I have a HP Photosmart 7200 Series Ink Jet printer. It’s convenient that OS X has what seems to be every printer driver under the sun installed as part of its system so you can plug in almost every printer and have it work (except a stupid all-in-one Dell printer my fiancee has). So more times than not, as long as all of the cords are plugged in, my printer works the way I want it to. That was until today.

The color cartridge in my printer is shot. Hardly any color comes out on the paper at all. Since I’m cheap, I haven’t gone out to the store to purchase a replacement yet. I needed to print a gift certificate from a web site for dinner tonight, but it wouldn’t print properly since the color cartridge was trying to print the parts of the document I really needed (a certificate # to be specific).

So, I did some Googling to find out how to just print in black & white. You’d think this would be simple since OS X is so easy to use, right? Not quite. It turns out, to print in black & white you have to do the following:

• Save the page as PDF
• Open in Preview
• CMD+Print to open the Print Dialog
• Click Paper Type/Quality
• Click Color Options
• Select the Black Printer Cartridge Only radio button

Now, I understand this might be a little out of the norm, but I think it should be way easier to do this from the browser than going through all these steps. Maybe I missed something along the way, but this was the only way I could get black only printing to work. Hopefully this is helpful for someone else out there who’s having the same issue.

I just checked Software Update on my MacBook Pro and noticed that Leopard 10.5.2 is available (there’s also a post here on Digg). That made sense since it appeared the entire world was after it since it took about 5 minutes for Software Update to do its thing and check for all the available updates.

The download comes in at a heafty 180MB. Not quite as big as I had heard in the various article I’d read about the developer seed downloads. Lets hope it fixes some of the lingering issues from the initial update. My biggest issue is that the Synergy screen sharing software doesn’t work (maybe some network issue) and with the desktop updating and some quirks with spaces. Anyway, my update is downloading as I write this and I’m anxious to have it installed to see what’s in here.

Steve Jobs and Apple announced Apple TV Take 2 at the MacWorld Keynote this morning. Lots of cool features:

• Movie Rentals
• HD Movies with Dolby 5.1
• Podcasts - Audio & Video
• Photos from Flickr & .Mac
• YouTube Integration
• Buy TV Shows & Music
• Play iTunes Content & Photos

And it sells for just $229.

Obviously Apple is positioning itself to sell content and a hardware device to potential non-mac users, much like they did with the iPod. Steve Jobs even said they got it wrong with Apple TV Take 1, as did all the other players in this market. But Steve, I think you guys are still missing one important feature. DVR! As far as I know (and I might be wrong here), you can’t DVR your shows from your TV to your Apple TV. Only take content from Apple TV and display it on my television. Integrating digital recording would make this a powerful device, one that I’d consider buying to replace the DVR from my cable company.

Anyone out there aware of why this limitation is in place? Is it a hardware issue with the footprint they put in place for the device? Are there licensing issues with the media moguls. Hopefully I can find some answers to these questions and post them here.

Back in August I wrote about how I had switched to the Camino Browser for my every day browsing needs (I still use Mozilla Firefox for development because of the plugin architecture so I can use the Web Developer Plugin and Firebug).

For the most part, the experience is still an excellent one (i.e. I haven’t switched to something else yet). They seem to update it on a fairly regular basis and its performance still seems to be the best of all the available browsers on the Mac. That said, it still has some annoyances.

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I had been putting of buying an iPod for quite some time now. The time just hadn’t come where I could justify spending the money when I wasn’t sure I was going to use it. But, I don’t have to wait any longer as I was a happy recipient of an 8GB Nano for Christmas! I’m really excited to have one now as its that time of year when its time to hit the gym (especially with a wedding coming up in 6 months). I’m also wondering if I’ll enjoy listening to it while mountain biking, though I’m wondering if that could be a tad dangerous.

The Nano’s have come a long way since the original iPod Mini. Obviously they’ve gotten smaller and have a larger song capacity than ever, but even the interface has gotten better. I think my favorite feature so far is the integration of Cover Flow when browsing the Nano. That’s how I browse my music in iTunes and being able to do that seamlessly on the Nano is key.

Unless I’m on the move, I typically I have my MacBook Pro “docked” with an external keyboard, mouse, and display. This is a habit I picked up from Kyle plus that fact that the new MacBook Pro’s get really, really, REALLY hot. That being said, I’d like a new monitor for home. But one of the biggest annoyances when docking my MacBook is that now I’m sans iSight. Total crap.

