Printer drivers for 10.4

From Apple's kb, a full list of supported printers in OS X 10.4 plus links to CUPS sources for more printers:

Mac OS X 10.4: Included printer drivers and PostScript PPD files:

The Driver Version column contains the PPD file version for PostScript printers or printers using CUPS drivers.
# Drivers that are denoted on the list as a Modern Driver are PPD files or drivers designed for CUPS (printing architecture available in Mac OS X 10.2 and later).
# Drivers that are not denoted as Modern Drivers cannot be selected when adding an IP printer or Windows shared printer.
# The drivers that list 'ESP' as the manufacturer are sample drivers included with CUPS.
# Some HP printer drivers support a series of printer models. To determine if a specific printer model is part of a series, see this website.

Small Dog Electronics: why they're a good place for Mac stuff

Small Dog Electronics speaks out on theft-in-transit, credit card fraud and more - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is in line with what I've read and experienced -- more issues with theft and damage in UPS and USPS shipments. The article also reminded me that SDE should always be on my vendor list when I buy electronic goods and especially Mac stuff.

OS X auto-complete: who knew?

Daring Fireball: Can I Get an "Hallelujah" for Auto-Completion With the Esc Key?. Hit F5, get an auto-complete drop down. Works in Nisus Writer Express. In 10.4 the Esc key does the same thing. Who knew? It raises the old usability question -- how do users learn about these occult features? What happens when one runs out of keyboard bindings (on laptops F5 controls the volume, you have to type Fn-F5 to get this).

Practically speaking auto-complete is extremely important for pen text entry, but it's far less useful for keyboard text entry. As DF notes it might help when one is unsure how to spell a word.

Gmail advanced search operators

These advanced search operators are well worth using: Gmail: Help Center - How do I use Advanced Search?. They're similar to Lookout (for Outlook)'s operators.

Thanks allblue.

Search gone mad - Custom AJAX API search

Google has now combined their custom custom search tool with their AJAX search API. Any geek with a bit of spare time can put together their own personal web 2.0 search utility. It's all a bit rough on those startup companies who've been creating a multitude of special purpose search tools. The barriers to entry have dropped.

The demo page is remarkable.

Google delivers custom search pages

I asked Alta Vista to do this in 1996. Now we have it: Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO Review: Custom Search Engine.

There's more there than meets the eye ...

...there’s a bookmarklet (Google Marker) so that if you’re surfing the web and find a site you’d like to add to your search engine, you just click and that site is instantly added to your search engine. And it wouldn’t be based on Google Co-op if you couldn’t choose to allow volunteers to edit your search engine and add new sites if you want.

Wow. This is my custom search page. If it works well it'll be embedded in my web site and blogs. I'll also create another custom search page I use to hold a larger set of sites. Hmm. If they enable site-sets, one could create ontologies of sites to search, and create a very sophisticated set of custom searches ...

The collaborative aspect is very noteworthy.

OS X: The OS without backup software

I can't figure out how to link to the Daring Fireball post that sent me to rentzsch.com: Hole in the Umbrella: Backup 3 but it was a good one.

Wow. This is bad.

Rentzsch suggests using Retrospect. Uhhh, no. Retrospect was acquired by EMC, a mega-corp with zero interest in the home market and even worse support than Dantz (which is saying a lot). It was a creaky and ailing software package before EMC bought it, it's now a zombie. [I use an old version of Retrospect Pro for Windows, I'll use it as long as it works.]

There are some small distribution backup solutions for OS X, but they're hardly home user friendly.

Backup is in bad shape under Windows, but it's in even worse shape in OS X.