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.

2 Comments

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:

18 Comments

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.

2 Comments

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!

2 Comments

26 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Has this ever happened to you?

Printers can be cantankerous contraptions, fickle and unreliable. Even worse, they can be aggressive, like this one that spits toner:

Even worse, some have been known to attack and EAT people!

But humanity will not accept being taunted and disrespected by lazy, insolent machines!

It’s been one page jam, one faint and smudgy page, and one “what the heck does this error me” too many! Even mild-mannered professionals have been pushed over the edge:

We’ll do whatever it takes to put these machines in their place. Even if that means using fire:

Or high-caliber weapons:

9 Comments

18 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Two months ago, my wife came to me with an interesting complaint about our home printer. It seems that she often needs to print “handouts” for our 4H club meetings, and these handouts are often used at the club’s ranch. Unfortunately, there are young kids–and sometimes damp hands–involved, which ultimately led to smudged ink and unreadable handouts.

So, the challenge she tossed in my lap was to find a way to print handouts that wouldn’t smudge.

Our printer, an HP Photosmart 3210 inkjet printer has been a real workhorse for us, and I’m generally very happy with it. We have it on a wired network connection, and it’s shared between the three computers we have in the house. It’s mostly used for “general” printing, but we also occasionally print photos on it.

Thinking that the smudging might be related to the ink or paper, I set out to investigate. Of course, there are few choices on ink; you either go with the OEM HP02 print cartridge family from HP, or find compatible ink cartridges. I just decided that it wasn’t worth investing in a complete set of compatible print cartridges at this point, and I assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the HP ink was probably as good as you could get, if more expensive than compatibles.

As for the paper, we were using an inexpensive office superstore “house brand” paper for our everyday printing. I knew that paper quality could have an impact on the print quality, and thought it might also contribute to the “smudgeability” of the printed output. After spending about an hour in the paper aisle of our local Office Depot, I bought a ream of the HP Bright White Inkjet paper. It advertised “HP ColorLok” technology which supposedly offers “brighter colors”, “bolder blacks” and (the real winner for me) “Up to 3 times faster drying inks for less smearing.”

We put this paper in the printer and printed a few test documents. Then it was off to the sink to dampen hands and handle the paper. The result? Handouts that still smudge…maybe not quite as easily, but still smudging.

I basically arrived at the conclusion that we weren’t going to find an ink/paper combination for an inkjet that would pass the smudge test. So, what to do?

Many of you may have already jumped to the next conclusion I drew—that inkjet technology is not really the best for this purpose, and that I should look at a laser printer instead. So, it was off to the Internet to research laser printers.

Our needs, in addition to being able to pass the smudge test, were to get a printer that:

• Was networkable, preferably with built-in wireless networking
• Was “affordable”, meaning that I wanted to pay less than $150 for it
• Was physically small, as I wanted to put it on a cabinet in our family room and still leave room for other things
• Was reliable and easy to operate
• Was “print only”—we didn’t need faxing, copying or scanning on this printer
• Had a sleep mode to conserve power when it wasn’t printing

Of course, I had to tell my wife that she’d be limited to black and white printing. The prices of color laser printers with the features we wanted were way north of $250, so I just ruled them out.

After looking at many options, from HP, Brother and Samsung, I settled on the Brother HL-2170W and bought it through one of Printer.com’s affiliate partners, PC Connection. The list price of the printer was $129.99, but I bought it in March when a $30 rebate was offered, so the out-the-door price to me was $99.99.

It’s “print only”, has built in WiFi networking and is only 14.2 x 6.7 x 14.5 inches in size, perfect for sitting on the family room cabinet. There’s a power plug right behind where I put the printer, so I just plugged it in, set it in place, configured the WiFi networking, installed drivers and we were ready to print! I must admit that the front panel controls (one button and three status lights) are pretty simple, and the driver installation went very smoothly. Also, it has a sleep mode, and just sits there quietly with its comforting blue status light on when not in use.

