No problem, I thought. I’ll just reinstall the printer drivers and everything will be fine.

WRONG. I couldn’t get either of my two Brother printers, a USB-connected HL-1440 and a networked MFC-7440N, to print anything. I kept getting errors about the “CUPS” and “operation-not-completed-client-error.”

Commence Google searching to solve this problem. I did eventually find the solution, which is surprisingly simple, but I must have visited 10 web site before I cobbled it together the solution in full. So here it is, in one easy to digest package.

1. To make this work, you’ll have to be able to see a hidden file directory called /etc/cups. If you can already see the directory Macintosh HD -> private -> etc -> cups in your Finder, then you’ve already got your Finder set to show you hidden files. But I had apparently hidden my hidden files, so I couldn’t even see the “private” folder, much less the “etc” or “cups” folders.

To un-hide your hidden files, open the application Terminal. Enter these two commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Ta-da, now you can see hidden folders and files.

2. Enter Time Machine. Scroll back to whichever backup pre-dates your system restore with Time Machine. Navigate to Macintosh HD -> private -> etc. Highlight the “cups” folder and click “Restore.”

3. Try printing something to see if your problem is fixed. Mine was fixed. But if you still have issues, you could try restoring all the files and folders that OS X accesses when adding a printer:

/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.makequeues.plist
/Library/Preferences/org.cups.printers.plist
/etc/cups/certs/0
/etc/cups/ppd
/etc/cups/
/Users/yourshortname/.cups/lpoptions
/Users/yourshortname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.add.plist
/Users/yourshortname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.PrintingPrefs.plist
/Users/yourshortname/Library/Printers/(your printers)

4. If you wish to re-hide your hidden files, go back to Terminal and type in these two commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

and secondly,

killall Finder

And if you are not an IT professional or a certified geek, this would be a good time to CLOSE TERMINAL because it is powerful joo joo. If you attempt to ask followup questions in the comments, I must warn you that I am not a Mac expert and will probably advise you to try macforums.com.

Posted via email from On the Search for the Genuine

Thanks to CrockPot365, I’ve become
increasingly addicted to making homemade yogurt in the crock pot. There’s only two people in our house, so it’s not unusual to have
a quarter or half gallon of milk that’s a few days from going bad, and
making it into yogurt saves me from throwing it away. But this week I
got carried away and made an entire GALLON of yogurt, so I’m looking
for new and novel ways to use it up.

Thank goodness for the Allrecipes.com ingredients search. I culled
these from the top-rated recipes that contained yogurt. Ideas I’m
gathering from Allrecipes:

Tandoori chicken

Biscuits (notice the link in this recipe for a homemade biscuit mix)

Fruit Salad —they specify strawberry or lemon yogurt but I’m thinking it would
work with homemade yogurt + lemon juice and/or honey

Cornbread Pasta that’s creamy but lighter than something with a cheese sauces Put it in Baba Ganoush and Creamy Hummus Yogurt cheese, a good substitute for cream cheese

And while we’re talking yogurt cheese, you can use that to make
CHEESECAKE

And if you’re gonna make cheesecake, might as well use more yogurt
for the Graham Cracker Crust Drool. I think I’ll start with the pasta and the cheesecake!

Posted via email from jenmichaels’s posterous

I wondered if I was about to enter a phone-calling, car-driving purgatory.

But then a minor miracle happened. My local hydroponics store, Indoor Gardening at 4720 Indianola Ave, sells both fine-grade and coarse-grade vermiculite in 4-cubic-foot bags for $14.95. This compares very favorably with the $14 “good price” mentioned in The New Square Foot Gardening book. Hooray!

