Introduction

I bought a DELL Latitude D400 laptop on E-bay. The machine had 512MB Ram and a 20GB Hard drive. It came with Windows XP SP2 pre-installed. This machine has no internal CD and this unit did not come with an external CD. My aim was to make it dual boot Windows and openSUSE 10.3 linux.

Preparation

I wanted a bigger hard drive, so I bought a 160GB samsung 2.5" HD. As with most ex-corporate machines this one did not come with installation media for windows (just a sticker with a number). Not having an easy way of re-installing windows, I decided the best thing to do would be to image the drive. I used the trial version of Acronis migrate easy. First I put the 160GB in an external USB enclosure, then ran migrate easy. It very quickly and smoothly transferred the image to the new drive. I needed to use the manual settings because by default easy migrate expands the partition size to fill the new HD, but I wanted to leave space available for SUSE.

A really useful thing to have when you are programming, writing html or just trying to find the syntax of a command in mysql, is a cheat sheet. A great site that lists a large number of useful cheat sheets is cheat-sheet.org. Worth checking out!

I've been having a close look at web frameworks recently. As my programming has matured, I've gone from spaghetti and hacking right through to well-structured, modular programs and I'm now religiously keeping my logic separate from my design. I see web frameworks as the next step in this evolution. Frameworks allow you to take advantage of other people's work (and that has to be a good thing!). If you work within the framework's parameters you can program your application with very little code. You will end up with a well-structured program that is simple, and easy for someone else to work out what you have done.

Canon i250 Inkjet Printer

Summary: The Canon i250 is a great little printer.

Why I bought it

I bought this because I have had no end of trouble with my current Epson C60 printer. The Epson kept clogging and needed endless nozzle cleaning which churns through the ink. Probably more than half of my ink was going on cleaning and the Epson cartridges are amongst some of the most expensive around. When the colour cartridge ran out, I saw that I could get a new Canon i250 for less than the price of a pair of Epson cartridges!

Installation

First up, this really is a budget printer, one of the ways they have saved money is that there is no usb cable supplied! My guess is that a lot of stores make more on selling you the cable than they do on the printer, so make sure you don't pay too much for the cable.