printing
Latest
Ask TUAW: Preventing automounting, Exchange support, printing selections, and more
For this edition of Ask TUAW we've got questions about preventing an external partition from automounting, printing text selections, getting email from an Exchange server, syncing the Address Book with Google contacts, and more. As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!
Better printing with Gutenprint
Gutenprint (formerly called Gimp-Print) is an open-source package of improved printer drivers and utilities that can be installed on Mac OS X to enhance printing functionality and add additional support for older printers. It has driver support for over 1300 printer models, and adds a GIMP plugin for better print customization and color adjustments. Since I do a lot of Mac system imaging and deployment, I don't like to install a bunch of separate print drivers on a seed image. I initially just used Leopard's built-in generic Postscript or PCL driver, but I had many issues with printing speed (the speed of spooling and job submission, not the speed of the physical printing process) and print quality. So I installed the Gutenprint package, switched all printers to the Generic Gutenprint PCL driver, and the printing issues subsided. To use Gutenprint, simply download the .dmg (5.2.3 is the latest version) and install the package. All of the necessary PPD's and drivers will be copied to your computer, and you will be able to select Gutenprint drivers when adding printers. If you have an Epson Stylus Inkjet printer, you will then also be able to use "escputil" from Terminal to do printer maintenance like head aligning and cleaning. Update: Thanks to Charley and Olligarski for commenting that Gutenprint drivers are now included in Leopard. I have used Gutenprint for a while but failed to check if it was installed before I started using the package. It's still worth the install if you're a Tiger user, but the latest version requires at least 10.3 Panther.
GE builds an OLED printer, hopes to challenge light bulbs in 2010
Maybe the incandescent light bulb has been sitting in its socket-shaped throne for too many years -- GE thinks so, anyway. GE R&D guys have produced a machine that prints OLED materials newspaper-style onto 8-inch sheets of metal foil in hopes that the sheets -- which can be pinned to just about any surface -- will start the process of home lighting biz regime change in 2010. Picture, if you will, wallpaper or window blinds that provide soft, diffused lighting for the living room after dark -- no need for special fixtures, just a wall plug. OLED lighting isn't yet cost-efficient for the average consumer, but GE hopes that will change soon. In the meantime, expect to see these sheets in a trip-out Flaming Lips concert in the somewhat-near future.
Fujifilm, Nintendo bring photo printing service to Japanese Wiis
Not that the Big N hasn't snubbed the vast majority of the world before with these channel releases, but folks holed up everywhere save for Japan have yet another one they can only look longingly at from afar. Thanks to a new partnership between Nintendo and Fujifilm, the Wii Digicam Print Channel is immediately available for Japanese Wii consoles to access, which essentially gives owners the ability to upload images from SD cards and receive customized prints, photo books, business cards, etc. in the mail. We're not totally at all sure why someone would choose to handle this on a gaming console rather than, say, an actual computer, but hey -- who are we to judge? Oh, and for you folks in North America, Europe and beyond, expect the service to roll your way sometime in the future. [Via DigitalCameraInfo]
Nintendo ups profit forecast, incoming money storm
Nintendo tripled its operating profit forecast to ¥420 billion ($3.7 billion) for this fiscal year. This would be Nintendo's second revision this year -- they did about four upward revisions last fiscal year -- and is an 86% increase over last year's results. Nintendo also raised its software sales goal by 35% to 97 million units.From the Japanese perspective in the Reuters report, the announcement of Monster Hunter on the Wii earlier this month is seen as a coup for Nintendo against Sony. It showed that the PlayStation franchise support may be eroding. As far as competition goes, Nintendo still holds they aren't in the same field as Xbox and PlayStation, so don't expect a price cut. Senior Managing Director Yoshihiro Mori says, "The way people play with the Wii and the type of games people play are quite different from rival offerings. The products are quite clearly differentiated ... We don't see any need to cut prices." Unless something dramatic happens, Nintendo is gonna see profits for the foreseeable future. And we still have no idea on the WiiFit impact yet.
