The Canon PIXMA MG7550 and the state of printers in 2015

▼ Today, I bought a new printer: a Canon PIXMA MG7550.

First, let me tell you about my old printer. This is a HP Deskjet 5652, which is from around 2003. Back then, it was a really nice printer: it prints borderless photos and it has a duplex module for double sided printing. Hardware-wise, it's still in perfect working order after a decade. You can even still get the cartridges. The trouble is that the latest MacOS version that has drivers for the 5652 is 10.5 Leopard. You can still use the printer with generic Deskjet drivers under 10.6 and later, but then you only get basic printing using the standard settings and nothing else. So when I want to print photos, I have to boot into 10.5. That gets old fast.

Also, the Deskjet 5652 connects using USB or a parallel (Centronics) port. Not a big problem, as the Apple Airport Extreme and Time Capsule Wi-Fi base stations have a parallel port for precisely this purpose. However, you then still need the right drivers and you can't print from an iOS device using AirPrint.

Due to my limited printing needs I accepted these limitations. However, the other day I noticed that some text I was printing kept coming out looking smeary unless I printed in black and white. Also, the color cartridge had run out of cyan, so I was looking at a € 45 or so investment into a new cartridge. So I did some research, and found Canon's PIXMA line.

There are very many PIXMAs. I think they're mostly lower-end photo printers. You can get one for well under € 100, but I decided to get a higher-end model: the MG7550. This one has 10/100 Mbps Ethernet as well as 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and USB 2 (no USB cable included, though). It also has a built-in scanner and it can print on printable CDs/DVDs/blu-rays. I got one at the local electronics store for € 134. It looks like it costs a bit more online, probably in no small part because the thing is huge and weighs 10 kilos, so that free shipping must eat into the online retailer's margins quite a bit.

I hooked the printer up using an Ethernet cable and installed the six ink "tanks". Apparently, unlike the inkjet printers I've used previously, the MG7550 has a fixed print head and the ink cartridges just provide ink. There's the requisite yellow, cyan and magenta, as well as gray, black and pigment black. The regular black is dye-based and mainly used for photos. The pigment-based black is mainly used for text. This is all selected automatically. I like the fact that there's a separate cartridge for each color, so you can replace them individually as they run out. (Yes, the cartridges are sold individually.) Each tank has a built-in LED that comes on when it's inserted correctly.

Canon wants to you to install software from a CD (Windows), their website (Mac) or the app store (iOS) to set up the printer. Not sure what that does, because after answering a few questions using the printer's touch screen and the color alignment procedure, the printer is ready to be used. The Mac discovers the printer using Bonjour. Because the printer supports the AirPrint protocol, there's no need to install any drivers—that's only necessary for the scanner part. The Mac automatically downloads those drivers from Apple.

Printing from the iPhone is even easier: select Share and then Print, the printer shows up... that's it. (It doesn't matter that the iPhone is connected over Wi-Fi and the printer over Ethernet.) The printer has two paper trays: a big one that holds A4 paper, and a second, smaller one that holds 15x10 cm photo paper. When printing from the iPhone, you simply select 15x10 cm / 6x4 inch and the printer will use the appropriate paper. Printing from the iPhone quickly became my preferred option, as printing from the computer involves a lot more settings, although printing from iPhoto is relatively simple. You can also print from an SD card, which is nice, but not quite as easy as using the iPhone.

The touch screen is really cool, and removes the need for inscrutable messages. When you load paper, the printer asks you to select the size and type, and then warns you when you try to print using a different size or type of paper. Printing text is pretty fast. Photos take a bit longer, but it's not too bad. When the printer starts printing, a small tray flips down to catch the printouts. The prints are really sharp and photos are very colorful, but the black could stand to be blacker, both for text on plain paper and for photos. I'll have to try Canon's photo paper to see if the results are better than with my HP and no-name photo papers.

Most people probably don't really need a printer anymore these days. However, if you do any printing at all, you really should get a modern printer: they're super cheap and produce very nice output, while AirPrint and Google Cloud Print have finally solved the driver issue. And with 15x10 cm photo paper loaded I can wirelessly print photos from my iPhone when the mood strikes.

IPv6 and firewalling

When perusing the settings, I noticed that the printer supports IPv6. I posted this photo to Twitter:

Only after I posted the photo, I realized that the printer's IPv6 address is now known to the world, so presumably, everyone will be able to print to my printer. After digging through the menus, it turns out there's no way to set an IPv6 address manually, and the printer doesn't use privacy addresses, either. So no security through obscurity for me. There's also no security settings to disallow remote printing. So I basically have three options:

• Do nothing and see what happens
• Set up an IPv6 firewall between my LAN and the IPv6 internet
• Disable IPv6 on the printer

None of these options are particularly great. I wish Canon had given all of this some more thought.

Update: this is what you get when you challenge the internet to print on your printer over IPv6:

@iljitsch @jaredmauch @danyork @appelboor Cool, that’s me ;-)

— Niels (@nlsp) March 3, 2015

Permalink - posted 2015-03-03

A battery breakthrough would explain the Apple car

▼ The latest Apple rumor is that they're working on a car. A rumor that is easily dismissed:

The fantastic Apple Car is a fantasy.

But is it? What would it take for Apple to start making cars?

Cars are a huge market and they're very expensive. That's exactly the type of market Apple needs to enter if it wants to continue growing its already unprecedented profits. However, cars aren't very profitable for the companies that make them today. So Apple needs to bring something unique to the table to allow it to reach the margins it's grown accustomed to.

