This looks like fun. I don't read Thai or Japanese, but this looks like a little plastic model kit you can assemble yourself to make a twin-reflex camera.

 

 

It's been many years since I'd first seen The Dirty Three, and I'd almost forgotten just how incredibly awesome they really are. The video below serves as a timely reminder. King of Goth Nick Cave tinkles the ivories.

So today I lashed out on a fancy new all-in-one multifunction printer/scanner/copier. I settled on the Epson TX700W wireless version, for AUD275.00. I made sure it said on the box that it was compatible with Macintosh OS X. Cool.

Set up was a breeze. Hooked it up to the router, threw in the cartidges, and was printing in minutes. Then why are Epson a bunch of douchebags, I hear you ask? Try doing a scan from you Mac on it, and you'll run into the worst set of instructions you ever encountered.

Every time I tried to start a scan from photoshop, or open Epson's Scan app, I got the ubiquitous "Epson Scan could not start", and the app crashes. I downloaded a bunch of different drivers, no dice. Re-installed everything, still no love.

Turns out and note - this isn't in ANY of the documentation or help files (on or off-line), that you need to go into your /Applications/Utilities folder and look for an app called "Epson Scan Settings", that bizarrely enough isn't installed in the /Applications/Epson folder with all the other dependencies. Running this still results in the "Epson Scan could not be started", but the scan settings app itself will still start.

I then chose the "network" radio button, clicked 'add', and had to enter the IP address of the printer manually, as searching didn't find it. In my case it was 10.1.1.4. Once this was done, I could scan till the cows came home.

My beef is that this obscure setup procedure wasn't mentioned in the documentation or help anywhere, and I wasted several hours of my time scouring the web till I found a reference to it. Good work Epson...douchebags.

 

And what a Christmas it was. Of course being MyTW's first Nöel, she was as excited as a three-year old and looking forward to receiving lots of gifts. After I explained that it was about giving and not receiving (after first explaining not only why we celebrate Christmas but also who Jesus was) she got into the spirit.

Being her first Christmas meant that we were able to come up with all sorts of *cough* traditions that she didn't know about and had to go along with. Such as the *cough* traditional "draw the names out of a hat to see who would play Santa on Christmas morning", not knowing that every piece of paper in the hat had her name on it.

Of course we also told her that she actually had to dress up for the part, which lead to much hilarity while she shouted out "Melly Kissmut!" over and over in her lovable Thai accent. With baby on the way she wasn't able to partake in the also-traditional all-day "get as drunk as you can" ceremony, but I think the relo's took care of that for her.

In all it was a pretty low-key affair and a relaxing break from the computer. We're well-rested and ready for what is sure to be a huge year for us.

Happy new year everyone! (Click pics below for more xmas photos)