iPhone 101: Uploading your Pictures to Flickr and printing sites
Uploading pictures from your iPhone to Flickr couldn't be easier. Many photo hosting and printing sites now allow you to upload pictures by email. (Of coure check with your host or printing service to see if they offer this option.) For Flickr, visit flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail. They'll assign you a "secret" email address. Just mail photos from your iPhone to that address and it loads right into your Flickr account. For Costco, mail your images to save@mycostcophotos.com. You'll receive a confirmation letter at the address you used to send the message. The letter includes a link to the Costco Photo Center website where you can print your photo.Unfortunately, the iPhone automatically scales your images when you choose the Email Photo option. It does this to save the mailbox of the person you're sending your images to. That's great when you're sharing cute pictures of the family or dog. It's not so great when you want to print out your emailed photos. To address this problem, I've written SendPics, a utility that allows you to select a photo from your iPhone and email it at full resolution. You'll find a copy of this utility at iphone.natetrue.com and via Installer.app. Your iPhone must be modded to allow third-party applications in order to take advantage of this utility
Network Magic: Simplify Mac and PC networking
The Mac and PC networking challenge is legendary. If you have both on a home or work network, it can be an adventure to get these two machines to see each other, share files or printers. Fortunately, Pure Networks has an app for both Mac and PC called Network Magic which hopes to change all that, as it allows you to easily set up file and printer sharing, diagnose slow networks and more. It offers what looks like a simple interface for managing all this, though I should note that printer sharing only works with the list of printers that Apple officially supports and provides drivers for right in Mac OS X (i.e. - if you can plug a printer in and it works without having to install extra software). While the Windows version is a bit more powerful than the Mac component, folks who need to maintain a mixed network and are after the primary features mentioned here will likely be happy with Network Magic, though licenses are sold at a slight disadvantage for Mac users: packages of licenses begin at $29.99 for 3 PCs (5 PCs for $39.99, etc.), but it's $19.99 for each Mac you want to add to the package. Still, Network Magic looks like one of the easiest networking tools I've seen in a while, and perhaps if its popularity among Mac users grows over time, licensing can become more fair for both operating systems.[via MacMinute]
DIY'ers create homemade 3D printer
Hot on the heels of the candy-object-making printer, an ingenious group of DIY'ers from Russia have managed to create a homemade 3D printer from a CNC lathe kit and some cobbled together bits and pieces. Typically, 3D printers are quite expensive (running anywhere from $20,000 up to $100,000), but working with cheap materials and using free, open source software, the designers were able to construct this project for considerably less. The printer software uses standard STL (a stereolithography CAD file) to render the objects, and it employs inexpensive plastic waste or powdered paint as raw material to create the real-world item. Motor over to the translated Russian site to see how it all takes shape -- pun intended.[Via Make]
Faster printing through Quicksilver or a simple drag and drop
At TUAW HQ we absolutely love Quicksilver, the powerful, incredibly extensible and indispensable productivity tool, as it's capable of speeding up just about any conceivable operation on your Mac. Still, with everything Quicksilver is capable of, I honestly never thought it could be used to help you print documents faster. Sure enough, I have been taught my lesson to never doubt Quicksilver's reach by Mark Fisher, author of this Faster Printing with Quicksilver. In summary, Fisher's how-to walks you through adding your printer to Quicksilver's catalog so it can be used as a target for sending files to print. Combined with the Quicksilver comma trick, you can send multiple files to your printer at once, all from the streamlined efficiency of Quicksilver's search interface. One downside to Fisher's tip, however, is that it requires a bit of digging around in Quicksilver, not to mention a decent workout training oneself through the app's arguably steep learning curve. If all this tinkering simply isn't your bag, there's a much easier trick I wrote about last year for creating a drag-and-drop desktop printer. This is much easier for virtually anyone to set up for themselves, and as a commenter on that post mentioned, you can drag that desktop printer to the right side of your Dock and delete the Desktop icon altogether, saving precious space for... well, probably all those documents you need to print off to begin with.Ultimately, either of these tips are a great way print your documents more efficiently, as they remove the need to open each individual app and print the documents manually, one by one.[via 43 Folders]
DIY 3D printer utilizes hot air, sugar to craft random objects
Just when you thought a $5,000 3D printer wasn't such a bad deal after all, the zany gurus at the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have put Desktop Factory's iteration to shame. The CandyFab 4000 is a homegrown printer that utilized a bevy of miscellaneous spare parts around the lab as well as the same sort of CNC hot-air control mechanism that we previously saw in the text writing toaster contraption. Their selective hot air sintering and melting (SHASAM) method allows the printer to begin with a bed of granular media (sugar, in this case) in which a directed, low-velocity beam of hit air can be used to fuse together certain areas repeatedly, eventually working the remaining grains into a three-dimensional object. The creators claim that while their CandyFab machine only ran them $500 in addition to junk parts and manual labor, even starting from scratch shouldn't demand more than a grand or so, so be sure to click on through for a few snaps of the fascinating results and hit the read link for the full-blown skinny.[Via MetaFilter]
CNC hot-air gun used to draw faces, text on toast
Slicing up ole Xbox consoles or using immensely powerful lasers to heat your morning cup of joe are certainly entertaining ways to make industrial machinery a bit more fun, but the CNC Toast printer ups the ante by providing an over-the-top replacement for those plastic molds we used as youngsters. By hacking a CNC hot-air gun to respond to a "computer-dictated X-Y control system" and affixing it to the carriage of a printer, the evil scientists were able instruct the toasty (ahem) blaster to move around in a user-selected pattern in order to print images and text onto pieces of toast. Cleverly dubbed "digital toast imaging technology," the apparatus was able to affix a number of slightly awkward faces on slices of bread, and even imprint "Hello World" onto one piece in particular. Still, you can't get the full impression of how geektacular this truly is without seeing it in motion, so that's why you should click on through right about now and hit play, cool?[Via HackedGadgets]
"Hello, tech support? My book isn't working"
"Have you tried closing and opening it again?"