The customer service was friendly and excellent, and the guy said they stock coarse-grade vermiculite as a regular product. So if you’re looking to do some square foot gardening in Columbus, give them a call! Here, I’ll even save you the Google:

Indoor Gardening
4720 Indianola Ave
Columbus, OH 43214
(614) 262-1600
Open Mon, Tue and Sat 10am-6pm; Wed, Thurs, Fri 10am-8pm
http://maps.google.com/places/us/oh/columbus/indianola-ave/4720/-indoor-garde…

Posted via email from jenmichaels’s posterous

Dude, very excited about this deal that I found out about yesterday night: $5 back in CVS eGift cards for every $25 you spend. Limit is $30 back for up to $150 in gift cards. I found out about it at Slickdeals in this thread, which lists TONS of cash back deals for gift cards this season: http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1749172

I think it’s flown under the radar because the main gift card page, http://cvs.cashstar.com/ (which you can get to right from www.cvspharmacy.com by clicking the “CVS Gift Cards” link at the bottom, so it’s totally legit) doesn’t advertise this deal. You have to click the little “Purchase an eGift Card” link, and THEN you see this lovely red sign + a link to Rewards Terms and Conditions. If you want to buy the eGift card(s) for yourself, there is a box you can check that says “This is for me”.

I will warn that while I got an order confirmation right away, I got a call the next day (nearly 20 hours after my order) asking for info verification. I can appreciate their diligence–I’m sure there aren’t many people who order $150 of eGift Cards to CVS for themselves. But thanks to the Grocery Game (www.thegrocerygame.com), I am a frequent flyer at CVS.

Love this deal!

Posted via web from jenmichaels’s posterous

Before I start blabbing, a list of participants:

Moderator
Brenda Brueggemann, Professor of English; Coordinator, Disability Studies

Speakers
Richard Voithofer, Associate Professor of Educational Technology
Patrick Losinski, Executive Director, Columbus Metropolitan Library
Tom Fritz, Executive Director, Connect Ohio
Gary Cavin, Chief Information Officer, City of Columbus
Osei Appiah, Associate Professor of Communication

Discussant
H. Lewis Ulman, Associate Professor of English; Director, Digital Media Studies

Things that interested me at this sesh:

Brenda Brueggemann, who designates herself as hard-of-hearing, said “I
was never deaf in the library” and that the Internet has helped expand
that information freedom beyond the walls of the library.

Richard Voithofer asked, “Is it time for public education to get out
of the content business and into the literacy business? Proposed that
we begin talking about a literacy called “community literacy” about
how 2 engage groups to meet particular goals.

Voithofer furhter observed that young people are often “faking tech
literacy”. This reminded me of the argument made in Bartholomae’s
“Inventing the University” regarding students who fake academic
college written literacies.

I learned a lot from the panelists about the state of the city of
Columbus re: literacy and broadband access. According to Voithofer,
the Columbus Literacy Council identified 100,000 adults in C’bus who
are not reading at the 4th grade level. Columbus Public Library Exec
Director Patrick Losinski said that in the workshops the Columbus
Public Library system holds for at-risk parents, many of those teenage
parents have never had a book read to them. They experience the joy
of reading with children for the first time EVER in these workshops.
Crazy!

I also learned that Ohio is one of two states that funds libraries at
the state level and that the desire for broadband access among library
users is so high that Columbus libraries have queues of up to 3 hours

There was a lot of chatter about public broadband access and how in
some places such as Finland and Spain, it’s construed as a legally
enforceable right. Someone, I can’t remember specifically whom,
talked about how 70 percent of U.S. landmass has broadband access
available, and that covers 95% of the population. However, some of
those 95% choose consciously not to use broadband in the home, either
because they can’t afford it (and many of those folks rely on
libraries for broadband) or because–more surprisingly to me–they
don’t see the need for it. Someone told a good story about an IT tech
guy who didn’t have broadband and didn’t see the need for it until his
paper boy started failing to deliver his newspaper in a timely
fashion. The guy got broadband so that he could access the paper
early in the morning.

Louie Ulman, who was the discussant, made a great list of things
(based on the previous presenters/discussion) about things that one
might desire for a citizen to be able to DO with information once
they’ve got it: subscribe to it, query it, discuss it,
cross-reference, etc. Might be interesting to hold a sesh JUST on
that–what things we would want a community literate citizen to be
ideally able to do with information.

Wish I could have stayed longer at the sesh, but alas, I had to run
off to a Final Cut Pro workshop!

