Is anyone here familiar with the Epson TM-88 series of point-of-sale printers?  I'm trying to write a utility to store images in its non-volatile memory (which except for the bizarre coding of the image data is -- theoretically -- rather simple and straightforward), but for some reason, the image data I'm sending the printer is coming out as printed garbage instead of being stored.  As they're pretty universal -- even if you don't know the model number it's almost guaranteed you've seen one -- I'm hoping someone here has experience with the Epson ESC/POS "language" and can offer some advice as to what I might be doing wrong.
Thanks.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

...someone who, unlike me, has the time and the skill to make an AMV.

An Asuka-centric Evangelion video to this song:

Edit: Embedded the video, which I couldn't when I was at work.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

So I was playing a little bit of Champions Online this morning, and then the screen went all jaggy, the sound stuttered in a high-pitched squeal. This was no normal "Windows BSOD" moment. I had to turn off the power with the 5 second "force shutdown". I opened up the case, pointed a fan in there just in case it had gotten too hot in order to cool it down, waited 5 minutes, then hit the power button. 

Nothing. I mean - absolutely NOTHING. The power button lit up, the fan came on, but that's ALL. No post test, no hard drive light, no indication from the monitor that it was getting ANY signal from the computer at all. 

It's dead, Jim. 

*SIGH*

I don't know if you'll see me in-game for the forseeable future.I'm sending this from Dad's computer. But I'm not sure it can run City of Heroes or any other game at any kind of decent framerate even at lower graphics settings. I'm going to check and see tonight.  

Ok - good news, bad news time. 

The good news: 

It is NOT my hard drive. It's a SATA hard drive and all I had to do to confirm it was stable was pull the SATA cables from the DVD/CD on my dad's PC, hook them up, boot up and I can see everything on the drive just fine. Everything is there. No loss. 

The bad news: 

It's probably my motherboard. Several things point to this. The main one is:

I THOUGHT I'd been keeping the interior clean by using canned compressed air to blow it out from time to time. Apparently I wasn't thorough enough. 

The cooling vent system sitting on top of my core(s) is a LOT more involved than I'd thought. I found this out when I opened things up to get at the hard drive. Which involved removing the RAM chips, the video card moved, and that cooling tower just so I could get the angle to get at one of the screws holding the hard drive. 

(Irony: I actually didn't need to go to all the trouble that I did. Turns out I missed an obvious screw. If I'd undone THAT one first, I could've lifted the entire assembly containing the hard drive straight out without having to unscrew the hard drive from it at all. Oh the things we learn...)

Anyway - because I DID go to all that trouble, I noticed something that made me both want to jawdrop and facepalm. 

Let's see if I can describe this - the Core is at the "back" of the computer from where the access panel is. The cooling system sits on top of that, it consists of an array of cooling fins about an inch square all around the core, sitting on top of THAT is the fan, and sitting on top of THAT is the fan hood that ensures that the fan draws air not from the computer well, but from directly outside through the grill on the opposite side of the computer from the core. The grill is in the access panel. So basically this entire "stack" runs straight across the middle of the computer. 

I'd opened up the case before and looked in, of course. I'd even stuck the little "straw" of the air bottle into many of these recessed places. 

Would you believe I NEVER saw the mass of cooling vents at the bottom of the "stack" before now? The Vent hood and fan assembly (along with the generally crowded nature of my case) obscured the cooling fins from view from almost every angle UNTIL I started truly disassembling it all!  

Well I've seen it now. I wish I had a long time ago. I'd been cleaning the fan because I could SEE it. But I'd missed the cooling FINS entirely. And they were caked in dust. CAKED.

So even though the fan was going like hell, the cooling system had apparently lost a LOT of ability to cool. 

So yeah. I think my core overheated. 

Before I went to the store for a diagnosis I took the case outside to the garage and hit it with dad's mini air compressor (that we normally use for airing up tires) and used the blower attachment. Jesus the dust cloud that poofed out of that case!

I've left the main unit (sans hard drive, because I'm paranoid with my data and because they don't need it to test the motherboard) at Fry's Electronics to diagnose. Just to be sure. I gave them as good a description of the problem as possible. Initial reaction of the tech at the desk was along the lines of "ouch, that does sound like the motherboard, but we'll do a full check just to be sure it's not the power supply etc." 

