What I meant to say in my previous post about my Lottery Program before I got too distracted, was to continue on about selling the program in a few stores that I figure are more or less a lock to get into, short of it being against the rules for them to sell it there. Since we have friends and family that owns stores that sell tickets, I figured it would be natural to start sells there, however I have a couple issues to address before I can do that.
- My CD/DVD burner doesn’t recognize CDs. Something got messed up with it’s laser alignment or something, I don’t know, so I’ll have to get a new one. I have a few models I am looking at. A Pioneer Black 18x, about ($31), Lite-On LH-20A1H ($33 for OEM, $38 Retail) which adds LightScribe which may be helpful and nullify one of the points below, on up to the Plextor PX-760A ($100) which doesn’t have LightScribe but is faster than the others, and being a Plextor, a bit more reliable. If I was to get one right now, it would probably be the Lite-On with LightScribe, since it save me the expense of…
- My printer is a Cannon Pixma IP4000, which outside of the USA here can print on printable CDs and DVDs. In the US, they took out two parts and put in a slightly altered front door. So to print on CDs, properly, you need to buy two parts, the roller and the tray. Both are available on eBay and the two parts together will set you back $31, not too bad really (note the link only takes you to the CD tray, the CD tray in question needed for this printer is tray B, but a few of the listings have the roller as well). Details on CD/DVD printing on US IP3000/4000/50000 are available at the link provided. The nice thing is that this provides for full color printing on CDs and DVDs that are inkjet printable, unlike LightScribe which is monochromatic, though some of the newer ones have a background color other than just gold. It is probably recommended to get anyhow, even with a LightScribe burner, there are times when either you want color, or like me you have a bunch of inkjet printable disks.
I’ll probably get the Lite-On soon, since I really need a CD burner… heck my DVD burner is so messed up it won’t even read a CD anymore. Nobody out there seems to have a clue as to what happened, I know it isn’t a driver issue as it won’t even boot using a bootable CD, and it didn’t work in Linux when I had Linux semi-working for a while back when. While I am at it, perhaps I should pick up a Mitsumi FA404A ($20), which would give me a floppy drive again, along with a media card reader (I still don’t know if the card that was in my camera before the camera became inoperative had any images on it).
Anyhow, a printing system of some type will be needed, to that end I think the Lite-On is the solution to go for… Hmm… I just noticed printing times on LiteScribe are kind of slow. No question on using 1.2 media since there is a huge time savings and boost in quality, but with each disk taking 15 to 20 minutes for a nice image… Of course if I stuck with basic text it might not be that bad.
What I really want to find is a Lite-On DH-20A3L, but it must be too new…
EDIT: Also, I need to come up with a really cool name for the program.
