Thursday, December 23, 2010

The PrinterShare Service

I first discovered PrinterShare http://www.printershare.com strolling through the android marketplace looking for a way I could print to my home printers from my Samsung Captivate.  As I browsed the web on my phone, I'd run into a cool article I wanted to read.  Being that a phone has a small screen, printing seemed all to convenient.  Yes, of course I could have gotten on my home PC and printed, but I wanted to see if I could do it directly from my phone.

PrintShare Overview
With PrinterShare you can print to remote printers from Android, iTouch, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows.  The magic about it is printer clients do not need direct access to your printer(s).  For example, I could print to my home printer while at a coffee shop on my android, come home, and pick up the print out.  I could even be across the nation and print something to my printer in Atlanta from LA, not that that would be practical for most of us.

Their website does a great job explaining how it works so I will only briefly cover it here.  I have one of my home Windows XP boxes configured to be able to print to my home networked printers.  This machine, let's call it "pserver" for clarity sake, runs the PrinterShare software and connects my home printers to the PrinterShare network.  You of course have to create an account with PrinterShare and pay a small fee to print via the service ($5.00 per 100 sheets) with other pricing and commercial plans available.

My Android Phone
Now on my phone, I install the PrinterShare software, login with the account I created earlier, and select which printer I wish to print to.  I configured two to be available in my case.  The simplicity about this service is that the printer clients do not have to have the printer drivers installed, just the PrinterShare software.  My home box, "pserver", takes care of all the print driver work.

My Son's Mac Book
I recently got my son a Mac Book and coming from a unix and windows background, administering the Mac was pretty new to me.   For some reason, the Mac could not print to my home printers in the way a Mac should, e.g. just point and click. So, as a quick work-around, I just installed the PrinterShare software on his Mac and he can print to my home printers via PrinterShare.  I agree this is the long about way for a home machine to print to a locally networked printer, but it worked great and we are still using it today.  I just have not had time to troubleshoot and get the Mac to print directly to my home printers.

Web Based Printing
PrinterShare also provides a no software to install, web based printing technique for certain file formats too.  I have not used this yet since the PrinterShare software can print anything.

Other Alternatives
For the group of us that are familiar with opening ports on our firewalls and pumping things through SSL and/or SSH, you can certainly print remotely in alternative ways.  There are also free VPN services that can do something similarly.  However, the PrinterShare setup was fast and just worked, so I opted for it.  I did come across a RSS Feed recently that stated that Google was looking into this type of service but have not followed up on it.

Summary
For any of you as geeky as I am and want to print from your smartphone, I urge you to check out this service.  Accordingly, if you want to print to your home printers from across the nation, PrinterShare is a service you should definitely check out.  I have no connection or ties to PrinterShare so this is solely my opinion.

http://www.printershare.com

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Some of my favorite Chrome Extensions

Here are some of my favorite Chrome extensions.  Perhaps others can comment on their favorites.

Read It Later
Good to flag a link you wish to read later.  Has a flag button and a go to the read it later links you tagged.  I use this for links I do not want to bookmark immediately and to just want to "read later".

WOT
Nice status button grading the safety of the link/site in green, orange, and red.  The grading comes from the mutual community of WOT users.  Help you avoid some bad sites.

Shareaholic
This is my all time favorite extension and you must give it a try.  It basically gives you a quick facility into just about all the social sites selectively.  You can use the extension button and select what you want to do with the current page, for example send to twitter.  Or, set up hot-keys.  I, for example, set up alt-m to mail a link, alt-s to share a link, and alt-t to twitter a link.  Very quick to set up.

Google Mail Checker
Nice icon that gives you the count of unread emails in your gmail account.  Keeps you from having to check your inbox tab.

IETab - windows only
Allows you to have an IE tab within chrome.  Helpful for those sites that only work with IE.  You can set up auto-urls so when you got to a particular site, it always loads in an IE Tab.  For example, when I go to msdn, I have it set to load in an IE tab versus a chrome tab.

Accuweather
There are many weather extensions but I have found the Accuweather to be concise and gives me the information I want to see.

Too Many Tabs for Chrome
If you have a lot of tabs open, it gives you quick access visually in an Aero like style to select the tab you want.  Chrome has many quick hot-keys too though.

Page Monitor
Monitor a page for changes at the frequency you select.  For example, I use this to monitor the downloads page for my Buffalo Router.  I want to know when new firmware comes out and this extension takes care of it more me so I do not have to manually check.  Of course RSS would work if they had it for downloads at the Buffalo Support Site.

ProxySwitchy
Allows you to manually or automatically switch your proxy.  You might wonder how I use this so I will explain.  I have my DHCP server on my home network to dole out the OpenDNS servers for content filtering.  This forces all of the nodes on the network through OpenDNS.  However, there are a few social sites that my wife and I want to get to but still want to block my son from.  So, I spun up squid on my firewall (FreeBSD/IP Filter) and configured squid to use the standard DNS servers from my service provider, AT&T.  So when my wife wants to go to facebook, her ProxySwitch rule kicks in and uses squid to access facebook versus going direct and using OpenDNS servers(which are configured to block social sites).  At this time, my son is young enough he does not know how to by pass my parental filtering.  In time, he will get old enough that I will have to tighten things up.

Yourversion
Currently in my "try it out mode".  I migrated my bookmarks from delicious to yourversion and I am trying out yourversion.  It has some nice features and also lacks some features.  See my previous blog post.  The chrome extension for yourversion duplicates functionality of shareaholic.  However, shareaholic does not have a hook for yourversion, hence I have to use it.

I'd like to hear from others on their favorite extensions.

Happy Holidays!

Monday, December 20, 2010

My initial thoughts on migrating from delicious to yourversion

With all the publicity of Yahoo's Delicious bookmarking service being shutdown, I started looking at alternatives.  There are many so it makes it difficult to decide.  I did some homework and decided to try to use yourversion.  I don't think it is as well known as others but I found only positive references to it on blogs.

Pros:

  • Great user interface
  • Loads fast
  • Searches fast
  • Free
  • Imports your delicious bookmarks in seconds via API
  • Does a great job of focusing attention on what you want to see, hence yourversion of the web.
  • Chrome extension is excellent and ties many social site tools together to your liking,  They have extensions for all the other common browsers too.
  • Android/IPhone/IPad apps
  • Ties news, bookmarks, twitter, video, and blogs into a central location in a very manageable view with a high level of customization possible.
Cons:
  • I see no way to export your bookmarks (have support request in for this)
  • Integration with Safari on Mac is via a bookmarklet and is not as good as chrome but workable.  Extension/addon in works though.
  • No integration with Android HD browser
  • I did not see a way to import bookmarks via a file or other bookmark service.  It only imports bookmarks from Delicious via API.
Summary
It is a good service worth your effort to try.  My biggest concern is just the exporting of your bookmarks.  I will update the blog entry when supports gets back to me.

Update from yourversion support on 12/21
Hi John,

Thanks for your email and your blog post about YourVersion.

Regarding your questions/concerns:
1.  Exporting bookmarks from YourVersion
2.  Integration with the Android HD browser
3.  Help forums

Here are your answers:
1.  Good suggestion -- thank you!  We've added it to our features list.
2.  We do not currently have any integration with the Android HD browser.  We are a very user focused company and we follow the trends that emerge from user requests.  As we hear more people asking for the Android HD browser, we will certainly look further into that integration.
3.  Great suggestion!  We don't have any help forums at this time.  I've also added that to our feature list.

We value your support.  If we can do anything to make your use of YourVersion even better then please let me know any additional questions, comments, feedback, ideas or suggestions.

Thanks again John!

Chris

YourVersion Support