Darice de Cuba

Yesterday I finally bought a printer/scanner combi. My last printer was from 2000 which I stopped using and got rid of 4 years ago. The ever growing amount of bills and insurance paper pushed me to get a printer/scanner combi.

I only need it for occasional printing and scanning of documents and it needed to have network capabilities, so I can put it anywhere I want. Needing network capability and needing it to be cheap I was left with one choice at the store: “HP Photosmart C4580 All-in-One Printer”.

Today I unboxed it thinking the setup would take 30 minutes max. I even read the instructions first to make sure I know what to do. But boy was I wrong, I spend almost two hours fighting to get it to work via network. It started with the delivered CD being defect, I would insert it in my Mac mini and it wouldn’t load, when I finally got it to load and started the driver setup it would keep showing me the annoying beach ball, freezing my system so badly that I have to force shut down.

It was such a headache to get this thing working decently that I’m giving a quick run won of the way I got it working.

How I got it working

After deciding the CD is a lost case I went and downloaded the driver for HP website so I wouldn’t need the CD. Also before starting the driver setup, make sure you join the printers network via Airport. Turn wifi on on the printer and then select “hpsetup” from your Airport list under Devices.

Run install of the driver, when done print out the network settings of the printer, you can get it via the printer menu itself. On the print-out you can see the printers IP address. Access the printers admin through your browser, e.g. http://169...*** where the numbers/stars are your printers IP address of course. Go to Network – Advanced and fill out your own wireless network info(Assuming you use a wireless router). This way you can access your printer through the router. When you save the settings expect the browser to keep loading, I never got a confirmation that it saved the settings. I just printed another sheet with the network configurations to see that it actually saved the settings.

Now your printer is supposed to be part of your wifi network and has it’s own IP. Now go to System Preferences – Print&Fax and add the printer by filling out the new IP address of the printer. This should do the trick.

It works fine for printing, I tried scanning, but after one scan it will get stuck. When I try to scan a second document it keeps saying “scanning…” I have to restart the printer to clear it up. So it’s not working nicely.

All in all HP’s setup instructions sucks badly, I never had so much problems getting a new device setup. It would be so much better if they supplied a step by step instruction on how to add the printer in your existing wireless environment instead of assuming that people will log off their wireless network just to join the adhoc printer network to print or scan.

I still will have to do some Google research to find out how to get the scanner working smoothly when scanning several documents in one sitting.

Last week I spend reading Don’t make me think by Steve Krug. It was for work that I decided to purchase the book and I’m glad I did. It isn’t often you get such good books in content and writing. Now that I read it I see websites from a whole different point of view.

I was always aware my own weblog isn’t the best usability wise, but then my weblog is not focused in making money or providing valuable information. It’s my personal playground and outlet on the internet. But now that I’m working to better my usability knowledge I’m thinking about a new design more user focused…it’s just I quite like my current design.

I recently also purchased Five Simple Steps by Mark Boulton.

A simple approach to applying graphic design to modern web design.

I read the first two chapters and it promises to be a good read. I’m not completly inept at designing but I’m more of a coder. So I hope this book will give me some new insight on how to aproach design. While I do like that I’m able to do both design(at certain level) and code(front and server side). Sometimes it would be great if I could be a guru on one of them. But I’m more a jack of all master of none. But I have nothing to complain considering it was in year 2000 that I learned what HTML is, seems like ages ago.

Reading these books also made me think, why there isn’t any book in those format available for SQL. What I have seen a few times in the field is that lots of people are real strong at PHP or ASP. But the the databases lacks a lot. If it wasn’t for college I wouldn’t be good at databases at all. But there we had written and practice exam on relational databases and SQL. It was a prety hard course which forced me to really delve into it.

So now out of habit I will spend a few hours mapping out a database, thinking of all possible relations and possible sitauations. This way I minimize the chance of having to rehaul the database if a script is adjusted dramatically in the future. But on SQL queries a book would be handy, with real life examples using apps like Wordpress, or some other popular application.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for more useful books like these. Like “Don’t make me think” has been out for years already and just now came to my attention how such a good book it is. So sometimes the good ones slip under the radar. If you know any book I might like let me know.