The One with the Thoughts of Frans

“Quelle surprise,” you might exclaim sarcastically, and you’d be right. However, as it turns out the waste is worse than you might expect. A few head cleanings and you’ve wasted more than twice as much ink than what comes in a single cartridge.

In round numbers, the cylinder is 40 mm ID and the cap is 20 mm tall. Volume of a cylinder is πr²h, so you’re looking at 25×10³ mm³ of waste ink.

Seeing as how 1 mm³ = 0.001 ml, the tank currently holds about 25 ml of ink!

The printer has six cartridges. Assuming head cleanings drain an equal amount from each cartridge, that’s 4 ml apiece. Given that the large OEM ink cartridges come with 11 ml of ink, you can do the math: a third of a cartridge of each color just for head cleanings so far.

Assuming that the cartridges are at or around 11mL in my older Epson Stylus Photo R220 model as well, the amount of waste is likely very similar for my printer. I can’t find any indication of measurements, whether cubic or otherwise, on my cartridges: presumably because you’d realize just how little there is in those cartridges if it were indicated properly.

Combined with idiotic default settings that make you waste ink and paper, and ludicrous region restrictions that may make you waste ink, owning printers sure amounts to an awful lot of fun.

It’s amazing how often I see the same information posted on both the feminist and atheist blogs I follow. Religion is not good to women.

On a very related note, I would highly recommend anyone to read Infidel, the autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. These issues all come down to treating people equally and fairly regardless of sexuality, gender, race, religion or any other reason, but religion is often in direct opposition with those values. For illustration I’ll quote the devil of whom I just spoke:

Feminists need to be wary of the celebration of “cultural diversity” unless they want to inadvertently celebrate polygamy, child-marriage, marital rape, honor killings, wife beating, selective abortion of female fetuses and other traditions that are now legitimized in the name of culture.

To end this quick post I’ll link to some of my favorite atheist blogs.

• Pharyngula, no doubt well-known to many. The amount of time he spends debunking quacks is to be admired – or to be pitied. Regardless, his blog is intelligent and provocative and an excellent source of rationality.
• Friendly Atheist isn’t as entertaining as Pharyngula, but heck, not everything can be.
• Heaving Dead Cats also hails from the US and telltales of living in a society that sounds like the 1950s to my Dutch ears.

I’ll end this post with Bill & Ted’s idiom, aka the Golden Rule: be excellent to each other.

This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Saturday 2005-02-26 at 18:08:45. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

This is the only signature I had which really liked. [I guess I must really, really like it, for I still use it.] It looks like a quote from someone famous at first sight [(of course famous by no means implies not stupid)], or just a good old expression (you know, like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”), but it is entirely a product of my brain. [Whoopee.] I don’t find that so very surprising all by itself; in what may be a form of narcissism, I say things I consider quotable quite often. [Saying quotable things sure is narcissistic. What's that? You meant I consider things I say quotable quite often, did you? Very well then, carry on. On a very related matter, I'm not so sure if stupid jokes like You've got the first pickle (when offering a few pickles) as a play on first pick is all that quotable, though.] But still, this particular “quote of my mind” has a sort of uniqueness over it. [Oh boy. If that means it's the magnum opus of my brain, I'm fucked.]

You should also know something about my browsing behavior to understand a bit about what happened when the quote came to me. I seldom browse with less than four pages open. [Even at the time that was a lie and you know it. I bet you rarely managed to browse with less than 10.] I basically just open what I find interesting and then read what I have opened one by one, or close it quickly if I see it is not what I expected it to be. [Most people, on the other hand, close pages they don't want to see as slowly as possible.] I also start writing a reply to something, to interrupt it by going to some other page, after which I will continue writing the reply. [You were also doing that while writing this post, weren't you?]

The situation where the general idea came into my mind was like this. I was filling in profile information on some site (I don’t remember which one, but it doesn’t matter) and I came to the signature part. I could use the quote which I made up with my Chicken avatar (“The chicken and the egg came at the same time”), but I wanted something new. [I'm sure that everybody knows what your Chicken avatar looks like.] Something catchy. So I decided to go to another site. Meanwhile, I could think about my signature.

It was quite a strange site I visited. A UFO related site, where they argued that UFOs actually were some kind of new technology from the Third Reich, whose descendants still resided on Antarctica. Utter nonsense and therefore enjoyable. [The perfect way to judge whether something is enjoyable.] But then suddenly this thought came into my mind, because of the combination between World War II and UFOs. [Suddenly, I wanted to kill myself.] Why haven’t aliens contacted us? If they’ve observed us they must have noticed the bloodbaths of Alexander, the expansion and fall of the Roman empire, the Conquistadors, Napoleon, and most important, World War II. So yes, obviously alien life is intelligent; if they weren’t, they would have contacted us. Intelligent alien life does exist, otherwise they would have contacted us. [Amazing!]