The slightly ok news: replacing the motherboard might just be doable. I think I can convince dad that it's cheaper and worth it to just get a new motherboard and replace that rather than try and replace the entire computer. (which at this point, I think he'd be unlikely to do, since the computer is less than 4 years old. Heck, it's barely over 2 years!)

I'm HOPING that a replacement motherboard of the same type is available. If I can get an exact replacement, then I don't -think- I'll have to also re-install the OS. Or the RAM. 

As for Champs Online/City of Heroes on the other computer?  Maaaybe. Dad hasn't utilized very much of his existing capacity on this computer. I doubt he'd even notice the installation. (Not that I wouldn't tell him anyway. Just so long as I explain what I'm doing and that it won't affect anything he want's to do.)

City of Heroes I think would run ok. Probably not the Ultra mode. But "standard" probably would work. 

Champions Online? Not so sure. It's actually a lot more of a memory/graphics hog, I think. At least if you want it to look halfway decent. I can try though. 

Team Fortress 2 - I don't think I'll even bother. The graphics aren't too bad for dad's system, but I'm not sure it can keep up in real time online. 

Still... even though my data and HD are okay... God damn but this blows. And the worst part is that it was completely preventable. I'm pissed at myself for letting it happen. 

I know not how nor when, but this line simply has to be used in a Harry Potter fic, with at least one of the "birds" involved being Hedwig.

- CD, would have put this in CTMB but it's not a crossover
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Just a quick 'un.

Quote:Mel was looking at herself - her real body - her core had been moved temporarily to her avatar while the orbiter was prepared. It was so... limited. She leaned up against a railing, as she stared through her own cockpit windows. The name ‘Melchizedek' was emblazoned in sharp black letters beneath.

This was the Vehicle Assembly Building.

This was where the Apollo missions had launched from. This was where her sisters had launched from. This was where she was, strapped up to an oversized fuel-tank come cargo-carrier capable of putting more than the take-off mass of a Gagarin in orbit, and a quartet of the largest and most powerful ion engines ever built.

She should've been giddy. She should've been itching to go, just like before the race. Something about this was different.

“Anxious?” said a voice beside her. It startled her. It stunned her to be startled. She instantly recognised it as Discovery.

Stupid limited body with such poor sensors. At least she was in some proper clothes, and not one of those stupid uniforms they made her wear for the cameras.

She heaved a simulated sigh, and looked over her shoulder. “A little,” she said.

A lot, really.

The contrast between herself and Discovery couldn't have been more stark. Dizzy was lithe, Dizzy was graceful, Dizzy had an air of maturity and authority about her, of age and experience that belied the apparent youth of her Avatar.

“You should be,” said Dizzy, coolly. “I would be worried if you weren't.”

Mel looked just a little bit dubious.

“I screwed up a simulation today,” Mel said, after a few moments. “And got everyone killed. They sent me a false engine-out indicator, and I performed a shutdown of the opposite engine to maintain the drive field symmetry. I lost attitude control, and broke up...”

Discovery spent more than a few seconds thinking.

“Do you understand what you did wrong, and why it was wrong?”

“Uh,” Mel nodded. “I responded too quick to an alarm, without checking other indicators to determine if it was false.”

But, if she took too long, the drive-field would've warped, and different parts of the stack would've found themselves with different inertias and velocities. It would've shattered like glass.

“Did you learn your lesson?”

Mel nodded again. “And I know that's why we do these simulations and stuff. I'm not stupid. It's so I can kill them in safety, rather than in reality. And learn what not to do.... and stuff,”

“I never said you were stupid,” said Discovery.

“I know!” Mel snapped, before instantly regretting it. “It's just... it's. I...” she wrangled with the concept in her mind, trying to get it straight. “If I'm making mistakes in the simulator, I might make one in the actual flight. I don't want to get my crew killed.” She stopped for a moment, looked at Discovery, then looked back into herself and her own memory of a video all Shuttles knew. “You remember her don't you?”

“I remember both of them, but yes, I do remember her. I'm the last who really does.” Dizzy smiled, a faint sadness in her gaze. “You're a lot like her in your own way.”

Mel looked out over herself, then down at the boosters.

“How did she feel?”

