Elemecca

Bonjour, CUPS: The dnssd Backend Explained

Probably the most pervasive system for printer discovery – at least in the SOHO market – is Apple’s Bonjour. It’s based on mDNS, which provides decentralized name announcement and resolution. DNS-SD is layered on top of mDNS to provide a mechanism for service discovery. By their powers combined, clients can find services provided by other nodes on their local network (i.e. networked printers) without needing a central directory or any manual configuration. Apple has published a standard for how network printers should advertise themselves.

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Sharing OS X Printers with Linux in VMware Fusion

VMware Fusion offers the ability to share OS X’s printers with guest OSes via its ThinPrint driver, but that often doesn’t support the more advanced options of business-grade printers and copy machines. Most Linux distributions use the C UNIX Printing System (CUPS), which is also used by OS X. CUPS is inherently networked even when working within a single machine, so it’s fairly simple to set up a Linux guest to print to the OS X host’s CUPS server.

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On Censorship

When the topic of profanity filtering comes up on forums or other community sites, it is nearly always discussed in terms of whether or not filtering is censorship. That framing produces much acrimony and little useful discussion. This is my response to one such thread. By the time I had written it the discussion had devolved into ad hominem attacks and been closed by a moderator, so I’ve chosen to post it here instead.

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Boost Mobile Considered Harmful

I accidentally left my mobile phone at a friend’s a while ago, and I needed temporary phone service until I could get it back. Since I use Google Voice, forwarding calls to another number is easy. I thought a prepaid mobile phone would be an ideal solution. I’d use it for a few days, then when I got my phone back I could just stop using it and the unused balance would stick around until I needed it. I had an old Android phone from Sprint lying around, so rather than get a new prepaid phone I decided to activate it with Boost Mobile, Sprint’s prepaid division. That seemed like an especially good idea since I already had the phone and CDMA doesn’t need a SIM card, so I could sign up on the web without needing to go anywhere or get anything shipped to me.

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Mystery Device ATK4001

I just finished installing Windows 8 drivers for all the hardware in my new laptop. One device in particular, ACPI\VEN_ATK&DEV_4001, stumped me for quite a while. There’s no open, centralized database for ACPI IDs like there is for PCI and USB. All I knew was that it was made by Asus (ATK is their vendor code) and searching Google was turning up nothing. I eventually resorted to looking at the ini files from random drivers on the Asus site for the UX31A until I found a match. Apparently it’s the wireless radio control interface, used to enter airplane mode from the Windows UI. It’s covered by the “ASUS Wireless Radio Control” driver in the “Utilities” section of the download page.

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Unable to Enter BIOS Setup With Windows 8

I recently bought myself an Asus ZenBook UX31A. I upgraded the OS to Windows 8 Pro. After I installed BIOS update 212, I stopped being able to get into the BIOS setup menu. I would press F2 during the POST screen just like before, but it would just boot straight into Windows. I’m pretty sure the BIOS update was a coincidence.

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