Pretty cool if you have a duplex printer, which I don’t.

If you too have a printer which can only print on one side of the paper, here’s what you do:

• Go to File -> Print
• Click “Options”
• In the “Pages” section, uncheck “Left Pages” and check “Right Pages”, “Reversed” and “Brochure”
• Click OK to dismiss the Printer Options dialog
• Back on the Print dialog, click “Properties…” and ensure your printer is set to print in landscape mode
• Click OK, and make a cup of tea while it prints…
• Now, take the printed stack and turn it so the blank side of the stack is uppermost. Take a peek under the top sheet, you should see it contains page 1. That’s good, as we’re about to print 2 on the back of it…
• Pop the stack into your paper tray. On my printer, the side to printed goes uppermost, and the top of the sheet is towards the front of the printer. I’m hoping yours is the same, so the blank side of the stack should be uppermost, and if you take another quick peek underneath that first sheet, you should find page 1 is frontmost towards the printer. Good. You’re all set…
• Run back to the computer, hit Print, go to the Options again, this time, check “Left Pages”, uncheck “Right Pages”, uncheck “Reversed” and check “Brochure”
• Click OK to dismiss the Options dialog, then OK to print
• Now dash back to the printer. By this point you will be giddy with excitement
• Pick up the stack, reverse the order, then fold it over so page 1 forms the front cover
• Staple it together and smugly hand copies to your colleagues. Job Done

I’m really writing this post so I can repeat this trick in future, but I hope someone else finds it useful!

One thing I don’t need HassleMe for is pastebin.com – there’s an army of real people doing that. I’ve not had as much time to devote to it as I’d like, as Geograph takes most of my spare time. Can’t promise when I’ll have more time for it, but hopefully soon. Maybe I will add a HassleMe for it after all…

Finally, my good lady has formed her own cottage industry of jewellery making, and it’s going down a storm locally. She even has a website, www.made-by-mrs-d.co.uk. Not much there yet, as I’m still getting set up to take decent pictures of her work!

I’ll need some help maintaining it – if you’d like write access to it, or simply want an event adding, let me know.

• Complete tagging system for Geograph – early in the month it became clear that the Geograph server wasn’t coping well with traffic and photograph uploading was becoming a struggle. I stopped working on tagging and switched to completing “Guppy”, a desktop application for queuing uploads. I’ve got the basic framework almost complete, so a new goal will be to release it during May
• Learn Python – I did enough to convince me to continue using it. I used it a couple of times when I might have otherwise turned to Perl. It’ll be a while before I’m truly up to speed, but I’ll most likely use Python now if I need to write more than 100 lines of Perl.
• Release Pastebin source – success! I’ll continue enhancing it over the next month now that I’m on a roll. Had lots of positive feedback and ideas I’ll incorporate.

I think that if I hadn’t publically stated those goals, I would not have published the pastebin source or bothered with Python, so it’s been useful “life hack” that I’ll repeat! So, what to aim for in May?

• Release Guppy – I’ll get a working beta of Guppy out there to aid Geograph contributors.
• Lose a few pounds – I could do with losing a couple of stones, which doesn’t quite tally with geeking out in front of a PC every waking hour developing software. But, I’ll aim to lose half a stone and at report back on how I did it!

Complete tagging system for Geograph

Geograph has a single “category” for each image and I’ve been working on-and-off since January to replace this with a decent tagging system. It’ll make such a difference to the usability of the archive and open up new possibilities, so it can’t happen soon enough. I’ll write about the design decisions made too…

Learn Python

This “Why Python?” article by Eric Raymond got me thinking I should try and give Python another crack. The next time I find myself turning to Perl I’ll see what Python has to offer. I like Perl for speed of development and the CPAN library, but I find it really time consuming to write decent OO code in Perl, so I rarely bother. Let’s see if I can if I learn to love Python too!

Release source code to pastebin.com

It’s been a year since the last release, and I get a steady stream of emails asking for the source. During April I will tidy the source, add a few common feature requests and release it under the GPL.

I think that’s enough. Let’s see how it goes…