Thinkpad Meets HP Printer - Hilarity Ensues

My stepmom came through town this weekend and wanted to print out a boarding pass. Considering we have three laptops, a desktop PC, a Mac Mini and a printer - this really shouldn't have posed much of a problem.

Except that when I plugged the HP printer into my Lenovo Thinkpad (my work computer) - it didn't want to recognize. Fine, no problem, obvious fix, right? Install the correct driver and go a printing away.

I downloaded the installer from HP's site, except it wasn't an installer but an installer for the installer and eventually the installer the other installer installed started performing some kind system updates which pretty much crashed everything moments later. I tried to reboot the computer, but it refused to log off - so I just shut it down.

Upon reboot, the installer uninstalls everything - which wasn't entirely what I had mind, so started the installer (the installed installer, not the downloaded installer) up again and we went to go eat some brunch. An hour later I have a prompt for some kind of license agreement so I figure it's more or less done. Except it's not done, it starts updating some files again and then asks me to plug the printer into the computer.

Which, it already is.

So I unplug and plug the thing back in and the Thinkpad starts to try and talk to the printer. The message suggests this might take several minutes and in fact does take several minutes. Fifteen minutes later, actually, there's a big red X over the message and the installer is preparing an error log and then precedes to uninstall itself and all of the lovely updates it had previously installed.

At this point I got The Girl's MacBook Pro and plugged in the USB cable. The MacBook said it had some kind of printer, looked like an HP model and would I like to use this driver? I said it was and I did and five minutes later I had a boarding pass printed out.

When people wonder why I hate Windows, this is why. I'm not sure, honestly, whether to blame the Thinkpad - which I have to say Lenovo has really done a fine job of butchering that fine lineage of hardware, HP software design - which still manages to lock up modern computers, or Windows.

But I'm willing to blame all three.

Windows Hatred To Go

So I recently upgraded my Nokia to a spiffy Cingular 8525 - also known as a HTC Hermes. This is kind of a moment for me since I've always been a big Palm fan and this 8525 is one big block of Windows Mobile. Still, the phone itself was the kind of hardware design I wanted - foldout keyboard, nice big touchscreen.

I figured Windows Mobile can't be that bad.

So last night I was syncing some MP3 files over to it while playing Oblivion. After a quick travel, Oblivion locked up and took the whole computer with it. So I rebooted the computer. I figured I would just need to go back to Windows Media Player and tell it to start syncing again.

Sadly, Windows Media Player had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe it had moved all the files over? Maybe not? It didn't really know what I meant by "did stuff". So then I picked up the phone and looked at the storage card - sure enough there were, well, some songs.

Then I launched the WMP mobile version. Files? What files? Songs? It didn't know what I meant. It couldn't see them. It could play them if I went to the song in the filesystem and then clicked on it - but once that was done the player refused to acknowledge it or any of its 100 friendly other songs as being in existence.

Being Windows - I tried rebooting the phone a few times to see if that would fix it. Nope.

Which brings me to my next point. Getting apps for this thing sucks. You never know if it will work or the app is outdated. 90% of stuff comes in a silly executable which insists on talking to ActiveSync when all you actually need is the cab file and a USB connection. I finally got Pocket Music running on the thing and ...

... the whole phone just crashes. Locks up totally. Refuses to even turn off until the battery is ripped out. After it did this like seven times I decided maybe it wasn't just coincidence that this started after Pocket Music. So this morning I removed it.

About an hour later - locked up again. Just before I installed Winamp.

Winamp, btw, throws an error message with a random assortment of letters before launching on this thing. But if it will stop crashing the phone, I'll take what I can get.

And someone was just asking me why I like my Mac so much.

Update: Right now Winamp is playing in the backgound on the phone. When I tell it to go to Winamp, it refuses.

So basically my phone is singing to me and the only way to tell it to stop will be to turn the whole thing off. Brilliant.

Update to the update: I just removed Winamp and installed GSPlayer (humorously right before Thomas recommended it). It's pretty bare bones but for me has the added functionality of actually working. And it's more user friendly than WMP.

Why Safari For Windows

Wired's Cult Of Mac asks who would really want Safari on Windows since the OS X version, as they say, "sucks".

The answer is simple: Apple does. They want it for the same reason they put iTunes on the platform - to increase the size of a demographic with better access to a consumer device. Can you imagine the iPod's success without iTunes for Windows? Safari for Windows may certainly not be nearly as instrumental, but since it will be your testbed for writing iPhone widgets - why wouldn't Apple put it out there? They don't care about getting a few more browsers hits here and there, they want access to the deep pocket of Windows based web developers.

Granted Safari's beta crashes at the sight of a proxy and may snap a few widgets - but the rational seems clear.

I just wonder if they'll port Dashboard. Imagine being able to write a Web 2.0 widget for Windows, Mac and iPhone.