pstoedit? Don’t

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I hope you have more luck with pstoedit than I just had. It is easy to waste an afternoon on what Wolfgang Glunz has cobbled together. I am sure it is entirely my fault why nothing worked. Neither under OS X, a generic AWS linux install or Windows 10. Error messages are kind a meaningless. One can dive down into indivual ratholes that they each offer. But nothing actually ended up working. All I wanted was to generate a couple of HPGL test files for the Deskjet 750c plus sitting here. It is OK hardware and the size is rather tempting. It works, just that I need to start generating HPGL files now. Which is not so easy in 2020. pstoedit can probably do this. It claims to, and I should not know why it would not. Just that I didn’t see it doing it. The fact that most of the links on the pstoedit.net did not work should have been a clear indication.

I am sure there are true gems in those 47969 lines of code that Mr Glunz wrote. Just if it can not be compiled, and if so gets upset about ghostscript issues it is not real helpful.

For me it was a complete waste of time.

But that was my fault. I could have spent a month making it all work. Or, even better, realized that pstoedit is a dead end. If you can make it work out of the box it will probably be awesome. If not: Move along. I have no idea where to. That far I have not gotten yet. There is only so much frustration I can take each day. pstoedit was a quick way to get to todays quota.

peak HP

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A 30+ year old device that still works. Kind a nice. Kind a trouble. It sits in stark contrast to the tech that is around today. In the end I will be driving things via HPGL. In looking for documentation I found this wonderful document. The https certificate is expired since 5 days. But peak HP was decades ago. So, yes, this is not surprising. Back then HP made things. And cared for them. Cared for making them well. Which includes documentation and explanation. Today everything is encrypted, and everywhere revenue angle seems to be lurking. Subscriptions are need to run things. Big and old tech companies are rather horrible to deal with. New tech companies mostly too. It is a shame, since technology is amazing. It is of great benefit to people. Back in 1977 the corporate wrapper that HP put around it was reflected in the premium price that was asked for the products. And then bad companies just did not have the service, care or product to live up to the promises. While good companies (like HP) did.

Make Tech Great Again.

Of course that is nonsense. There never is a way back. An egg can not get unscrambled. But still worth looking a the different states of eggs that exist.

Max Mara coat

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10 more minutes not more. They never showed up in time. Not the only thing she disliked.

It gave her time to wonder how all this had started. Yes, the money was good. Too good. The only reason she didn’t stop. Or was it?

The first time it wasn’t really something she set out to do. There was an opportunity. It had cried and just to calm it down she lifted it out of the stroller. The noises stopped. Somehow she started walking. Five short exciting seconds later she was around the corner.

It took a while before she realized what just happened. There was no plan. Her car was not far. She put some pieces of laundry in the foot room of the passenger row and placed it, now crying again, gently there.

She remembered the messages she had seen when she bought party drugs for her cousin Luiza. Luckily nobody would notice something strange about her when she carried an oversized armful of clothes into her house.

Was that them? A dust cloud on the horizon announced the arrival of a 4×4. She hoped.

Occasionally she had doubts about what she was doing. The money was amazing. It also was exciting and interesting to look for opportunities. She had quit her job in the nail salon. She no longer needed the money and it took her time to drive to different
towns, look for opportunities. She told herself that she just filled the gaps that the bureaucracies of the adoption system would leave.

What would happen once she had made the trade was never something she thought about much. She rather thought about what she would do with the money.

Yes. It was them. In 10 minutes ti would all be over and she could do what she wanted again. She didn’t have any more diapers either, and they get so annoying when they their own feces give them discomfort. One of these aspects of her job that convinced her further never
to have kids herself. Besides, you never know if not somebody would steal it.

The Edge of the woods

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Charles Courtney Curran painted this in 1912. Probably somewhere around The Gunks. He seems to have split his time between the small Cragsmoor and the not so small New York City.

The world of 1912 was naive and unknowingly standing at the end of an epoch of progress and change. The time between 1914 and 1945 would smash it into ‘modern times’ – if it wanted it or not.

Today we have no knowledge on how large the changes are that started to unfold. Covid is part of it, but the bigger ones are AI, the phonication of peoples minds and the unstoppable ascent of China.

Between 2014 and 2018 I was telling myself: Well it is better than 100 years ago. This holds true. But if you ask people about it many might claim that they’d rather be back on those 20s that they called roaring. A world with mud roads, cobble stones and before antibiotics.

Unrelated: Worpswede in the Teufelsmoor seems strangely similar to Cragsmoor on the Shawangunk Ridge. I am sure there were lots of other artist colonies during that time. Their styles differ and are also similar. Funny how that happened. Without an Internet or easy faithful color reproduction methods.

Trumpality

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So, it is over for NZ and South Korea. He says.

Reality (on a log scale!!) looks different.

It is shocking how simple, stupid and blatant his lies are.

His supporters (more than 30% of Americans) seem to not mind or actually eat up the version of reality that he prepares for them.

There are no 2 sides here. There is one that has gone off the deep end. Simple as that.

VW vs Prevent

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Building cars is a very integrated business. A couple of years ago Volkswagen and a Bosnian supplier no longer looked eye to eye.

For a brief period production was impacted. A VW employee made recordings of meetings on this topic. He is dead now. His car burned. It might have been suicide.

man findet immer was …

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… im Internet von 2020. Nur leider ist es oft nur Müll der erzeugt wurde damit er dann auch gefunden wird. Das ist einfach & billig. In diesen Vor GPT3 Tagen kann man es noch als Datenmüll erkennen: Zum Beispiel: treiber-aktualisieren.com/hp-designjet-750c-treiber-download-fur-windows-10-64-bit/ Dahin linken tu ich besser nicht.

Einen 25 Jahre alten HP printer / plotter 750c Polus aus einer Erbmasse konnte ich nicht stehen lassen. Er geht sogar. Die TCP/IP konfiguration musste ich ein bisschen suchen: Nachdem man TCP/IP KFG auf JA* setzt much man Pfeil Hoch eingeben. Das hat mich 30 Minuten gebraucht darauf zu kommen.

Er braucht ziemlich lange sich in der Welt zurechtzufinden wenn man ihn mit Strom versorgt.

Vor einigen Tagen schaute ich mir einen 60 Jahre alten Röhrenfernseher an. Den Einschaltknopf zu finden war auch nicht leicht: Am Lautstärke Regler ziehen scheint der Trick zu sein beim Modell Rafael. Auch schön ist das die Glotzen den Namen alter Meister hatten.

Is Berlin safe?

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What if Alexei Navalny dies under strange circumstances in Berlin? Would that not be the best outcome for Putin? It would send a clear signal that Berlin is not safe if you are on his list. Zelimkhan Khangoshvili got killed last August in Berlin. Probably by the FSB.

sand

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Vince Beiser’s “The World in a Grain” is alright. Not amazing. Not great. It is an OK listen. It starts out with an ungainly heap (see what I did here) of lists of items. Non of it very interesting.

Overall not bad. I did not return it. I learned something about Dubai. Did even finish the whole book. But would I wholeheartedly recommend it? Unlikely.

Boeing: Max? What is this “Max” plane you are talking about?

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Looks like Boeing rebrands the latest version of its 737 jet. As Trump had suggested in a tweet in April 2019. Interesting that the Guardian article fails to mention that.