Kick Your Epson into Gear -- If you have an Epson Color Stylus printer (see TidBITS-266), you might be interested in two handy Photoshop utilities to improve the color accuracy and the quality of high-resolution images. The first utility, KS Labs Epson Ink 2.52, comes from Guy Kuo <guykuo@u.washington.edu>, and it improves color saturation and accuracy when printing from Photoshop 3.0 by letting Photoshop separate colors using custom ink settings for the Epson Color Stylus. The second utility, called Better Epson, is a fat binary Photoshop plug-in from Thomas Keller <100115.3313@compuserve.com>. Better Epson prints RGB, bitmapped images with better speed and/or better print quality. The Macintosh drivers Epson ships with the printer apparently don't produce true 720-dpi output; Better Epson provides a better dithering methods that can (theoretically) give true 720-dpi output, though results vary depending on the type of image being printed. [GD]
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Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
Kick Your Epson into Gear
by Geoff Duncan 
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