My wife is running this charitable organization ‘Dormagener Tafel’, and I try to help sometimes, like carrying boxes, or setting up the computer, web-site, and maintaining it.

They still needed a printer for the office, with key characteristic: color (their letterhead is in orange), photo printing not needed, cheap, cheap ink costs, good text quality, low maintenance, fast... After some browsing I bought the Canon Pixus IP4200. These days it seems to be impossible to get a printer who is not able to do ‘photo quality’ printing. The printer is designed well, still small, can manage two different paper feeds, duplex printing, CD printing, etc.—and on top of all that, reasonable cheap, and individual printer cartridges for each color. Now I’m really jealous …

Installation was a breeze, finally an installation program which only lets you install the needed drivers without default-installation of all the other fancy software you need for photo printing, etc., but you in real life will never touch. The drivers look stable, well designed from the configuration possibilities, and text look amazingly sharp (didn’t try any photo prints). If this printer is still running strong in a couple of month, I might switch away from HP as the standard text printer for my home office...

Seen a strange error message lately? This one is my current favorite:

I picked up the latest Hulf game for the XBox last week: Hulk - Ultimate Destruction. I have only a few hours of Hulk play under my belly, but I’m actually liking this one a lot. Most of my time I did spend on the bonus missions and did progress just beyond the first boss into the game. About half of the bonus missions seem to be the usual – get as fast from A to B as possible, but others are a lot of fun … kick a car as quickly as possible into a destination area across town, rescue people from a building (I hate it if I rescue them, then press the wrong button and smash them into the ground instead of laying them down in the target area), or stacking cars on top of a building.

A good thing so far, no messing around with the ‘real Bruce’. You are playing the Hulk, and the surroundings are huge (a city area about the size of Manhattan) with lots of things to smash and kick … I collected lots of points in the bonus missions, and could buy all special moves I wanted. Now it is time to advance the story and see what else is going to happen. From the ‘staging’ area (the church complex) it looks like there is at least one other area which I might discover later in the game …

2 thumbs up from me

An additional notes to the parents: Not a kid-game, no blood, but you can pick up people and smash them to the ground or throw them around. In one  mini-game you have to wack people with a big metal stick while they are falling from a helicopter. Kind of brutal, but my personal best is more then 400 feet

Looks like you can vote for your favorite XBox games, and hopefully guarantee backwards compatibility in the upcoming Xbox360!

http://xbox360poll.1up.com/

A friend mentioned that he couldn't find the RSS button ... it turned out that the site didn't display well on the Macintosh and in Firefox. I installed Firefox and it looked really ugly, the text was squashed to the left side of the screen, and the bar on the left was outside of the window-boundaries. Some of the Cascading Style Sheet commands were interpreted differently, I'm not enough of an expert to say who didn't follow the standard, but actually removing some of the CSS commands fixed the problem for Firefox, I hope it also works for the Apple browser.

There is still some inconsistency in the top-banner display, but this is minor and I choose to ignore it - my apologize to all CSS purists!

More then a month ago I wrote about the easy addiction to those simple 'distraction games' and the need to ban them from the work computer. Of course you still can fall victim to those web based games you don't need to install locally.

Got a few minutes during the lunch break? Check out Planetary by John Tantalo. I hope you are getting some work done during the afternoon - very simple and a lot of fun ...

Link

Let us start with the bad one …

Ocean’s Twelve – what a disaster this one is. The prequel (Ocean Eleven) was reasonable entertaining, but this one is just plain pointless and boring. You are watching a heist movie and you are expecting an interesting heist, some nice action sequences, and definitely some suspense. This one doesn’t deliver on anything. Sure, you got all the stars from the first movie, but somehow they should have spent some of the money on the story. In the end this movie will make you ask one question: ‘This is it?’

Layer Cake – I watched this one, because the producer (Matthew Vaughn) of the excellent “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” is directing this movie. Layer Cake can not hide the connection to this movie; multiple story lines seemingly disjoint cross during the path of the movie, interesting characters with lots of ‘personality’,… I had a good time watching this movie (all to the end) and I can recommend this one without hesitation (without spoiler - a 'good' ending, watch also the alternate ending!). Well, there is one hesitation, it is rated ‘R’ – and one of the reasons is violence. Not totally over the top, but nothing for the sensitive viewer.