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Is The Standalone Inkjet Printer Finally Dead?
Posted by Angus Kidman at 9:00 AM on October 8, 2008
Canon today released its half-yearly Canon Digital Lifestyle Index, which suggests that Australians spent $2.4 billion on technology in the first half of this year. A ton of that was on big-screen TVs (hello Beijing!), but there's also some areas where we're spending less:
The latest CDLI also reveals categories in decline, including DVD players with their already high household penetration rate, and single-function inkjet printers in the face of high multi-function device growth.Given that even the cheapie printer that came with my last notebook included a scanner, it seems to me that single-function inkjet printers have reached the end of their working life. Admittedly, there's still single-function photo printers, but at the prices charged to get photos printed professionally, they don't make much economic sense. Do you still find a non-multi-function inkjet useful? Share your thoughts in the comments. If you want to get more out of your printer, check out our top 10 printable paper productivity tools.
Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Free peer-to-peer printer-sharing tool PrinterShare cuts out the network fiddling and router tweaking necessary to share a printer from, say, a Mac system at home to your Windows PC at work. The PrinterShare system requires signing up each computer on your network and assigning it a name, but once you're set up, sharing and accessing printers is truly simple. Files you send to be printed remotely are encrypted by default, and free accounts print, unfortunately, with a cover sheet that includes an ad. For those trying to make connections between troublesome systems, PrinterShare might save some frustration. Got another, non-ad-supported GUI tool? Share it in the comments. PrinterShare is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Update: Vista systems require a UAC work-around for full two-way printing. 
Free printer-friendly service PrintWhatYouLike.com is a simple point-and-click element removal tool to make printing sites and pages without printer-friendly links much easier, and without any software. Paste in the URL of a site, and you'll get a left-hand sidebar that lets you click and and remove pictures, headlines, and other page elements. You can pull out the background image, isolate selected parts of the page, and even resize individual elements, all in the name of reducing ink usage and improving readability. Better still, you can copy a link to the page you've just hacked to bits, giving web site owners with popular pages a free resource for printer-friendly versions. PrintWhatYouLike.com is a free service. For more earth-saving and frugal printer tips, check out the How-To Geek's 
One of the few guarantees the computer world offers is that, at some point, your printer will report that it's out of ink when it isn't, mangle pages because of a small break in a plastic part, or otherwise make even the geekiest of users pull their hair out. FixYourOwnPrinter.com hosts an active forum of users who share their tips on managing the money-grubbing machines, with tips like placing black electrical tape over the ink sensor to make a Brother printer finish out its toner (as one Slate writer found) and button combinations that can reset a unit's wayward sensors. A little smart Googling, of course, can net you some DIY fix-it schemes, but FixYourOwnPrinter.com's search is a good place to start and explore, and the site itself might just have the part you're looking for.
After making a few small tweaks to its interface yesterday, Google Maps also updated the options for printed directions. The new version lets you toggle between text only, map view, or street view for each step of your directions, giving you more details when you need them and fewer when you don't. Granted, using Google Maps mobile on your mobile phone can save a lot of paper, but printing maps is still very common for people without data plans. Either way, the added control—like having the option to embed a street view of your destination—is a welcome update to what used to be a frustrating feature.
Need some lined paper for note-taking, graph paper for drawing, or bi-colour paper for budgets? Printable Paper has you covered, assuming you've got access to a printer. All of the many, many templates are free and available in PDF format, and go far beyond 8.5 x 11 sheets to business cards, receipts and invoices, and beyond. Good starting point for making your own templates, or a good bookmark for those moments where one sheet can hold you over.
The Google Operating System blog provides a few blocks of code that anyone can insert into their Google Docs word processing files to add dynamic page numbers to page headers and footers, but which show up only in the online office suite's PDF-powered printing mode. The trick involves added a chunk of code to the top or bottom of a document using the "Edit HTML" toggle at the top of the editing page. Head to GOS for the code, as well as links to ways you can further customise both code blocks.