There are already very nice high-end cars, and there's just not that many people who can afford them; selling a better car for a higher price isn't going to give Apple the numbers that it needs. What Apple needs to do is make a better car cheaper, so it can be sold for a regular price but at an Apple-like margin.

The insides and outsides of a car are determined by its function and the fact that it must push through the air at a relatively high speed. There's not much that Apple can do here. Maybe Apple has come up with some new user (driver?) interface paradigm that will revolutionize driving, but somehow I doubt that.

Maybe an Apple car is going to be self-driving? Not impossible. But Google has been working on that for some time, and they use existing cars. Also, Google's driverless cars are described as "trains running on invisible tracks": they're not very autonomous, but rely on extremely detailed maps. Is Apple confident enough in its mapping abilities to think they can pull this off?

But maybe they just build a better car. Apple isn't going to improve the motors used in electric cars, simply because those are already pretty much perfect: they weigh a fraction of what an internal combustion engine weighs, run at 90% efficiency and they last pretty much forever with little or no maintenance. Most of the other electronic and mechanical parts are small potatoes.

However, there is one thing in an electric car that could be improved: the battery. A better battery that stores more energy for the same size/weight would be a big deal. Or that can be charged faster. Or lasts longer before it has to be replaced. Or is simply cheaper.

We read about research breakthroughs in battery technology all the time, but we rarely see those translate into real-world improvements. Obviously, Apple has been interested in batteries for a long time. So what if Apple has developed a significantly better battery? That's sure going to help the Apple Watch, and we could all use a bit more battery life in our iPhones.

But if you're looking to monetize a battery technology breakthrough, look no further than the electric car.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-16

Star Trek Voyager

▼ Twenty years ago, on January 16, 1995, the first episode of Star Trek Voyager was broadcast in the US. The series would be on the air for seven seasons. I'm not sure when I started watching, but I ended up buying all 172 episodes on VHS. Every Tuesday I would go to the Free Record Shop to buy a tape with two new episodes for ƒ 29,99, later € 13,61. So I must have spent 1170 euros on Voyager. I was actually about to buy that week's tape when my brother called me on my first Nokia cell phone to tell me an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

At about 250 grams a piece, this collection weighed in at 21.5 kilos, and I got rid of it when I moved to Spain. However, last week I re-bought Voyager, on DVD this time. The box set weighs 1.25 kilos and cost me € 105. At the time of this writing, you can get the Star Trek: Voyager - The Full Journey box set for £ 85 from Amazon UK, but in the US you'll have to shell out $271 for Star Trek Voyager: The Complete Series on Amazon.

I never really watched the original Star Trek series, which is 49 years old now. The few times I caught an episode, I had trouble suspending disbelief because the sets looked so improbable and the effects are terrible. I mean, they can't even get the space ship model to travel in the direction it's facing.

However, I was a loyal Star Trek The Next Generation viewer. I even recorded every episode on VHS tape, and I still have those tapes. (Well, I missed the last two episodes, but I got those on tape, too.) I think I re-watched them once, but now that ST:TNG is available in high definition on blu-ray, it's unlikely I'm going to revisit those home recordings. Also, TNG isn't that great. The the story lines tended to get repetitive and characters are fairly bland. I especially disliked Data.

I liked Voyager a lot better. First of all, there's a real mission: getting home from the delta quadrant—although they sure get side tracked a lot. But the great thing about this conceit is that Voyager actually gets to explore some unknown places, something that The Next Generation didn't really do much. The characters also work much better. Captain Janeway is a great character, warm, but also tough. Tuvok works much better than Spock or Data because the whole lack of emotions thing is no longer explored to death. And, emotions or not, he does have a sense of humor. The characters all have traits that propel stories forward organically. The desire get home before they die of old age allows them to do stupid things from time to time (as needed for the plot) for understandable reasons.

The biggest limitation of Voyager is that most episodes were written to allow for out-of-order watching. As such, the (life-changing) events in one episode are forgotten the next. However, there are some longer-running story lines where the crew has to deal with a certain adversary throughout a season or two. My favorite seasons are 3 - 5. Season 3 slowly leads up to the first encounter with the Borg, and then in season 4 Seven of Nine gets added to the crew. This shakes things up nicely until the writers start to spend too much time on Seven of Nine and the doctor.

Even though Voyager is pretty good TV, it's not great science fiction. The big problem with Star Trek is that they're just too powerful. The technology is basically magic and can do anything. Often, first half of the ship has to break before there's any sense of danger. It also makes things way too easy: scan a planet 20 light years away from signs of human life? No problem. Not only do most aliens look human, they also speak English (for all intents and purposes). I'd love to see a show that takes a more realistic approach to space exploration, where space is actually big and empty—even when navigating it faster than light speed—and visiting a new planet is a huge deal rather than something that's over and done with in 43 minutes.

In these days of widescreen high definition TV, it takes a little getting used to to watch Voyager in 4:3 narrow aspect ratio, and of course the image isn't super sharp. The live action parts aren't too bad, though, and it helps that Voyager predates the trend to make TV and movies super dark so you can't tell what's going on. The CGI doesn't fare so well: it tends to be noticeably soft.

Having to navigate through menus and being force fed unskippable disclaimers is pretty annoying. Then again, simply inserting the DVDs without having to worry about managing storage on my computers has its advantages, so I don't think I'm going to rip the entire series.

Time to watch some Star Trek Voyager!

Permalink - posted 2015-02-15