Posted via email from jenmichaels’s posterous

I’m normally averse to paying for copycat restaurant recipes when there are so many available for free, but I looked high and low for the Red Robin chili recipe and couldn’t find it. I finally bit the bullet and paid 99 cents for this one, and folks, it was delicious and right on the mark. I even fudged a couple ingredients and it was still perfect (most notably I did not have canned chipotle chilis on hand, so I used canned jalapenos with McCormick’s chipotle chili powder added in.)

The next time I feel like gaining 5 pounds, I’ll be trying the TopSecretRecipes.com (free) Girl Scout Thin Mints recipe. Sounds delicious and easy.

Posted via web from jenmichaels’s posterous

I long ago converted to homemade laundry detergent (brief detour here: even if you hate the Duggar family, their laundry detergent recipe is the bomb http://www.duggarfamily.com/recipes.html). But when I tried the most common online recipe for homemade DISHwashing detergent, which is 1:1 borax and baking soda, it was no match for Ann Arbor’s hard water. My dishes came out filmy and unclean, and my glassware was all spotty and gross. So I “cut in” a box of dollar store powdered dish detergent, hoping that the enzymes in the store-bought stuff would improve my homemade stuff. It was passable, but my Cascade Gel-Pacs were clearly better, and I resigned to keep dishing out 20 cents per load for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, the people at Debtfreeadventure.com appear to have figured out the secret to a better formula. It uses the same washing soda found in the better laundry soap recipes (although in a much smaller quantity), uses kosher salt to create some of the “scrub” that the commercial formulations have, and uses food-grade citric acid to get that missing “sparkle”. I am psyched to try this! I’ve even already located my local beer specialty shop (http://www.winemakersshop.com/beer.php) to find the citric acid!

Posted via web from jenmichaels’s posterous

God bless the Slickdeals.net forums, which is where I found out about the Glasses Unlimited promotion for $9.99 prescription glasses + $4.99 shipping. I ordered two pair for $30 shipped. That’s pretty slick, especially for spare pairs. Go check it out, www.glassesunlimited.com

Two warnings if you’ve never ordered glasses online before: the stronger or more complex your prescription, the more likely they are to botch your order. My prescription is fairly straightforward. Also, it is worth taking the time to upload your photo into the “Virtual Try-On” mode. I’ve found it to be a pretty fair facsimile of what it’s actually going to look like.

If you are still a paranoid skeptic about ordering glasses online, try checking out the awesome blog at www.glassyeyes.com, which is by a guy who’s been ordering dozens of frames online for years and years.

Finally, a word on pupillary distance. This is the one important measurement for glasses ordering that almost never makes it onto your written prescription. Get yourself a metric ruler and have a friend measure it for you–it’s the distance from the center of one pupil to the other when you’re looking straight ahead into the distance. It’s not a hard thing to measure, but it makes a huge difference in whether your lenses are any good.

Posted via web from jenmichaels’s posterous

Cory Doctorow wrote a great editorial explaining this idiocy in Make magazine:
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol19/?pg=18&pm=2&u1=friend&sub_id=BzbDHrhIuuHkk

and this site explains the issue in greater detail: http://lflegal.com/2009/03/kindle-press/#the-top

If this ticks you off, take action on this issue here: http://readingrights.org/take-action-now

Posted via email from jenmichaels’s posterous

 On top of having ridiculously good produce prices, the owner was a super nice guy. He asked me to guess my total before he pressed the Total button on his cash register. Here’s what I bought:

 7 Idaho baking potatoes
5 small tomatoes, one with a small bruise
2 Roma tomatoes
3 big onions
2 handfuls fresh green beans
3 limes
1 bunch dark grapes
1 piece of ginger, about the size of two fingers
8 bananas, not yet ripe
1 pint of Italian Seasoning ($2)

 I guessed $18. The total was $12.69. As if that wasn’t amazing enough, they take credit cards.

 I will be back. You should go too. Read the Columbus Underground review!

Posted via email from jenmichaels’s posterous