Well, cool-ish, anyway. Good enough for me to be productive.
Divided the morning between physical stuff (clearing another few cubic feet of Stuff out of the lab) and doing the dist-upgrade on the VPS (appears to have been successful, or at least Subversion came back up OK; I still need to make sure web and mail services are alive, because switching Gumbyware over is on the agenda for next weekend).
This afternoon? A bit more lab-tidying (I need to procure some more mid-sized plastic storage bins and organize a bunch of spare equipment, project parts, and such), and there's also the current project for ToasterCo, which is back in my court after a long absence (their technical staff being more overloaded than usual, so progress on such low-priority projects gets to be slow).
A quick check shows that Apache is indeed alive on the upgraded VPS, though I'm sure it hasn't made any of my broken PHP3 scripts start working again. Exim appears to be running. So does Courier, but Thunderbird can't seem to talk to it. Hmph. Oh: there's a complaint by the server about the certificate having expired. There was some weird incantation to generate the courier server cert, wasn't there? Like, it doesn't just use the one Let's Encrypt provides? I really need to automate that, as part of the every-few-months certificate renewal process, so that everything that needs to get updated does get updated. And maybe it needs to run in a cron job, at a suitable interval?
Oh, well. Time to stop writing and do something useful.
Update: Growf. That ToasterCo job? I really want a nice printed copy of the draft schematic. This calls for using the inkjet printer, and B-size (11x17) paper.
Now, once upon a time, I had an Epson Stylus Color 1280. It did one thing: it printed. It did it well. It did it for many years. Eventually, it wore out.
Inkjet printers that speak 11x17 are expensive these days. But! There are "multifunction centers" that will handle such a paper size. So, a while back, when I had to replace the old printer, I bought another Epson: a WorkForce WF-7610.
As a printer, well, CUPS drives it well enough, and the quality is good enough for my purposes. But it won't nohows feed cardstock (I can use another, cheap, 8½x11 printer for the things that call for cardstock). It's horrendously bulky. The paper feed has always been finicky, and has been getting worse lately. And this afternoon?
I can't seem to get it to feed at all - or, rather, it will sometimes feed and eject the top sheet, and then complain that it can't find any paper. Seating the paper tray has gotten problematic. So I move a bunch of stuff out of the way, drag the printer out to where I can have a look at it, and....
Huh. What's this odd-shaped nylon* bit doing underneath it? Seems to be a pin broken off of one end of it. Maybe it's part of the paper feed, or paper presence sense, mechanism? And this other weird nylon bit, that's been kicking around for a while: I'd assumed it was a fragment of some long-since-dismantled CD-ROM drive, but maybe it fell off the printer?
Oh, well. Printer repair isn't a priority at the moment, and I don't have a large enough cleared work surface just now anyway. Guess I'll print the schematic out at letter size, and switch back and forth between the teeny printout and the fractional-page (when zoomed to legible scale) viewport of the PDF viewer.
I wonder if there's a repair manual (ha!), or at least an exploded parts list, for the WF-7610....
Incidentally, why is it that sites peddling printers don't have a handy filter-by-maximum-paper-size capability? Am I really the only one who shops for larger-than-letter-size (but smaller than hyper-expensive large-format) inkjet printers?
Oh, hello! Searching for wide format inkjet printer on Amazon now turns up something from Canon that gets good reviews, appears to be supported by CUPS, is just a ferschlugginer printer, and for $105 I can have one on my doorstep tomorrow. For not too much more, I can get a pile of spare ink cartridges with it.
So maybe I recycle the clunker instead of trying to repair it, get something new and more suitable to my purposes, and try to give away the box of spare ink cartridges for the Epson.
Update 2: That letter-size inkjet? It's a bargain-basement Canon, bought a while back when the Epson was being uncooperative, I needed to print something small in color right away, and Fry's had this one on the shelf for cheap. After sitting in the living room, unused the past several months, it happily prints the CUPS test page. Printing at the default setting is fast, but not very legible at the small feature size (this is a C-size schematic scaled down to A-size, so half the original linear dimensions). Selecting a higher print quality gets all the quality I could reasonably expect, but, given the scaling, I have to take my glasses off and squint.
Post-relocation, I may splurge on a 24"-wide printer that'll let me do real C-size prints (correction: 24" printer width allows 22x34, which is D size). Here, such a thing fits neither the budget nor the space available.
Southmoon keeps trying to be helpful. Given her diminutive size and lack of opposable thumbs, she mostly just gets in the way.
Update 3: Support for the specific model of printer that's on order is in recent editions of CUPS, meaning not what's on the workstation. The lab machine has Debian 9, which does have new enough CUPS. (So does the VPS, but I don't have a USB cable long enough to reach from here to Dallas.) Or maybe I just scare up the right .ppd to install on the workstation?
... Hey, wait. I think the new printer has an Ethernet port on it. So in fact I could set up a VPN bridging my LAN to the VPS, and run the printer driver on the VPS. In Dallas.
But that would be silly... which might just be enough justification to do it, if I had a bunch of time on my hands.
* Afterthought: It looks like nylon; it feels more or less like nylon, but the break doesn't look anything like nylon. Must be some other sort of translucent, semi-stiff plastic that lacks nylon's toughness.
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