And there it was. The perfect signature. I had exactly the kind of bad quote I wanted my signature to be. I still like it. [I guess I can live with it for a while longer. Perhaps I should update it. Space dinosaurs do exist, otherwise they would not be extinct on earth.]

Nearly a month ago, the Dutch cabinet fell. Because of this, national elections will be held on June 9, 2010. Dutch immigration policy plays an important role in these elections, though there is no real debate on the matter. The immigration debate (or lack thereof) is controlled almost exclusively by Geert Wilders and his PVV.

A couple of days ago, ppk published his party profile of the PVV. One commenter remarked, “On immigration, the CDA/ VVD ideas a couple of Cabinets ago were novel and more creative compared to the rest of Western Europe.” If you’re interested in Dutch politics or simply wish to learn more about it, I can strongly recommend ppk’s political site. This pushed my buttons and I replied that I prefer to call it “illegal fascist xenophobic nonsense.” I don’t think fascist was the right adjective, but other than that I stand by my statement. However, especially the xenophobic part of my opinion regarding Dutch immigration policies embodies much more than merely language and cultural tests, and the income requirement. This post will list what I consider most important regarding Dutch immigration policy, how I think the implementation is horrible even if you do agree with the basic principle behind all of the rules, and to a lesser extent how I also think the principle behind some of the rules is improper.
Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this summary for a university course, but I never finished it.

The History of Philosophy

• The history of Western philosophy starts in Greece—Miletus, more precisely, situated in modern-day western Turkey—, around the beginning of the sixth century BCE. According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletos was the first to develop a way of thinking that deserves the name philosophy, around 585 BCE.
• The first philosophers were possibly aware of the novelty of their enterprise; at any rate, they made up a new term for it, historia, which means as much as “research.”
• The verb philosophein is not found until the second half of the fifth century BCE. This verb and the substantive philosophia do not become commonplace until the first half of the fourth century BCE. Literally, it means “love/desire to/strive to” (phileô) “knowledge” (sophia).
• Philosophia did originally not only specify a specific way thinking: originally philosophizing as an intellectual activity was intrinsically connected to a certain way of life. Something of this ancient concept is still present in our modern language: someone who sees things “philosophically” might possess the spiritual calmness the philosophers of Antiquity had in mind.

This intrinsic connection no longer exists, but some particular terms have maintained this connotation to the present day. Kantian, Heideggerian, phenomenologist or structuralist, on the other hand, only refer to certain points of view. The only qualities the philosopher needs to have are the same that every other scientist should have. Consequently, practicing philosophy does not mean that someone is or tries to be a better human being. It should be noted that this isn’t a modern development. During the Middle Ages, philosophy was little but a tool to support theology, and that is where the modern meaning of philosophy as academic and purely theoretical originated.

The Four Philosophical Questions According To Kant

1. What can I know?
2. What should I do?
3. What may I hope?
4. => What is a human being?

To know what philosophy is, it does not suffice to know the history. You need to know which questions philosophy wants to answer. According to Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) philosophy tries to answer three main questions, which come together in one big question.

The following post on the MyOpera forum spurred me to complain about something I call the prettiness disease. By this I mean adding features that either don’t help usability or actually impair it just because it looks good (according to some). A prime example is most of the features added to Mac OS X as compared to preceding incarnations, but Microsoft and the open-source community have also bought into it.

[…] the thing that most annoys me about [combine always, hide labels] is the fact that it removes the ability to simply click the taskbar icon to minimize/maximize. […] This is the case only, when taskbar buttons are not set to the default ‘combine always, hide labels’. Then it needs CTRL-click to directly switch to the last visible window of a ‘grouped’ application. This is standard Win7 behaviour also with IE8. So, if you disklike the current behaviour disable grouping of taskbar buttons for now. Perhaps there might be an option within Opera later on…

I don’t care for the “combine always, hide labels” setting in Windows 7. I think it’s a failed copy of Apple’s crappy dock, where looking pretty is the only thing that counts while losing out on usability.

Oh wow, look how clean this looks, with all the pretty icons. No text. Whoopie. Now try to identify your windows when there’s 10 different ones. What’s that, thumbnails? Oh how useful, now I can really spot the difference between my 10 directories filled with files, my 10 web pages on the same forum, my 10 text documents in my word processing application, and so on and so forth. There’s a reason I give my directories names, you know. The same applies to just about any other application. The icon only identifies the application, the text-based title identifies what the heck it actually is. Thumbnails would only work the way Microsoft seems to think they should work in Windows 7 if all I ever opened was pictures.

