Original Cin

There’s a lot of misinformation about the Lexmark x4270 under Ubuntu, with a lot of pages simply claiming it doesn’t work. This is not correct; the printer works just fine (as far I can tell, I haven’t tested color printing yet) using the Lexmark Z42 CUPS driver. While I’m not aware of any way to get the _scanner_ to work, the fax and copier should also work standalone, of course.

I’m currently trying to lose weight, so I’ve been keeping track of calories online with NutritionData. It’s been one of my favorite websites for years for looking things up, but I didn’t realize they had such a nifty tracking system. Can I admit that I think it’s fun to see how everything in my diet changes all at once every time I enter a new food? What’s more, this has already helped at least a little bit:

• Nutritiondata alerted me to the fact that I was getting much, much more saturated fat in my diet than I should have been.
• As long as enter Omega-3 and Omega-6 for (at least some!) custom foods, I actually have some idea what their ratio is
• Nutritiondata’s also let me know that I’ve been getting lots of vitamin A, which is a good thing once in a while, but not something you want to do every day.

There also some annoyances – most of the data in the ND database comes from the USDA; I often find myself entering nutritional labels for foods. But with so many users, I’m sure I’m duplicating the work that many, many other people have done before. If there were ever a more obvious case to apply a crowdsourcing philosophy to a website, I don’t know what it is. For some reason, I can’t share the labels I enter with other website users, and they can’t share with me. Why?

My diet was messed up by 3 hours of website downtime. A local app would be better. (I was going to ask why there isn’t a Gnutrition program, but it turns out there is and that’s exactly what it’s called. I might give it a try later.)

Nutritiondata should probably take a hint from the Advocates for Self-Government and change their nutritional/filling grid into a diamond, with very nutritional, filling foods at the top (I realized a week ago or so that I can do this with my goal grid).

Finally, and bizarrely, every new day involves clearing the old data out completely. There is no archive. I’ve just been jotting down notes in a tab-delimited text file. I understand why they might not want to store a bunch of what-I-ate for years and years on end, but they can’t hold onto information for, say, a week or so?