30 June 2009 | Uncategorized | kimm

Printers aren’t the most attractive things you can have in your house. People try different ways to hide them all the time with mixed results. But what if the printer was actually a piece of art, or at least something cool you could show off?

Science-fiction fan and environmentally friendly? Consider an entry in a university project at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design in New Zealand. Students had about four weeks to create a 3D printer that was also green.

Environmental Choice, a future-focussed, government-backed ecolabel which was sponsoring the project, loved the printer “Equinox” which was designed by Emma Bull. It is powered by the sun and uses recycled paint to sculpt objects. It looks like something out of Minority Report, but a lot less temperamental than Tom Cruise.

If you want a green printer that prints in 2D and doesn’t cost thousands of dollars, look at the RITI Coffee Printer. This minimalist printer has a streamlined look, uses old coffee grounds as ink and human motion as power. It would be great to take on vacation. Alas, it isn’t quite a reality, but as one of the finalists in the Green Gadgets Designer Competition, there are hopes that someone will take a leap and put this into production. Plus, it is white and lime green. How can you not love that?

Trying to stay in touch with your inner child? Consider Canon’s Selphy CP770 Hello Kitty Portable Photo Printer. Not only is it pink enough to make Molly Ringwald take notice, but it is also portable with a handle making it easy to take to the prom.

Casio has a printer that has a neat design too. (Yes, THAT Casio.) This one would have been perfect for Bart Simpson in “Radio Bart”, one of my all-time favorite episodes of The Simpsons. If you’ll remember, at the beginning of the episode, Bart gets a label maker from his aunts and uses it to put “Property of Bart Simpson” on everything in the house including the dog. Bart’s label maker looks like a cross between a UFO and a handgun.

Don’t get me wrong. The old label makers have a very retro, astronaut look to them, but the Casio USB Label Printer has its own appeal. The egg-shaped printer is small, easy to put into your laptop bag and has a soothing color scheme. All you have to do is plug it into your USB port and you are ready to go.

Imagine the damage Bart could have done with this little printer. The entire town of Springfield would have been the “Property of Bart Simpson”.

Lastly, you can hide the printer altogether. Yanko Design has come up with a printer that is an end table with a modern look. Designed by Lukas Koh, this printer is perfect for a small study at home or a small office at work especially if you have a minimalist theme going.

So if you are looking for a way to make your messy office have a little bit of flair, consider finding a printer that is more of a conversation piece than an eyesore.

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19 June 2009 | Uncategorized | kimm

Everyone knows from their school days that when dogs can’t get bacon or mailmen to eat, they’re next favorite meal is homework. You’d think, now that we’ve come to the 21st century, that we’d have found a solution to the homework-eating ways of canines everywhere.

Alas, you’d be wrong:

Few things get a dog as excited as the sound of a printer warming up, preparing to produce pages of scrumptious, tasty homework:

The only thing more frustrating to a dog than a printer that’s not producing homework is one that should be printing but is jammed:

The youngest dogs tend to be the most energetic, lunging and attacking homework before you have a chance to rescue it:

You can, of course, attempt to reason with a dog, but most cannot abandon their homework-devouring ways, even in the face of the most impeccable logic:

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08 June 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Print certainly isn’t dead, but the chunking, shuddering hunks of steel and plastic on our desks hardly seem the stuff of sci-fi dreams. Ever since inkjet and laser printers replaced dot matrix and daisy wheel printers, it seems that printer technology has stalled. Printer companies seem more interested in selling us pricey ink and toner cartridges. So where is the innovation?

You can find it by going back to the future with Jas Bhachu’s rubik’s cube-inspired font generator. Rubber stamps were placed on four of the sides in such a way that you can still rotate the rows and columns. By changing the configuration of the rubber stamps, you can create all sorts of symbols that you can then print by pressing them into an ink pad and then applying to a surface. It may be extremely manual, but it’s a very creative solution to a school project requiring students to create a visual representation of the word “move.”

If you’ve got a larger print project in mind, like an entire wall, you might want to check out Random International’s PixelRoller. “PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces.” The end result is the ability to apply designs, words, or pictures quickly to almost any surface, using the same, easy back-and-forth or up-and-down motions you’d use with a normal paint roller.

However, if you’re more about sticking it to the man and fighting the powers-that-be, you might be more interested in the robotic innovations of the Institute for Applied Autonomy. Catering to todays busy anarchist who must avoid the ever-growing surveillance apparatus of the modern state, the Institute has developed a pair of graffiti-producing systems that allow you to get in, leave your message, and get out quick.

The first, and most fun, is the GraffitiWriter, a remote-controlled robot with an array of spray cans that are pre-programmed to print out your message in a manner very similar to the way old dot matrix printers used to spell out words.

For bigger jobs, the van-installed StreetWriter does a similar job, only at a much larger font size:

Again, the technology is decades old, but is being applied in novel ways that get beyond the usual fliers, pamphlets, and white papers that most of us use printers for. Just as the latest cellphones allow us to take the internet and all its networks of email, instant messaging, blogging, and Twitter with us into the outside world, these innovative printing technologies allow us to express ourselves in ways that are no longer limited to computer screens or 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper.

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01 June 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Several weeks ago I described the search I went through to find a “smudge-free” printer. I ended up purchasing a small, compact Brother laser printer, the HL-2170W. This printer had pretty much everything I wanted – small footprint, built in wireless networking, low cost, and was “easy to use.” The only thing it lacked was an automatic duplexer for automatic two-sided printing. But, my wife and I determined the extra cost for that feature was just not worth it.

The printer arrived in a big box via UPS just a few days after ordering, and I happily took it inside the house to begin installation. I unpacked it, and was greeted with the printer, the requisite software driver CD, the toner cartridge in one of those Mylar bags, and a quick installation guide. Nicely packaged, and nothing appeared broken or out of place.

Installing the toner cartridge was a breeze, and I then went to place it in the family room, its new home. I did actually look at the installation notes, and was glad I did. The notes tell you that if you want to install it using the wireless connection, they highly recommend doing the initial configuration using a wired connection, and then switching to the wireless network. I decided Brother probably had a good reason for this, so I followed the advice.

I had a spare network cable near my laptop, so I connected it to the network, and proceeded to install the software from the CD. The dialog to install was very straightforward, and I selected the option to use wireless networking, configuring with wired networking initially. I was then presented a screen to provide the SSID of my network, along with the security key. After that, those settings were sent to the printer, and I was then instructed to disconnect the network cable and restart the printer.

The driver installation also went smoothly, and when it came to the point in the process to detect printers on the network, the printer was found, a port was configured automatically, and installation was complete. I printed a test page, which worked perfectly, and I was up and running.

I also installed the driver software on two other computers in the house, so we now have three computers (two Windows Vista and one Windows XP) happily sharing the printer. The printer does have a built in web server for administration, though the web admin user interface leaves a lot to be desired. It’s obvious that Brother invested very little there. It’s pretty ugly and not very intuitive.

Overall, we’ve been very happy with the printer. After running 589 pages through it, we’ve had not one problem. I can only hope it stays that way!

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