After much of the usual hype for an apple product the mouse arrived today. I have to say, unboxing it didn’t take long. Apple must be doing all they can to save the world. After you take away the usual shipping cardboard box you are left with some foam protection cradeling a plastic case in which sits the magic mouse.

After eventually getting it setup ( multi-touch only works with snow leopard and leopard ) I was able to see just how good it is.

Good points:

• Looks great
• Is pretty responsive
• Has on/off switch to save battery
• Great battery life (up to 4 months)
• Although a bit odd at first, it sits well in your hand
• Kinetic scrolling works really well
• No more scroll ball issues!

Bad points:

• Dirt can get inside lense hole easily
• It is quite loud when used over a solid surface

Overall I am pleased with the purchase, there are probably better solutions in terms of practicalities but it looks good and works well for my needs. Apple has made the mouse exciting!

Today I received the dreaded ink system failure error from my Hewlett Packard Photosmart printer. I as usual looked around the web to try and find an answer to my problems. I ended up taking ink in and out of the printer waiting for a certain length of time, putting it back in, manual error resets, cleaning the printer heads manually, kicking the printer and shaking the printer… all of that and it was still showing me the same error.

In a last ditch attempt I tried to find a manual hard reset for the unit (this actually proved quite hard to find). This however managed to get my unit back up and running! so I have included the steps below that I took to reset my printer.

HP C5180 All-In-One Printer HARD RESET:

Hold down HELP + OK button and unplug printer (could experiment with regular power-off, but I opted for brute force)Hold down HELP + OK button again as you plug the printer back in. Then power it on, if it doesn’t power on automatically. Be Safe: keep holding the buttons until the printer turns itself off. (It took mine less than a minute.)

Now you can release the buttons and simply power it back on. (I held my breath, but that’s not required.)
I got an error message about “improper shut down” since I unplugged it w/out powering down. After I clicked “OK” the printer was just fine and didn’t mind anymore. And now I can print.

Credit goes to http://www.mlnarik.com/jewel/2009/05/21/how-i-fixed-my-hp-c5180-printer/ for this information.

I hope it helps

HTML entities (character references) which are used to define reserved characters or to express characters that cannot easily be entered with the keyboard are generally hard to remember.

EntityCode is a website that lists HTML entities in an easy-to-find format. Rather than a long list of entities, they are simply grouped like currency, math, direction, etc.

A must-bookmark for every web designer & developer.

As part of my new branding being completed for the final project at the SRC I am updating everything. This is a snapshot of what is to come.

I put together a new landing page for the main site tonight. Got bored of the old one and though a bit of a refresh was due. So here it is…

Found this thing floating about the net, Never seen one before but makes some pretty weird noises thats for sure.

Improvisation from Skot Wiedmann on Vimeo.