Changed the location of pyocrhelper project

Because of my somewhat stupid idea to call pyocrhelper python-ocr-helper in my first attempt to use Google's code hosting, I started running into trouble with naming scripts and tarballs etc. It was getting quite confusing, so I figured I'd start of openSUSE Hack Week 2 with a clean sheet and replace the old project with a new one, as well as taking the opportunity to clean up the code a bit and iron out some nasty bugs which I didn't have time to look at up until now.

So, now the deed is done. The new, old project is now up at http://code.google.com/p/pyocrhelper/ and is looking good. The checkin rate is quite impressive for a Monday morning, even if it is only me contributing. I'm actually fairly happy with the script at the moment - there's still a lot of work to be done - features to be added etc, and I'll probably break everything a couple of times.

Anyway, make your own impression of the script and post any bugs or feature requests you might have - this week is a good week to fix stuff.

amarok 1.4.8 can't submit tracks to last.fm

In the last couple of days/weeks/months, amarok seemed to choke when trying to send tracks to last.fm to refresh my profile. This was very annoying. After quite a bit of searching and monkeywork grepping through log files, I found a workaround here.

The workaround isn't very elegant or scalable but, hell, it works.

The solution to the problem is:

1. Log into last.fm and change your password
2. Change the password in amarok
3. Profit
   

Brother DCP-110C on openSUSE 10.3 Linux

I was asked by my neighbour to give him a hand with a Brother DCP-110C multifunction printer under openSUSE 10.3. Since it was me who convinced him to install openSUSE in the first place, I figured I pretty much had to - not that he needed that much convincing in the first place. Anyhow, after a half an hour at his place, I still hadn't got the printer to spit out anything, so I took the hardware all the way down two flights of stairs and now it's sitting at my feet purring happily with openSUSE goodness - kind of.

I browsed through some forums trying to get an idea of what steps were needed to get the Brother beast working. After about two minutes, I saw that it could be done, but wasn't going to be easy. Before I describe how I got it done, there is a caveat which might bite me tomorrow - my machine is an AMD64 and my neighbour's is a 32bit Intel. Without messing about, here are the steps I needed to get it working:

1. Forget YaST. Don't even try setting anything up. It won't work. Period.
2. Download the lpr driver from here: http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/lpr_drivers.html
3. Install the driver from (2). with rpm -i DCP110Clpr-1.0.2-1.i386.rpm (as root)
4. Download the cups wrapper from: http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_drivers.html
5. Install the cups wrapper from (4). with rpm -i cupswrapperDCP110C-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm (as root)
6. The above rpms only install the cups filter in /usr/lib/cups/filter/brlpdwrapperDCP110C. Thus you need to create a symlink: ln -s /usr/lib/cups/filter/brlpdwrapperDCP110C /usr/lib64/cups/filter/
7. Now try setting up the printer in YaST. It should more or less work

As you might have guessed from what I was saying about caveats (above), the printer is working on an AMD64 at the moment - it will probably be a(nother) chore to get it up and running on the 32bit Intel. Here are a couple of links which might help:

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/linux_faq-2.html
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/