My first Android phone

So I bought a Motorola Moto E on special (end of line) from the Warehouse. This is the 2014 model, seen above with the Lumia 520 on the left and the Lumia 635 in the middle. The screen just happens to be the same size as the Lumia 635 despite the latter's larger package. This morning I let the phone update itself to Android 5.1. It is interesting for being a dual SIM phone and has a sticker on the outside of the box mentioning 2 Degrees, but is in fact a retail model so is not locked and didn't come with a SIM.

Buying an Android phone is about getting access to a lot more apps that won't be available on Windows phone for a long time because of the dismally small market share that Windows Mobile has. (That is the new name for the platform since Windows 10 by the way) Even though Windows Mobile 10 is going to let Android apps run on it, I still think there is merit for me to own an Android phone.

I will have a look at making it my main phone, but that depends on whether it can work with the work email which is on a Microsoft Exchange server. The main reason as of now is to be able to load my e-Bible onto it, as that is a Adobe Digital Editions DRM protected EPub, and I couldn't find a suitable app for the Lumia.

Well eventually I did get my NIV Study Edition loaded onto it, after looking at a few different options. The main issue has been finding an app that will work with Adobe Digital Editions specifically. It turns out the only suitable one is Aldiko Book Reader. While ebooks.com from whom I purchased the e-book have their own reader app, I have found both on Windows and now Android that this app is very poorly designed with unhelpful error messages and being unable to either download the e-book or import it from the SD card. More than likely the ebooks app is not authorised to work with Adobe DRM.

Out of several reader apps, Vitalsource Bookshelf is the most disappointing. I understand that the objective of it is to produce an exact replication of a page layout and that therefore it is unable to reflow text to suit the reading device. This limitation prevents it being used on small screen devices such as phones. At least with Kindle or Aldiko the text can reflow to work on a screen. So the idea I could have some of my textbooks with me anywhere on the phone just ain't gonna happen unfortunately. Maybe I start thinking about an Android tablet sometime,

How to print to a colour PCL printer from a Mac

If you know the Mac platform well, then you know that PostScript is the preferred printing system for OSX and all its precedessors way back to the very early Macs. This comes about because Apple virtually invented PostScript printing and desktop publishing about thirty years ago partnering with Aldus, the inventors of PostScript (which later became Adobe). Whereas on Windows, PCL is the de facto print standard, although PostScript is also supported.

The problem is, there are cases where you will want to print to a printer that only supports PCL, and PCL drivers officially provided for the platform may be few and far between. Apple supplies a "Generic PCL" driver for OSX, but colour printing is not supported with this driver. We have a school customer with a pile of Ricoh photocopiers that don't have any PostScript capability and with which the Ricoh PostScript drivers wouldn't work. So, we needed a Ricoh PCL driver for the Mac, and officially, there are none.

But thanks to the Linux community there are good third-party drivers available, through Foomatic.

Go to this site (OpenPrinting) and there is information about OSX HP drivers. You could install these drivers if you have an HP printer. In this case we could have used these drivers for compatibility and they would probably be OK to a certain extent. However I did find another place where the Ricoh PXL drivers (PCL XL) can be downloaded.

The OpenPrinting page provides links to download the Foomatic RIP and GhostScript software, which you will need anyway, so go ahead and download those from the page.

Then go to OpenPrint's Ricoh downloads folder and find the driver for your Ricoh printer. In this case the MPC 4502 PXL.ppd file was the one needed.

Install Foomatic and GhostScript onto the Mac in that order, and then you need to make a small fix in the PPD file. Open it with a text editor, find the line that reads

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-pdf 0 foomatic-rip"

and change this to

*%cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-pdf 0 foomatic-rip"

then save the file.

You can then install a printer in the usual way, choosing the option to install a driver and opening the PPD file.

Mozilla Thunderbird

So I am trialling out Tbird again. For some reason I disliked it for quite a long time even though I used it a lot, years ago. I suspect the interface was kind of clunky, but of course there are all these styles available now. Really easy to set up with Google and Hotmail accounts, and with the calendar extension which is integrated, you just need a Gdata provider extension to connect to Google calendars.

Yesterday I was wrong when I wrote that you had to pay for the Google calendar extension, the one you need to pay for is for the extension to connect MS Exchange accounts. I can get by using Windows 10 Mail for just that one Ex2003 account that I use regularly, since it looks like Tbird will do everything else. If it does the Google calendars well then it can replace EmClient that I currently use for my timesheet calendars. It is not quite as tidy or featured as the EmClient calendars but the functionality appears to be there.

It will be interesting to see if Tbird also handles some of the other Google stuff, or Live calendars, although I can get by without the Live calendars since this is mainly for work computers with Windows 10 that I will be using Thunderbird with to start.

Well since writing the above this morning I have quickly moved to put Tbird on every computer I own or use. The Google calendar functionality is great, it works just as well as emClient although the information is not quite displayed in the same way. There is another extension that synchronises contacts which I am also trialling. Basically, Tbird has superior performance over Outlook for IMAP accounts, although in fact just about everything does, including Outlook Express/Windows Mail. It is the fact it works well across Outlook.com accounts and Gmail as well that makes it highly suitable to my requirements. What it doesn't have is the ability to sync Outlook.com calendars readily and possibly their contacts, but that really isn't much of an issue for me at the present time.