By popular request: a postscript hack to produce a four-fours advent calendar.

Each of 24 printed pages bears a label such as 4+4/4-4 or 4+4*4+4. Print, fold e.g. as shown below, insert pralines, tape to a convenient wall.

I'm not very happy about the way I drew the square root and still less about the presence of 4² and 44, but the result is good enough to be fun. I try to tell myself lighten up, it's just a hack.

And here's the advent.ps postscript file and, for those with substandard printers, the same thing as PDF.

When my previous printer ran low on toner, I bought a new printer. Billing is critical. A Brother MFC-8880DN, which I already know from setting it up for someone else.

It's a decent network printer. Notable positive aspects: It can scan in colour (even though it's nominally a monochrome printer). (more…)

I've had the 4828 for half a year, and have had several bad experiences.

I have crashed the printer twice. Once by printing the guice guide using chromium and once by printing a book-length ΤΕΧ (dvips) document, mostly text with some tables and figures.

The copier is really, really bad at copying grey-on-white or green-on-white text. (more…)

I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/fax/­copier/scanner, and use it with linux and BSD. (Update: I've a follow-up posting about the printer.)

The printer is fine for black and white text, such as I usually print: Fast, crisp text with fine edges, nicely readable. Duplex printing just works. The printer can print quite close to the paper's edge, too. (more…)

The four major output formats (long print, piecemeal print, ASCII on screen and hypertext) all have their fans, all have their uses, the ideal system would support all four, but it isn't possible to support all four really well.

Writing, designing or encoding for plain ASCII just isn't the same as writing for pages. One of the books I read ages ago had a very nice example, showing two pages of text vs. one screen of text. The pages allowed boxes that didn't intrude on reading the regular text, fine graphics, and easy overview of a lot of data. In all, around six times as much information in front of the reader's eyes. (more…)