My request to Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple: Cinema Displays with built in iSight. Please. I’ve heard rumors of them forever and I’m almost expecting them next month at MacWorld. If they don’t come out I’m going to be totally bummed. Mostly because I can’t imagine this would be hard or costly for Apple to do. It also seems like the next logical step when refreshing the “pro” line like they did with the new iMac and its cool, sleek design.

I’d buy another brand display, but really, nothing compares the the quality of the current Cinema Display in my opinion. Yeah, you can probably get more “bang for your buck” or whatever that means, but I’d prefer an Apple. So Steve, whadda ya say ‘ole chap?

There is an interesting article over on CNET about Google and Apple outsmarting all of the cell phone companies over the next 5 years. Google is coming out with the “gPhone” (either a phone OS or an actual phone) and Apple has its iPhone. Now, when the iPhone was first coming out Kyle and I talked about how cool it would be to just run Skype on the iPhone over WiFi and just circumvent the cell company. Basically VoIP, but mobile. Super neat!

Well, this now gets more interesting. With Google aimed to bid on the 700MHz spectrum in January, the cell phone landscape could change dramatically. Now we have wide spread WiFi, available at a low cost. You can use your “gPhone” or iPhone to talk to anyone and everyone over this WiFi network. What does this mean? No more traditional cell companies. No more crazy cell phone charges and taxes (granted, there will probably be government WiFi taxes). No more 2 year term agreements that bind you to crappy devices on an even crappier network.

At the end of they day, I think this article has pretty much hit the nail on the head in saying that in the next 5 years, Google and Apple will have snookered the cell business really good. They’ll be the ones left out in the cold.

I’m sure most people are aware of NBC pulling its content from Apple’s iTunes store a few months back. A new article on Apple Insider sheds some more light on NBC’s “position”. Jeff Zucker, Chief Executive of NBC, claims that they wanted to increase download prices for its shows to $2.99 from $1.99. The reason being that they had ONLY earned about $15 million from the service last year. ONLY?!?! ONLY?!?! Jeff, that’s $15 million you wouldn’t have earned on T.V. episodes without iTunes. I’d love to make $15 million without lifting a finger on the back of someone ELSES platform.

You sound like the RIAA claiming that downloadable music is killing the recording industry. Uh, no. Its just killing your profits, so you’re going to take your ball and go home, no matter how much it could affect what you COULD make in the future.

Jeff goes on to claim that Apple made millions by selling its hardware on the back of NBC’s content, money NBC never saw. Uh, yeah, right. Jeff, Apple makes a superior product that people see value in, hence they buy it. Show me some numbers on that claim and I’ll listen. Reading comments such as these only get me more excited that recording artists (and I’m sure we’ll see something similar with film in the future) are taking control of their own content and controlling how its distributed. Tell me Jeff, when NBC can’t make money on commercials anymore, will you take your bat home too and take my DVR away from me?

A while back I finally had it with Google apps in Firefox on my Windows box at work, so I switched to viewing my Gmail and other Google applications on my MacBook with Firefox.  It didn’t take long to get fed up with the speed of Firefox even on my MacBook.  So I decided to give Camino a try.  It’s powered by the Mozilla engine, but its only made for the Mac.  The first thing I noticed was how fast it loaded and how fast it loaded the web pages that I visited the most.  The one thing that’s been tough is some of the keyboard shortcuts that are different between Firefox and Camino.  But all in all, its been a great experience and I honestly don’t see myself going back to Firefox unless I’m doing development.

For the longest time I was frustrated with the lack of an Windows Remote Desktop client for OS X. It was actually easier to fire up Parallels to use the build it RDP Client in Windows XP than it was the mess around with what Microsoft had released for OS X (read, lack of multiple sessions, even with the new Beta which claims to support them). So I did some hunting around and found CoRD. Its really easy to use and offers multiple sessions, which is key. It even lets you tab them in a sense giving you a left toolbar with your saved and connected sessions. Cool! Exactly what you expect from a useful OS X application. It’s pretty responsive too, a bit better than I’d say the Microsoft RDP client is.

A couple of complaints though. The drawing of icons and windows is a bit fuzzy. I’m not sure if this is a setting I can tweak. I haven’t dug into it enough to find out. Also, it seems a little bit unstable. Using it tonight, it crashed on me twice. Once out of nowhere and the second when I was logging off of one of my servers. All in all though, I’d say its a great improvement over what I’ve been using.

Update:  I saw in CoRD’s bug fix log that there was a bug supposedly fixed in the 0.4.1 release where CoRD would crash when logging off of a server. I updated to a development release, 0.5.0, and it seems to have subsided. If you experience the same issue, I suggest trying a development version.