2015 — 23 July: Thursday
Today's little treat? Lunch.1
I will doubtless need it if I manage to disperse all that junk stuff that was cluttering up the depths of my garage. In more interesting non-garage news I powered through another four episodes of "Suits" yesterday evening as a minor-league compensation for being entirely unable to persuade my HP laser printer to work other than as a scanner. (This was after having found it already defined [correctly, as far as I could tell] to CUPS.) For my next trick, I shall try reconnecting its LaserJet predecessor, and just see what happens with that.
Of course, I could simply zap the "upgraded" HPLIP service, re-installing the back-level variant from the Mint distro, but I'd rather be without printing than without scanning. The combination of the GIMP and the Xsane plugin module should be enough but I'm discovering one never quite knows with Linux.
The garage yesterday afternoon
Trust me. You don't really want to see a better picture of this little lot!
The things I do for the sake of a car that hasn't even arrived yet.
I was sifting...
... through a set of family photos to find a photo of John's brother-in-law from way, way back (early 1975, in Penn) for his wife. Having sent that on its way, here's a reminder of Christa from that same photo...
... taken on the front lawn of the parental home. It shows her totally characteristic smile (which I still miss [but treasure] more than I can say).
After lunch...
... at the Luzborough ("a cosy beamed 16th-century pub") and some Linux consultancy2 I was faced with a choice between (a) following a set of clear instructions on how to zap HPLIP and re-install an earlier build, or (b) finish clearing more room in my little garage. It's now 19:20, I'm parched, and starving, but the Yaris is now back in this space...
... with about 48 cm to spare, and the Mazda purports to be only 31 cm longer than the Yaris. What could possibly go wrong? Mind you, Peter now has to decide how much of his stuff can be chucked out. I'm getting a little tired of the amount of clutter that is his versus the amount that is mine. If he wishes "his" room to be uninhabitable, he's getting very near that goal.
Printing and scanning...
... is once again a doddle. By following my consultants' advice I was able to zap and expunge all trace of the errant HPLIP. Though doing so also nuked my ability to scan. I then stepped right back to HPLIP 3.15.4 which was recent enough to include my model of All-in-One but not so recent as to suffer from whatever the heck the HP team has managed to do. I went through the make and install steps. I then downloaded HP's proprietary plugin. Fired up the new (old) HPLIP. Configured it to add the new (old) printer. Tried a scan from the GIMP. Perfect. Printed a test page via HPLIP's menu. Perfect.
There were a couple of reboots, two printer power cycles, and an oath or two, but all now seems to be well.