It’s easy enough to combine a text-based title with thumbnails (for those who like thumbnails) and flashy effects (OK, I admit that as long as they’re shorter than a second I don’t completely dislike effects like burning or fading windows, things that light up, etc), but writing your own Compiz plugin is near-impossible without completely reverse-engineering the code (documentation? comments? what’s that?), and for Windows that situation isn’t very different, at least for me.

I do agree with Joe Clark’s recent blog entry protesting shared streets without sidewalks, but I feel that the Netherlands was mistreated by the Toronto Star and to a lesser extent Joe Clark himself. For starters, the sidewalk-free erf as apparently exists in Cologne (assuming that’s what Koln is supposed to mean — if you don’t know how to type Köln, type Koeln or just use the English name) is something that, in the Netherlands, usually only exists where there is no place for sidewalks, and all erven are culs-de-sac. Erf is a Dutch word that means something like yard or court, but in the context of roads it rather refers to an area that is supposed to be more or less as safe as a yard for those cycling, walking, or playing in it. A place where the road-function (transport) is secondary to the area-function. By the way, woonerf is a now an outdated word that means something like living yard. Erven originally only existed in residential areas.

I’d say a typical erf does have sidewalks. Its distinguishing features are that cars have to drive really slowly (no precise speed is specified, but in practice it definitely doesn’t mean anything over about 10 kmph) because everybody except cars can utilize the street however they like, and that traffic can’t pass through: it’s a cul-de-sac after all. Most important it means a place where it’s safe for kids to play on the entire street and where everybody can utilize the street however they like. By no means does it mean that there aren’t supposed to be any sidewalks, and to claim that it does is a misunderstanding at best. Sadly some misguided people have managed to introduce erven without sidewalks in some places where there is enough space for them, but I’m glad to say that this is far from the norm.

Another typical situation is the 30 km zone, though you might see lower speeds like 20 km at times. This kind of zone will typically have a number of speed bumps in place to keep people at this speed and it is usually a through-going road, though seldom the preferred one. This zone will always have sidewalks and may or may not have separate cycling lanes, the latter being almost universally present on roads where the speed limit is 50 or above.

In conclusion, the Toronto Star must have projected its own vision of “better” street conditions on what is actually going on in countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium. An erf does not mean a lack of sidewalks, its application is only in carefully selected areas, and it is always meant to be a cul-de-sac. If you want to copy erven, at least do it right. Don’t claim they’re things they’re not.

I don’t care much for Twitter. The maximum message length of 140 characters is extremely limiting and, unless you resort to chatspeak, it’s hard to say anything meaningful in such a limited space. If you do resort to chatspeak, it won’t look meaningful even if it is. Catch 22! I imagine the best way to say something meaningful is to link to a blog post offering more explanation, or maybe I’m just prejudiced against chatspeak. Regardless, since most people comment on blog posts using Twitter, and everybody and their grandparents is using it, I figured I should look into a way to utilize it in a more meaningful way than logging in about once a year.

microblog-purple offers convenient integration into Pidgin, which I already use for chatting. It’s easy to install on Ubuntu using sudo apt-get install pidgin-mbpurple, but you may want to consider using PPA for both Pidgin and microblog-purple. Note that the microblog-purple from PPA is named pidgin-microblog, so if you already installed pidgin-mbpurple you’ll have to remove that first. That’s what it is, after all: a chat service with a 140-character limit — most chat services offer at least 500 characters or so. At least it has better offline and history support than most. You also need to enable the plugin named Twitgin so you get a character count on the window where you communicate with Twitter.

Since, like I said, almost everybody uses it, I figured it might also be a good idea to announce new blog posts on Twitter automatically. I searched around a bit in the forest of Twitter plugins and WP to Twitter sounds like it best meets my needs. This post is a test of the plugin, and it announces my partial submission to the crowd — not submission in the sense of Islam, but submission in the sense of realism.

I decided to join the crowd over half a decade after this kind of post started showing up across the Internet — and I bet it wasn’t new when I first saw it either. Here is my 2009 in places, alphabetically. I spent the night at most of these places, but some were “merely” the subject of day trips.