Of course, one of the first things we did was the smudge test. The results? Even with almost waterlogged paper, there was no smudging seen! Since then, my wife has happily printed many 4H handouts, and all remain readable.

11 Comments

11 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Is there paper in your future? We’ve often turned to the world of science fiction to tell us what we can expect in the world of tomorrow. From Jules Verne’s submarine voyages beneath the North Pole to Arthur C. Clarke’s geostationary communications satellites, the creators of science fiction have been giving us peeks at the wonders of futuristic technology. So let’s take a spin in the sci-fi time machine and sample some printers of the far distant future.

Babylon 5
Print is clearly alive and well in the Babylon 5 universe. Somehow, newspapers survived the online assault and the readers of tomorrow still suffer ink-stained fingers as they peruse the sports page. Readers of the Earth-based “Universe Today” feed the previous day’s copy into a recycling slot, where the paper is reused to print today’s paper, with the sections personalized for your interests. Unfortunately, looking at the first few minutes of this clip from second season episode, “Divided Loyalties,” it seems toner cartridges still need the occasional shake to keep the print quality even.

Dr. Who
The Time Lords of Gallifrey, of course, don’t worry about such things. Their psychic paper makes you see printing that’s not even there, saving their civilization billions in ink costs. Even better, psychic paper shows you what you want to see, making everyone far happier and more mellow. Unfortunately, this may have lead to the destruction of their civilization since the psychic paper probably never told them, “Hey, the Daleks are coming to KILL YOU ALL!!!”

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

The Babylon 5 folks have it easy compared to the humans in the latest iteration of Battlestar Galactica. The printers on board the human vessels have joined forces with the Cylons as something of a fifth column. With the corners carefully snipped off, every page of paper has eight rather than the normal four sides, increasing the number of razor-sharp edges. Was it an outbreak of painful, stinging papercuts that led to Starbuck’s mysterious disappearance at the end of the show? Only the printers know for sure…

Firefly
Not to be outdone are the sinisterly secretive paper products of Firefly. Who can forget River Tam’s one-woman war against Blue Sun can wrappers and food packaging in the episode “Shindig”:

There it is, there it is. It’s always there if you look for it. Everybody sees and nobody sees it… These are the ones that take you! Little ones in the corner that you almost don’t see. But they’re the ones that reach in and do it. They’re the ones with teeth and you have to smash them! A million things, and the hands go everywhere and when you brush your teeth all the little blue things are there but no one says it because, because sometimes they’re afraid. And then they come… The hands go everywhere. Two by two, hands of blue.

Just what is the link between the sinister Blue Hands and the paper packaging of Blue Sun food products? And why does River hate them so much? Was the threat of paper cuts used to keep the children at the mysterious academy in line? Or is there something far more sinister going on?

Star Trek
When creating Star Trek, however, Gene Roddenberry imagined a kinder utopian future. One of the hallmarks of this more perfect tomorrow is the complete lack of paper products. Yes, the Enterprise is a paperless starship. Even in the relatively low-tech original series, Captain Kirk set stylus to a paper-free data pad and information was stored on brightly colored microtapes. Which was a good thing. We can only imagine how a papercut incident might have played out on the Enterprise :

You’re dripping your cursed green blood all over my sickbay. Damn it, Spock, I’m a doctor not a… Oh, right. I’ll see if I have any bandaids…

But fear not… Captain Picard boldly goes where many have gotten papercuts before as evidenced by his treasured collection of books. Truly, only the bravest of starship captains would dare to employ such ancient and dangerous technology.

Photo credits: dalangalma, free-ers, thegreatgeekmanual, rojer.

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04 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

The web’s gone 2.0, your floppy drive has been replaced with a DVD burner, and your monitor has gone from a big clunky box to svelte elegance. But what about your printer? What new tricks can we expect from that old dog in the near future? While the business of staining paper with meaningful symbols and art is thousands of years old, there are still some neat new ideas brewing for our future.

