Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’m going to be running the Providence Geeks table at AS220’s Foo Fest (not to be confused with FOO), an all-day free block party in downtown Providence tomorrow (Saturday, July 15th 2006). It starts at 12am and goes late, so you have all day to check it out. I’ll probably have the table up until 5pm or so, and I’ll be giving away copies of Retro Gaming Hacks to people who can make high scores in whatever retro games I happen to have set up!

Providence Geeks is delighted to be hosting another Geek Dinner. Get while the getting’s good, though. This is the last geek dinner of the summer! Read all about it here.

If you’re trying to get an OfficeJet d135 working with Beta 2 of Vista, you’ll probably get an error when you try to install the driver. If, like me, you did an upgrade installation from a previously-working XP installation, your printer may just mysteriously stop working.

I found that the DeskJet 990c driver that’s built into Vista works fine, and handles color as well as the two-sided printing accessory. (If you want to change your driver, open the Control Panel, click Printers under Hardware and Sound, and then right-click on the printer. Instead of choosing Properties, choose Properties from the “Run Elevated” sub-menu. Then use the Advanced tab to change the driver).

ABC6.com: “Air quality is expected to reach unhealthy levels in Rhode Island today.” (We don’t have a single air conditioner, just a bunch of ceiling fans, which don’t help one bit with this particulate problem).

A few months ago, my home state made the news for its work on an initiative to cover the state in wireless with a true border-to-border network. The RI-WINS initiative (Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Networks) officially flipped the switch on June 19th, and I had the honor of organizing and moderating a Providence Geeks Town Hall event where the RI-WINS folks explained the project and answered some questions about it. Some of the interesting tidbits:

• It will take 120 WiMAX base stations to cover Rhode Island.
• Initially, the network will not target end-users, but…
• …there is one RI community that is talking with RI-WINS about providing access to people who can’t afford broadband

Find out more in the event coverage: Part I and Part II.