address of your HP 2610 printer. The other field will automatically fill — this does not need to be changed. Click “Next”.

There you go!

Now you can print logged in with any user account (not only administrators).

Woo! I don’t think a Windows test page has ever looked so beautiful ;-)

GMail using SPF and another odd feature

I logged into my GMail account today and noticed that a message from a Yahoo! user account was authenticated using SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, and was marked as such when you click “More options”. They’ve probably been doing this for a while, but I only just realised.

Another thing they’ve got going is user aliasing… for example, I signed up for “josh.street” and received an email to JoshStreet (and since email addresses are effectively lowercase, that means joshstreet). Obviously I’m not posting my email address in parsable format (because spammers have programs to harvest email addresses off websites), but the domain is gmail.com, so that’s not too hard to figure out if you want to send me email now is it?

From a non-IT person, regarding Firefox

anyway, i’ve been using firefox for like at least a year now cos of all the silly things attached to internet explorer.. actually it was my brother who downloaded it.. but yeh it’s pretty good!

Kim, via email. It’s funny, because I still have to file this post under “Geek”. Time to ditch the categories for freeform tags, methinks!

More Moire on a Gateway EV500 monitor

We picked up a second-hand Gateway computer around the beginning of the year (it’s great build quality, and uses less than 90W of power… but if any of the components in it died we might be a bit screwed! Mind you, at least it has plenty of PCI slots, unlike some.), along with its original monitor, a 15″ Gateway EV500.

I’m pretty sure they were rebadging Sony monitors even when this thing was made, so it’s probable there’s another model number that goes with it, but perhaps not. Basically, I used it because it went with the computer and, at that time, we didn’t have any other spare monitors of any decent quality.

This screen is okay in terms of resolutions/refresh rate support (it does 1024×768 at 85Hz, which is very good for a cheap vendor from the late 90s — and yes, it was cheap — this is a Celeron 400MHz system, though we’ve pumped up the RAM from probably 64MB or (optimistically) 128MB to 256MB to make it usable with XP. It is, however, rather blurry.

Or, was. We acquired it just as we moved into this house, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend just setting it up properly… I was trying to get, you know, four other computers and the network setup, whilst working out how to configure the phone system… oh, yeah, and I had to move into my bedroom at some point, too (in actual fact I still haven’t unpacked all the boxes… there is one or two remaining but I know what’s in them and they’re being stored in the bottom of a wardrobe, so that’s okay!)… basically I threw it on the desk and plugged it in, formatted and installed XP, made some trivial administrative software changes (probably via RDC because hot desking is, like, so much easier than turning around and using another KVM setup!), and promptly forgot about it.

So today I actually had to use it for a bit and its blurriness irritated me enough to bother doing something about it. It’s got one of those doors that covers controls and pops open to reveal a rotary switch that doubles as a button, so I did that seeing if there was anything I could do to fix it in there. Alas, no software focus utilities to be found (must poke a screwdriver in the back of it sometime), though, importantly, there are both Vertical and Horizontal Moire adjustments available under the More option from the core menu. This monitor had a fairly significant moire problem (I’m not sure if I’m using that term correctly, though I know the problem was with that), so playing with these settings for a bit made its lots more pleasant to use.

Admittedly, its focus towards the edges drops off fairly significantly, but that could be an unavoidable limitation of the device (that is, it’s a curved CRT display… so the focal length physically does change fairly significantly).

Sans LCD

Makes you wonder how I ever managed to fit a conventional screen on there, doesn’t it?