A few weeks ago Timothy Ferris' The Four Hour Workweek entered my reading agenda. The book certainly looks nice - hardcover, golden borders, and the inside is refreshingly sparse, spaced, easy to read.

The rationale for this book is appealing: most people seek a life of achievements outside work, but do not have either the means or time to reach those achievements. Tim wrote a book to explain his successful experience in reaching a life of (expensive) leisure involving only four hours of work a week, and proposes a model to follow to do the same.

The idea is simple: express the means for your achievements as dollars, and make other people work for you to get these dollars for you to spend. Once you got the money and time, profit! And then the book goes on and on about how to quit a job, create a side business, and pay people in India to manage the side business. The side business should involve selling information products (costless to create) at high price (high margins) to small markets (no risk for competitors).

A salesman's dream.

The important step is to find the right market. A business concept that holds. Find a virgin niche market - that is, people who need something that nobody provides yet, such that you could provide to them for a high price goods that don't cost much to produce. The ideal product: a collection of facts around a topic sold as a video on a DVD. The catch: finding the topic. It has to be narrow enough to match a need where people would want to spend money, broad enough to attract a sufficiently large number of customers to sustain the business, and uninteresting enough that no competitors will ever compete.

I'm not sure how many free niche markets are left out there. Tim says lots, I see none. Too bad, maybe I'm just not creative enough.

Then I think I knew I wouldn't finish reading when I understood that the key to finding free time and staying rich is to delegate work to lowly paid slaves^K“assistants” — preferably in India, since they have a “different scale of values” anyway, and foremost you can just dump one and get another at will if you're unsatisfied and even get a refund.

In other words, buy slaves in India to do your work for you, get the money from the business they run for you in your pocket and give them the leftovers.

In other words, you can leverage the gap of social and economic inequality in the world to make you even richer and contribute even more to inequality.

Not my cup of tea, so I'm not joining.

“Relax, don't do it, when you want to suck it to it, Relax don't do it, when you want to come.”

That was the catchy line from this tube from the UK band Frankie Goes To Hollywood. They were successful, they were controversial, and their most popular song Relax was banned by the BBC pretty fast due to concerns with the overtly sexual nature of the lyrics.

The original music video is featured on Youtube:

Shortly after the release and the ban of this video, another clip was made, quite boring compared to the original one:

(thanks to MeFi for all the memories)

A while ago I acquired a Brother laser printer, model HL-2030. This is a cheap printer with excellent printing quality (up to 1200dpi) and power saving features. Moreover, it supports the standard printer language PCL-5 which makes it “polite” to free and open operating systems — such as, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

On Linux, the Brother printers are fairly well supported. There is a lot of information on what drivers to use on LinuxPrinting.org and several good hints for the printer HL-2030 are hinted there as well. Brother also provides official Linux drivers that give access to all the printer features.

Using the generic driver

Unfortunately, Brother “officially” indicates that they do not have specific drivers for FreeBSD, and that FreeBSD users should use the generic drivers. Of course, using this printer (as well as many others from Brother) with FreeBSD is possible using CUPS and the generic printer drivers provided in the packages Gutenprint and/or Foomatic. For example, with my HL-2030 printer I proceeded as follows to use the generic driver:

1. install and setup CUPS (not covered here, there is a section for it in the FreeBSD documentation)
2. setup appropriate permissions on /dev/unlpt0 (USB device for the printer) — I used root:cups 0664
3. generate and download the PPD file for HL-2060, (HL-2060 is a compatible printer)
4. setup CUPS to use this PPD file and the USB device (use device "no-reset") to reach the printer.

That works very well, but I wasn't satisfied because it supports only resolutions up to 600dpi, and the paper margins are not well defined.

Using the Brother driver

Hopefully, I found possible to use the official Linux drivers provided by Brother on FreeBSD. This is made possible by the Linux emulation layer on FreeBSD.

Note the following:

• CUPS should already be installed and running, and the printer should have been tested first using the generic driver as described above. Rationale: if the printer or the USB device somehow don't work, the official driver can't do anything about it.
• This has been tested on FreeBSD 7.0 for i386 (32bit). See notes below for some hints for the x86_64 architecture (64bit) and other versions of FreeBSD.

Here are the steps:

1. install the Linux compatibility libraries through port emulators/linux_base-fc7. Likely you need to set the Linux kernel version high enough prior to installing the port, using for example sysctl -w compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.9 (save to /etc/sysctl.conf to make the setting persistent).
2. install print/psutils which contains pstops required by the Brother drivers.
3. download the LPR driver and CUPS driver for your printer from Brother. Download specifically the Debian .deb files.
4. extract manually the contents from the .deb files. They are .tar.bz2 files in disguise: use the command tar -xjf
5. place manually the files in the appropriate FreeBSD directories:
   • .so in /compat/linux/usr/lib
   • bins in /usr/local/bin
   • Brother-specific files in /usr/local/Brother
   • CUPS data+filter in /usr/local/share/cups and /usr/local/libexec/cups
6. edit all the script files included in the .deb and change the following:
   • all references to files included in the .deb should be modified to point to their new FreeBSD location
   • references to other tools (gs, pstops...) should be modified to point to /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin
   • use path to USB device /dev/unlpt0 instead of /dev/usb/...
   • the LPR installation script may contain commands to change the owner/group of files in /var/spool/lpd. Replace with user "root" and group "daemon" instead of the default "lp".
7. open the "postinst" scripts from both .debs and read what commands they use to setup the printer, and execute them manually (LPR driver first, then CUPS driver). This should register the Brother PPD file into CUPS and create the printer configuration.

Et voilà!

If anyone volunteers to create a FreeBSD port, that would be great.

Special Notes

Users of FreeBSD x86_64: the binaries and libraries provided by Brother are compiled for Linux 32-bit. You need to ensure that your linux_compat package supports running 32-bit binaries.

Previous versions of FreeBSD: you are on your own. The steps above are untested. It may be that the USB stack in previous versions of FreeBSD (than 7.0) cannot send data to Brother printers.

USB device: the standard USB printer device file on FreeBSD (/dev/ulpt0) fails with (some) Brother printers. Use the non-reset /dev/unlpt0 instead. This works. The drawback is that the printer needs to be switched off and on when an error occurs (the driver cannot reset the printer using this device).