I got lucky.  As soon as I was able to get the proper Mac drivers for the funky Samsung ML-8900 at my school, I was able to set myself up for our office printer with no extra hassle.  But not everyone has such an easy time of it.

Download Samsung ML-8×00 Mac OS X Printer Drivers Installer

Today, I was trying to use the same drivers at my girlfriend’s office, but it was a no-go.

The mac drivers I had were for the Samsung ML-8×00 (download above), and her printer is an ML-8700.   Those are the right drivers, so no sweat, right?  Wrong.  I could get her computer to send a file to the printer for printing, but the printer would spew out page after page of useless data.  Actually, this all the normally-hidden formatting/meta-data that your computer always sends along to the printer along with any file, you just aren’t supposed to see any of it printed out.  The fact that it was getting printed out meant that the printer driver wasn’t playing nicely.  What to do?

Here’s how I eventually solved the problem, and so can you.  Please note that these instructions will vary slightly, depending on your version of OS X.

1. First, make sure that the problem really is the drivers, i.e.: your computer is properly connected to the printer, you’ve got the correct IP Address for the network printer, the printer’s status is “online”, and there is paper in the tray.
2. (If you’re using OS X Leopard, then skip this step) Download the free/open source Gutenprint Driver and install it
   
3. Go into your OS X System Preferences and into the Printer & Fax option.  Click to add a new printer.  If it’s an IP printer (i.e. you have its IP address written down), then select “IP”.  For the driver, click “Select Driver to Use” to select it from a list.
   
4. OS X Leopard should list lots of different Samsung printer models by default.  Normally, previous versions of OS X would list only one or a few, but, thanks to having installed Gutenprint in the step above, the list on previous versions of OS X should now include many more Samsungs.
   
5. Ideally, you would just select your actual printer model and “tada!”, but it’s probably not quite that straight forward.  If the driver for your printer model isn’t in the list or isn’t working, then here’s the trick: choose a different model number that’s as close as possible to your own. That’s it.  Just choose a similar model that says “Gutenprint next to it”, and press ADD to finish.  Gutenprint will take care of the rest.
   
6. Do a test print.  Perhaps, like me, you will be pleasantly surprised to find it working perfectly, even though you have selected what is supposed to be the wrong printer model.

Gutenprint contains within it all of the information necessary to set up a slew of usually unsupported printers in Mac OS X.  Even if you are trying to set up a printer that isn’t Samsung, or isn’t anything close to what I was dealing with in the instructions above, do consider trying Gutenprint as your printer driver if you’re having problems.

Happy printing!

The Idea: give out a maze that’s super difficult to do on its own, but drop breadcrumbs that make it super easy if you know your days or months.

1. PDF Maze: Days of the Week
   
2. PDF Maze: Months of the Year
   

I know I’m probably not the first person to come up with this idea, but just watch your students while they’re trying to solve the maze.  They will be repeating the days of the week and months of the year in order one by one, and not even notice they are doing it.

1. Google No Country Redirect The wise designers at Google thought of this issue in advance, and thus made it super-easy to quickly search google with no redirection to non-English language pages.  Instead of navigating to http://www.google.com, simply tack on a “/ncr” on the end, resulting in: http://www.google.com/ncr

   Many users of Firefox love the Google Search box built into the toolbar, but using it in a foreign country results in foreign-language search results.  The solution is to replace the standard Search options in this box with their no-redirect equivalents.  The MyCroft Project lists all sorts of localized Google alternatives.  The third one in the list is the No Country Redirect version of the search box.

2. Gmail and Google Calendar Since you will almost always need to log in in order to get any use out of GMail or GCal, there’s no need to bother with a no-redirect URL.  Instead, log into either service as normal, and then access your “Settings” section at the top-right of any page in order to change your language preference, and, if desired, your Time Zone as well.  Changing the Time Zone is really quite vital when using Google Calendar, but be sure to fix any appointments that suddenly stray into the wee hours of the night.
   
3. Youtube No Country Redirect On one of the expat forums I frequent, someone asked how to get YouTube back into English while staying in Korea.  One of the responses was to look up at the top of the YouTube page, where the current country/language are listed, in order to change them appropriately into English, and maybe Canada/USA if the mood strikes you.

   This is a pretty good solution, but the result is that your language preference gets stored in your browser cookies, which many people like to empty from time to time.  Plus, if you use any other computer for a one-off YouTube visit, you have to do it all again, resulting in another semi-permanent change to that computer’s settings for all future users, most of whom may not appreciate their YouTube in your foreign language.

   I couldn’t find a no-country-redirect URL for YouTube anywhere online, but a quick look into the cookie file that YouTube saves and some trial and error resulted in this: http://www.youtube.com/?hl=en

   Just bookmark and/or memorize that link, and YouTube will forever load in English.