Among the companies imagining what that future might look like is Hewlett-Packard. Vyomesh Joshi, head of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, recently gave a few hints as to where that company is headed. It’s less radically transforming printers themselves and more about giving you new and more compelling reasons to use them. “We don’t want to be thinking about a printer attached to a PC as the opportunity,” he said. Instead, HP is focusing more on how you use that printer.

In alliance with social media sites, HP wants to give you a one-button solution to do fun things with your printer, such as print out your friends’ pictures, or create posters or books without having to cut-and-paste or launch additional programs. Taking your social media experience out into the non-digital world seems like a winning idea, but only time can tell if it will catch on.

And speaking of books, book seller Blackwell brings us the Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds books at the blazing speed of 105 pages per minute. This means it can print out most paperbacks in less than five minutes. The Espresso Book Machine is an industrial-sized printer, so you won’t be plopping it on your desk anytime soon. The idea is that people looking for out-of-print or hard to find books can order it at the machine and pick it up a few minutes later. Writers can also bring their own work on a CD and have it turned into a professionally bound paperback. Blackwell reports that the cost of these books will be about the same as if they were in stock.

While the Espresso Book Machine takes advantage of some cutting-edge technology, the emphasis again is clearly on taking printing beyond single-sided loose pages of text. The two-pronged strategy aims to give you more compelling reasons to create physical artifacts from your digital life while at the same time making it easier to do. If these forward-thinking companies are correct, the Digital Age won’t kill print, but co opt it, turning the printed page into a bridge between the physical world and our online lives.

Photo credit: Mess of Pottage

2 Comments

27 April 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

Most people don’t realize that cats and printers go together like peanut butter and jelly. Some printers have been known to forge deep and lasting bonds with their feline friends:

Many cats are experts at repairing troublesome printer problems. This one certainly seems to have the right idea:

However, I think enlisting the services of this cat will likely void your warranty:

It may take time for your cat and printer to warm up to each other:

But once printer and cat have bonded, you’ll find your feline a great help when it comes to handling your precious documents and printouts:

9 Comments

20 April 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

The approach of Earth Day is another reminder that we all should do what we can to conserve. Saving ink by choosing a more efficient font is a good start, but it’s only the beginning. Here are five more ways you can green your printer.

1. Put it on a surge protector. Even when your printer is turned off, it’s still sucking a tiny amount of electricity off the grid. Turning off the surge protector is just like unplugging your printer as far as the power company is concerned. Also, it just makes sense to have your valuable electronics protected by a surge protector.

2. Don’t print unless you really need to. Use email and online faxing instead of paper whenever possible. The average American office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and those 10,000 sheets take more than a single tree to produce. That’s one tree for each of us, which adds up to a pretty big forest. Only take what you need.

3. And recycle what you do use. Recycling paper is easy. Most towns and cities now have a service which collects paper, aluminum, and plastic for recycling. Find out where the nearest drop-off point is to your office. They may make pickups right at your front door, or in a special bin near your dumpster. You can also use recycled paper, allowing you to recycle on both ends of the print job.

4. When beauty and quality aren’t required, take advantage of “draft” modes and black-and-white printing. This will extend the life of your ink and toner. You can usually find these options by pressing the “Properties” button in the upper right of the window the pops up when you click your printing icon.

5. Use both sides of every page. Some things, like fliers and posters meant to go on walls, really can only use one side of the page. But for almost everything else, printing on the back of the page is perfectly viable. If your printer has an option for it, take advantage of it and cut the amount of paper you use in half.

The great thing about conserving is that it’s not just good for the environment. All of these suggestions will also save you money by cutting down on your printers’ costs of ownership. Being conservation minded is best when it puts more green in your wallet as well as outside your window.

Photo credits: René Ehrhardt, netlancer2006

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