Byzantium

Do go and see the Royal Academy's Byzantium Exhibition if you have any interest in that sort of thing. A few comments:

• Many of the pieces of course are Christian artwork; strikingly some of these predate Constantine.
• The most amusing piece was a simple bowl with what I can only describe as a happy fish painted on the inside. It wouldn't look even slightly out of place in the modern world.
• Byzantine religious artists liked writing (or carving) identifications of the figures they depicted, even the ones their audience really ought to be able to get easily like Mary and Jesus. Dead handy for a modern audience though.
• St Paul is pretty reliably depicted with a longer beard than any of his human peers. Makes him pretty easy to pick out.

HP Deskjet F2180

I bought an HP Deskjet F2180 in the end, which is a cheap inkjet printer-scanner-copier. No thanks in particular to printerland.co.uk and PC World both of which didn't stock various things that appeared on their websites. Mitcham's corner Staples on the other hand had a pile of them on clearance. It's black despite the picture on HP's website.

Getting it working was initially a struggle; CUPS seems to be inordinately bad at producing error messages, preferring instead to claim that a print job completed when in fact it failed in some really obscure way. What actually worked was downloading the latest version of HPLIP (the version in etch is too old) after which things went much more smoothly. Setting up remote printing from Windows, Mac and Linux clients was much less painful once the server was right.

Scanning just worked, the Gimp knows to invoke Xsane and gets a very large image back automatically. I do have a few pre-digital photos knocking around somewhere so those might get digitized.