• America
  • Chicago
  • West Bloomfield (+Detroit)
  • Holland: where they tried to explain the flags of the Dutch provinces and Wilhelmina peppermint to me.
  • Palatine
  • Saugatuck
• Belgium
  • Antwerpen
  • Brugge
  • Brussel
  • Gent
• France
  • Lille: on the way back the conductor told us we’d better be glad he’s Flemish, ’cause the French would give us a huge fine for not validating our dated return ticket prior to boarding the train (had already been checked on the way there, as well…), and that this was apparently written “clearly in 4 languages at the station.” Maybe on the validating machines themselves, but certainly nowhere else. Other than that it was quite nice.
• Germany
  • Nürnberg: old looking city, but actually quite new due to WW2. Nice museums and metro system. Each church was apparently built by killing all the Jews who lived where the church is now located. A Nazi past, so to speak. The hotel had rooms based around local fairy tales, and was a total dream: both for the price we paid, and compared to our accommodations in Italy.
• Italy
  • Atrani, Amalfi, Amalfi Coast: wonderful scenery, a horrible road that makes a 20–30 minute drive into one that’s more like two hours, lots of touristy shops, and the most laid back people anywhere, ever.
  • Capri: didn’t spend quite as much time here as we’d liked; blue grotto is nice but overpriced.
  • Florence: northern Italy is so refreshing after the south, recommended.
  • Torre Annunziata: Naples suburb that is near the Pompeii and Oplonti archeological excavations; also has a convenient train connection to Naples. Very impressive Roman ruins, and nice landscape, but the modern-day suburbs, city, and nearby villages are not very inviting. The atmosphere is a lot better in the villages than around the city, but the natives peer at you like you were some creature from outer space, which is rather uncomfortable.
  • Rome: definitely need to go back sometime; we barely scratched the surface despite being there for a while. Scariest and oldest elevator I’ve ever used. Who says elevators aren’t supposed to go down like 10cm when you step into them?
  • Sorrento: lots of stairs, just like anywhere else along that coast.
  • Venice: involved quite a bit of dragging with suitcases. Very special place.
• The Netherlands
  • Amsterdam
  • Den Haag: they didn’t have a sand sculpture. Lame.
  • Den Helder
  • Middelburg
  • Rotterdam
  • Scheveningen
  • Texel
  • Utrecht: I lived here, after all.
• Sweden
  • Stockholm
  • Tippen, Saltsjöbaden: where we spent the night and enjoyed the hospitality and company of a good friend.

A couple of days ago, I wanted to print some photos on my Epson printer. I don’t do this often because I usually merely print text, but it is capable of it. I had always thought that the discrepancy between what was on my screen and what came out on paper was a matter of RGB to CYMK (or whatever my printer uses internally) conversion, but today I found out that it is merely a stupid driver. I am embarrassed that I only discovered this after utilizing the printer for several years, but in my defense, I have barely used it for printing pictures.

I’ll start off by showing the culprit. If you select some combination of a type of photo paper with one of the photo quality settings, PhotoEnhance is automatically checked. Despite being somewhat of a control freak in regard to my software and hardware, I wrongfully assumed that this meant some other kind of optimization in ink usage for photo paper as compared to normal paper. Hovering it quickly revealed my mistake: Enhances photos by optimizing color levels. Useful for low resolution images. EXCUSE ME!? I am not printing any low resolution images, and if I were, I would most certainly fix any potential color level issues myself prior to printing, if only because I could try various algorithms for blowing the picture up to a resolution more suitable for printing. Now it’s fine that this switch is there to save me such trouble if I happen to be printing low resolution imagery, but I am not doing any such thing. Tampering with it unasked could potentially have somewhat favorable results, somewhat detrimental results, or results that are so bad that they cause me to write this post.

Let’s start with exhibit one. A picture of us on the beach. Perhaps it could be made a little better by playing a bit with some color or brightness levels prior to printing, but I deemed it sufficiently decent.

Here is the first print-out I made of this picture. As you can see, the colors were made a little brighter, and the results of the PhotoEnhance feature were actually not too bad. It’s not the picture I wanted to be printed, but it’s close enough that I wasn’t suspecting anything to be fundamentally wrong. In this sense it’s comparable to the few pictures I printed previously.

This is the picture I printed later, without PhotoEnhance. Scanning it introduced some color distortions compared to the original picture, but it should nevertheless be clear that it’s closer to the original, i.e. what I wanted to be printed.

Here is the picture that sparked all of this. It’s a perfectly innocent picture of us standing at some random bridge in Amsterdam.

The monstrosity my printer made of this actually seems a touch less bad in the scanned version, but it should still be clear how horrible it is.

And finally, the same picture without PhotoEnhance. As before with the beach, most of the color differences with the original were actually introduced by scanning, and not by printing.

In conclusion, my printer is perfectly capable of producing very nice, approaching color perfect reproductions of photographs, but by default it creates something that made me think its photo printing capabilities were highly exaggerated for years. Since I didn’t buy it to print photos this was not an issue, but it’s certainly yet another example of a hardware manufacturer messing up their otherwise perfectly fine products with bad software.