All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista

Hardware, Software

I’ve been fighting against Windows Vista to get my HP Laserjet 1010 working for about a month now and finally have a working solution. You’re mileage might vary:

  1. Go to http://www.hp.com and find the driver for your printer. If a direct match isn’t available, see if there is one for the updated version of your printer (in my case, a Laserjet 1012 or a Laserjet 1015). If none of those are available, there are numerous forums that suggest using the Windows XP driver will work as expected, see how you go.
  2. Decompress the drivers you’ve downloaded to a known location on your computer.
  3. Go into Control Panel, Printers and select the Add Printer option.
  4. When the prompt comes up to select the port to connect your printer to, instinctively you would have chosen USB. Don’t ask me why, but even though the printer is connected via a USB connection, you’ll need to select the DOT4 option. I had been choosing the USB option with no success, so if you’re having trouble with your existing driver it might be worth switching it just to see if it fixes your printer problem.
  5. When you get to the vendor/printer screen, select the Have Disk option and navigate to where you decompressed the files to in point 2.
  6. Follow the rest of the wizard though.

I’m currently using the HP provided Laserjet 1012 drivers against my Laserjet 1010. After my new found knowledge of selecting the DOT4 port option, I now suspect that the Microsoft provided driver for the HP Laserjet 1010 would have worked as well.

WordPress Upgrade

Blogging, Software

Just before the end of last year, the team behind WordPress released an update, which was marked as an urgent upgrade for all users. For whatever reason, it’d been quite a long time since I’d updated last – that I’d let this upgrade pass by as well. Not quite sure what made me actually do the upgrade last night but it was such a painless exercise, I’m going to make a point of upgrading in step with the releases of WordPress from now on.

To give you an idea of what is involved in upgrading a copy of WordPress:

  1. Backup my current installation of WordPress
    1. First I downloaded my out dated copy of WordPress, which took about two minutes.
    2. Second I took a backup of the database as well, this took approximately ten minutes as I included everything in the database.
  2. Download the latest and greatest copy of WordPress, takes approximately a minute.
  3. Extract the freshly downloaded WordPress.
  4. Disable any plugins that are running, in case they aren’t compatible with the new version of WordPress.
  5. Set the theme back to the default, in case the current theme had any dependencies on any of the plugins which were active.
  6. Upload the new WordPress files onto the server, takes about two minutes.
  7. Load the web site upgrade file, which upgrades the database schema to the latest version.
  8. Re-enable plugins one by one, making sure they function correctly as you go.
  9. Restore your preferred theme.

After all of the fluffing about, it took about 20 minutes in total and most of that could have been avoided if I chose to only backup selected bits of the database (thus reducing the download size).

As a by product of the upgrade, I have a little house keeping to do around the site. I noticed that one of my WordPress plugins isn’t functioning correctly, since the category management has been completely overhauled since the version I was running. WordPress now supports tagging, which are essentially micro-categories; so it’ll be a bit of an exercise to go back through the last few years of posts and tag them appropriately but it’ll make finding information much easier for users.

Regeekified

Hardware, Humour, Life

In May, I realised that over the course of the last few years some of my so called geek status might have been fading, as I lamented that I hadn’t taken the side panel off my computer for over 2 years. Over the last fortnight, I can confirm that I have been quietly re-estabilshing my geek-fu with the following hardware acquisitions:

  • Intel Core 2 3.0Ghz CPU
  • Asus P5E Motherboard
  • Asus GF8800GT 512MB
  • Corsair TWIN2X2048 8500C5D 2GB
  • Western Digital 74G SATA Raptor 10000 rpm HDD (16Mb Cache)
  • Western Digital 500G SATAII 7200 rpm HDD (16Mb Cache)
  • Liteon 20x DVD Dual Layer DVD+/-R SATA
  • CoolerMaster Real Power 550W Extreme

At the same time, I have installed Windows Vista Business, which was a pretty seamless exercise. After using it for the last fortnight, Windows Vista is certainly a visual upgrade from Windows XP Professional however there are a few things that keep getting in my road. Once I’ve fixed those and the Vista driver problems I’ve been having, I’ll reevaluate whether it is worth downgrading to Windows XP Professional.

Besides those few little problems I’ve had with Vista and driver support, the new computer components sure do hammer. I’ve been playing Counter Strike:Source, Team Fortress 2 and a few other games with the highest settings I can manage and it isn’t missing a beat.

For those that are interested, the Vista performance information for that above hardware is:

  • Processor, 5.6
  • Memory, 5.9
  • Graphics, 5.9
  • Gaming Graphics, 5.9
  • Primary Hard Disk, 5.9

I chuckled when my slowest component was my 3.0Ghz CPU!

Defridgeration

Food, Hardware, Life

Last weekend, our refridgerator started showing a warning signal that something wasn’t quite right and by midweek it had decided it was a good time to stop refridgerating.

When it stopped cooling properly, I opened up the phone book and started calling around to service people to come and fix the fridge. I naively thought that it’d be a simple process and someone would be out that same day, it turns out that wasn’t the case. After calling 15-20 different businesses, the standard responses were that they didn’t service Fisher & Paykel fridges or they were too busy.

Of the ones that did service Fisher & Paykel fridges, the soonest we might be able to get someone out was going to be the following Monday. Now comes the amazing part, of the ones that did performed fridge repairs on Fisher & Paykel, their fees varied from a $100 to $150 for the call out fee. Once they were on site, they billed a similar amount per hour for labor and of course parts were extra.

Apparently, refridgeration is a license to print money like plumbing.