Kodak enters the desktop printer market, plans to rumble with HP
With traditional film sales all but dead, and the intense competition in the digicam space, the once formidable Kodak is hoping to find success and newfound revenue in that teensy little $50 billion market known as the print industry. Of course, Kodak has been selling photo printers for a while now, but this new launch is a full-on assault on the king of printing: HP. Kodak's secret is to skip over the whole bait and switch model of most printer sales, where everybody discount their printers heavily, and make it all back on exorbitant ink prices. Kodak will be charging reasonable prices for its three new EasyShare All-in-One printers, the 5100, 5300 and 5500 (pictured) which can print copy and scan for $150-$300, but the ink costs are at $10 for a black cartridge and $15 for a five color cartridge. With ink about half the price of competitors -- Kodak's secret is a print technology that doesn't require the print head to be in the cartridge, just ink -- Kodak is hoping consumers will feel free to print more photos and in turn buy even more ink from the big red K. The technology also supposedly produces prints that can last up to 100 years, and will be making it into stores with these new EasyShares in March. Who knows if this will be enough to give Kodak a fighting chance in the consumer print world, but even if all that results is a speedy and bloody price war, we sure wouldn't be complaining.[Via Cnet]
College student creates paper-based storage system (no, not that kind)
24-year-old Sainul Abideen thinks he's come up with an alternative to CDs and other data storage options that'll allow for greater storage capacities and be cheaper and biodegradable to boot, using a fancy printing technique he's devised to cram loads of data onto a plain old sheet of paper. The trick is to first convert the data into a so-called "Rainbow Format," which is made up of various geometric shapes that can be densely printed onto a sheet of paper; that can then be read by a computer or other device using a Rainbow Card Reader. From the sound of it, the system appears to be somewhat similar to QR Codes and other newfangled bar code-type technologies currently in use in parts of the world other than here, but Abideen's "Rainbow Versitile Disc" can apparently store far more amounts of data than those -- between 90 and 450GB, according to The Arab News. Demonstrations of the technology, however, seem to have only shown much smaller amounts of data being Rainbowfied, including a 45 second video clip and 432 pages of "foolscrap" being stored on a four-inch square piece of paper. Still pretty darn impressive if you ask us, and it sure looks a heckuva lot better hanging on a wall than a CD.[Via The Register]
Nokia adds mobile printing software to N-series phones
While there's a certain novelty associated with an SMS-printing bicycle, the practicality is certainly questionable; however, Nokia is adding yet another dash of ole fashioned utility to "four of its N-series cameraphones." Although details are still a bit slim at this point, we do know that Nokia will be releasing software that allows the "Internet Edition" N80 (and a yet-to-be-announced trio of other N-series mobiles) to order prints from the Snapfish website directly from the phone. Users can presumably order prints from other popular alternatives such as Winkflash, but Nokia hasn't extended official support for any site other than HPs own at the moment. Of course, users can order prints from photos already in their gallery, or they can upload them on the fly via their cameraphone. While attempting to resize, crop, and tweak images to perfection before throwing down for a couple 8 x 10-inch hardcopies on a 352 x 418 resolution screen may not be ideal, we won't complain about extra functionality tossed in gratis.
3D Printouts of Your Virtual Self
OGLE, the OpenGLExtractor, is a little piece of software that can be used to extract 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. What this means is that it can pull out images of our favorite alternate reality for our own entertaining uses. While some people use this to make backgrounds or videos, one of the most interesting uses of this technology seems to be making 3D printouts of your character, using a special 3D printer. And, most recently, color 3d models. While this little gnome may appear to be venturing around Un'goro, it's probably just sitting on a tree in someone's back yard. (Which, to a tiny gnome figurine, is probably about the same.) And if you're just that kind of fan, you might be able to get one of your very own...!
Enable drag-and-drop desktop printing
Since I don't actually own a printer, I find it ironic that I'm posting a tip about printing more efficiently on a Mac. Regardless, this is a handy little tip right out of Apple's Pro site for all you chronic printers out there: if you print a lot of documents throughout the day without necessarily needing to edit them, you can create a "desktop printer" onto which you can simply drag and drop a file to print it. No opening the document or Office, and no dialogs to click through. It's pretty simple: select your printer in the Printer Setup Utility, go up to Printers > Create Desktop Printer (cmd shift D) to create your very own printing secretary on your desktop. Now, if only OS X had a coffee option...
