The iPrint
I’m so excited. Apple has just released a preview of it’s new iPrint. Finally a printer that looks good, is completely compatible with all my hardware and will just work instead of 5 hours of screaming and troubleshooting. Apple claims that the design is almost perfectly silent, prints 11 pages per minute and the ink cartridges are loaded into the back so you don’t chance mucking up the print heads. It connects via bluetooth and wifi so no need for oddly shaped cords; Plug it into the power and it’s ready. Apple says the device will be available for purchase in early March but you can preorder through their website in a couple weeks.
Kindle hacking!
I love my kindle but I really don’t like the screensavers that come with it. Something about promoting people who’ve been dead for over a hundred years… Anyway, Amazon released the source code for the kindle and the hacking community got right to it. We now have custom screensavers as well as custom fonts and a few other hacks that are less interesting. You can find the latest code for the hacks as well as very easy instructions at: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004. The only note that I have about this is that if you have firmware 3.3 like I do, you need to use a different jailbreak and hack than normal. Don’t use the k3g version; use k3g-3.2.1. Technically that’s the hack for the special offer version of the kindle but it works for firmware 3.3 as well. Check it out!
QR Code Hacking…
I was reading a lot lately about playing with QR codes such that you could display a custom image in them instead of just the random assortment of dots. I didn’t know this but apparently there’s a serious amount of error correction that goes into processing these images. You don’t even need to rearrange the data for the code because you can just write on top of it and the error correction will deal with it. So, I give you the new QR code for my business. How awesome is this?
under the hood…
so, if you have no life you may or may not have read this blog more than once. to you i say: thanks and come again!
anyway, i changed up the theme and layout a little so let me know if you like it 
in related news, i’ve been looking into some fun technologies that you probably already use and don’t know or care how they work. well i do! i already implemented a URL shortener which was a fun little project. the one that i’m using right now uses the open source project yourls. it’s simple to install, easy and fun to use and has a great interface. since i’m using a blog structure that has really long titles and a complicated organization structure it’s been really handy for linking people quickly and easily to really long page names. plus it’s fun to keep track of just how many people actually click on the links i send out.
something else i’m looking into right now is an open source video conferencing software called big blue button. the guys who developed that are really amazing. if you’re not competent enough to install it yourself they actually have a virtual machine they put together that will do all the work for you and it’s ready to go. the interface is beautiful and friendly and i really enjoy the features while in chat such as uploading a presentation, chat and multiple video streams plus user rights management. I’m totally putting this software on my server for future video meeting use.
my latest project has been learning about microblogging services such as twitter. the difference here is that i’m using an open source project(do you see the trend yet?) called status.net. it’s really simple, really fun and they even developed an attractive desktop application. twitter is a nice service but there’s a couple problems with it. one, they don’t have the infrastructure to support a lot of their users which makes it hard to manage anything there. and two, they use windows servers which i’m guessing is the reason that they have half of the crashes they do, if not more.
windows servers break everything. the latest OS they realeased, windows 7, is a lot better than previous implementations so i’m less thoroughly opposed to running windows at home but if you want your business to stay up 100% of the time you shouldn’t run windows server. it’s poorly coded and needs to be restarted like every 5 minutes which kills your uptime.