“On the morning? She wanted to fly, she was eager to go. She was always so glad to get the chance to fly, especially since she was never expected to be anything more than a structural test article. She took every chance she could.”

Mel sighed again.

“I just can't stop thinking about it... the break-up. In the sims, when we get ‘Go for Throttle Up', I can feel the tension. Everyone knows that that's when it happened. And I start wondering what we'll say right before I break up, I start wondering what'll happen afterwards. Will they fly another Vulkan? Will they stop flying us? Will they stop building us? Will we get our own memorial beside the other two?”

Discovery was silent,

“After my ALT test, you warned me about what'd happen if one of us was lost. You warned me about the long shadow, what happened after both disasters and about what the effect of one of us dying again would be. And I was so afraid of screwing up your legacy and your dream that I got as far away from it as I could. I wanted to do my own thing, I always did.... I wanted to be Mel and not ‘another Shuttle'. I wanted people to think that, if I ever.... y'know.... then it was me,” she pointed to her chest, “ doing something I wasn't supposed to, and not another Shuttle disaster.”

“I want to be my own person, I wanted to be free of that restriction” Mel finished. “But now that I'm doing this Shuttle-thing, and people are calling me a Space Shuttle and drawing all these comparisons between the old missions, that I'm afraid of screwing it up. It's all so...heavy. ” She looked up at Discovery, her expression searching for reassurance. “I'm afraid of killing everyone. I'm afraid of what'll happen afterwards.”

Discovery looked over the shuttle's body, then down at some of the workers far below busying themselves on the crawler. She contacted her own body being rolled out from its hangar, pulling through a few things. She was talking with her own commander at the same time. The avatar returned her attention to Mel, her deep eyes locking with Mel's own.

“I flew both return to flight missions and I can tell you that I felt the exact same way before both. But if there was one thing both disasters proved, it was that we would continue. We would find out what went wrong, it would be fixed, and we would try again and keep trying. We keep moving forward.”

It was Mel's turn to go quiet. She was staring away at her own body. All clean and shiny for what must've been the first time since she left Hephaestus. Even the new OMS pods and tail assembly no longer looked suspiciously cleaner than the rest of her body. Lights played across the boosters, highlighting all the logo's and emblems of the organisations forming the consortium. The tank was creaking. It even smelled clean. It was the royal treatment for her, every last little nut and bolt and tile being inspected and adjusted to perfection.

Discovery smiled at her, “If you genuinely don't think you can handle the mission, I could take over for you. It should be possible to move my core into your systems.”

Mel's face screwed up into a petulant pout. “Not a chance!”

Dizzy laughed, “That's exactly the response I'd expect. That's what I like about you. We're grown up and sober, we're careful. But you're out there doing anything and everything you can and then some. I see in you what we were in those first years, that sense of optimism and joy..” She placed a soft hand on Mel's shoulder. “So please Mel, do it well for us all,”

The whole stack began to move, crawling towards the open doorway. Hundreds of tons were slowly creeping their way towards 39-A.

“I will.”said Mel. She was staring out the sky.

----

A couple of friends introduced me to the board/card/minatures zombie game Last Night on Earth. It's a fun way to ekove that Zombie Movie feeling.
It's made by Flying Frog Productions, a small game making company.

http://www.youtube.com/wa...mE0&feature=youtu.be
8:03....Hoverboard!

This time, of something you guys might expect of your friendly, local Blackbird fanatic. 
Gorgeous full-color SR-71 cutaway: http://www.dkimages.com/d.../previews/771/504805.JPG
A very HUGE black-and-white YF-12A cutaway: http://sobchak.files.word.../2009/11/yf12cutaway.gif
And last, but not least - a massively detailed B-36 cutaway, complete with all turreted canons in their deployed positions: http://sobchak.files.word.../2010/11/b36cutaway1.jpg
Enjoy.  (^_^)

There's a book out in hardcover that is based off of CoH (if I'm recalling the blurb on the dustcover correctly)
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Inv ... wsec=Books
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biPwomfyuxw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kaR2s_XnX8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyc0fuDuPcc

You know me. I am so there, the fabric of space and time are warping into a new black hole to suck down free time that might otherwise be used for unimportant things like sleeping or eating.

- CD

ETA: For more information in non-video form: http://www.tfuzone.com/
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows