28thavenue.net

I’m suffering from a little from the “don’t have a cool laptop blues.” I own 3 laptops. One is a Compaq, circa late 2007, which is my best performing laptop. The problem with it is that it’s just a little too heavy to be comfortable to carry around. It mostly stays in one place.

I have a Sony laptop that’s much lighter and easier to carry, but it was new in 2003 — and at this point isn’t powerful enough to even keep up with my typing when I’m trying to write a post like this one.

And then I have a 700 Mhz G3 Apple iBook, which belonged to my dad. I’m writing this post on it now. It was new in mid-2002, about as old as the Sony. It’s interesting that it performs better than the Sony for the simple task of writing to a blog like this.

I like the Sony and the iBook as far as physical characteristics. I like the Compaq for performance. So what do I do? I’d like to reduce the number of unused computers sitting around. I could put some things on eBay and probably get a couple of hundred bucks towards a laptop fund. Maybe sell the Compaq and use the proceeds to buy memory for the iBook?

This is what happens when a person doesn’t have to make any serious effort to feed himself. He comes up with petty problems like this to grapple with. Woe is me.

I mentioned my direct-thermal label printer in an earlier post. I have now received a USB barcode scanner which has been tested and works great.

Cost + shipping: $17.59. The cheapest one at Microcenter is $80. Ebay is awesome.

Now I just need to figure out what I want to do first with this stuff.

A few weeks ago I bought a used Eltron Zebra label printer to experiment with for work. I’d like the power to print labels directly from our customer database without using a proprietary application.

I’ve taken a small step — by sending simple commands from the programmer’s guide I was able to print a bunch of bar codes which I was able to read successfully using my bar code scanner.

Next step is to test some actual formatting on appropriate sized labels…