printer

Phomemo D30 Bluetooth Label Printer review

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A photo of a Phomemo D30 Bluetooth Label Printer

We’ve had this little Phomemo D30 Bluetooth label printer (sponsored link) for about 3 1/2 years now, and it’s a fab little gizmo.

It lets you quickly print labels from your phone, with text or emojis, using the Print Master app. It’s quick, as it uses thermal printing in the same way that receipts are printed in shops. The label printer itself is also quite compact – about the same height and width as a smartphone, but about twice the thickness. It comes with a built-in rechargeable battery, and a micro-USB port for charging. There’s a variety of colours to choose from – we have a ‘green’ one that’s more turquoise, but they come in pink, purple, grey and a cheaper all-white model.

The Print Master app is relatively easy to use. You select the size of label to match, type what you want and add any emojis. There are also templates that you can use, and a variety of fonts. When you’re ready to print, you can select the number of copies, and it’ll pop out of your printer in a couple of seconds.

We’ve used our label printer extensively since we bought it. It was especially useful in our new kitchen as it meant that we could label boxes of things in the cupboards. We also use it on a regular basis to label leftovers before they go in the freezer. It’s easier and neater than writing labels by hand.

We need to buy a new printer

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Photo of the HP Deskjet All-in-One F2140 printer

Here’s a photo of our current printer. It’s a HP Deskjet All-in-one F2140, and I think it dates from around 2008. Suffice to say, it predates the computer that it’s connected to, has been through several house moves and periods in storage, and even predates my relationship with Christine. You can also see how much dust is on top of it, and I’ll admit to having to shift a pile of documents stacked up on top of it to get the photo.

Okay, so we don’t use it very often. But having a printer is useful from time to time, and we use the scanner every now and then. Christine and I recently scanned all of our qualification certificates, so that we had electronic copies on hand in our shared Dropbox folder.

So why the need for a new printer? It still works, and we can still get hold of new cartridges easily.

The issue is networking.

Christine’s new laptop

Christine recently bought herself a new laptop – a very lightweight Lenovo Ideapad 320S. She’s doing a part-time university course, and her previous laptop bought in 2010 (when we first started dating) was getting too slow. It’s also big and bulky compared with what you can buy new nowadays. As she will need to print from time to time, she tasked me with setting up the printer on her laptop.

Our HP printer isn’t wireless, and so it’s connected to my Mac Mini (also dating from 2010) by a USB cable. I’ve been using Apple’s Bonjour network sharing protocol to share it across our Wifi network. For Windows, Apple offers a Bonjour Print Services utility that will discover any printers shared using Bonjour. And on Christine’s old laptop, this worked fine.

But I couldn’t get it to work on her new laptop. I think the core issue is that Apple last updated the Bonjour Print Services tool in 2010, and so it pre-dates Windows 10 by some time. Her old laptop was set up under Windows 7 and so was fine. Despite following my own printer sharing guide, and manually installing HP’s Windows 10 drivers, I could not get the Bonjour Printer Wizard to complete without failing with a permissions error (even when running as Administrator).

Whilst my Mac is generally on all of the time, it’s probably about time that we replaced it with a proper wireless printer. To get it to work with my iPhone and iPad, I’m using Printopia, which works okay but it’s a bit of a hack. Having a proper wireless printer, which works with all of our devices (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android) would be a big improvement. Especially when it comes to scanning, which we can currently only do on my very slow Mac.

A custom solution?

New wireless printers start at £30, so it wouldn’t be a big expense. In fact, it’d be about the same price as buying a new Raspberry Pi and setting up some kind of bespoke solution. Which, whilst appealing to my geeky side, would probably take a lot of the very little free time that I have nowadays. Plus, there would be the added ‘fun’ of trying to find a way of scanning documents on the Raspberry Pi, and then have them available to use on our other devices. I’m sure it’s possible, but what’s the point when you can buy an off-the-shelf product that already does this?

I could also look at buying a printer sharing hub, but again, the cost would probably be about the same as a new printer. So I might as well just buy a new printer.

We’ll have a look out for any good deals and will buy a new printer soon.

Printer sharing with VirtualBox on a Mac

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This blog post will probably be only be useful to a small niche. If you have a Mac, with a printer, and run Windows in VirtualBox, here’s what you need to do to get it to work.

Step 1: Make sure your printer is shared on the network

On your Mac, open System Preferences, choose Print & Scan, and then select your device on the list on the left. Tick ‘Share this printer on the network’.

Step 2: Check network settings for your virtual machine

In the VirtualBox manager, open your Windows virtual machine’s settings, and under Network, ensure you’re using ‘Bridged Adaptor’ rather than ‘NAT’. This will make your life much, much easier later on.

Step 3: Install and set up your printer using Bonjour

Bonjour ships on all Macs, but not on Windows, which is a shame because it makes setting up network connections much easier. Thankfully, Apple offers a cut-down version for Windows computers, so download Bonjour Print Services for Windows, and install it. This will add a ‘Bonjour Printer Wizard’ icon to your desktop.

Run the Bonjour Printer Wizard. If you’ve done the first two steps correctly, your printer should be listed. Click Next, and, if you’re lucky, Bonjour will install the correct driver and add the printer to Windows for you. Sorted. If not, then…

Step 4: Install the printer driver in Windows

Sometimes Bonjour won’t be able to identify which printer driver you need and will ask you to select it. Again, if you’re lucky, your printer will be one of those that Windows ships with, but if not, you may reach an impasse here. Some people have had luck with using a driver that is similar to their printer, but this doesn’t always work.

Instead, we’ll connect the printer directly to Windows to convince it to install the driver that way. VirtualBox lets you bridge any USB device which is plugged into your Mac, so that the virtual machine can see it. Turn your printer on, and then whilst Windows is running, click on the Devices menu in VirtualBox, select USB devices, and then choose your printer. Windows should detect that the printer is now ‘plugged in’, and so it will install the necessary drivers. Complete the installation, disconnect your printer using VirtualBox and then shut down both your virtual machine, and your Mac, to ensure that your printer is correctly picked up by your Mac on the next boot.

Start your Mac again, and then open Windows in VirtualBox, and try to run the Bonjour Printer Wizard again. Hopefully, this time you’ll be able to select your printer driver from the lists when presented (annoyingly it’s not searchable).

This still didn’t work for my printer, so I had to do one final trick. I clicked ‘Have Disk’, and then browsed to the c:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository folder, then sorted the sub-folders by date. My printer is by HP, and one of the newly-created gobbledegook folders had ‘HP’ in the title which turned out to be my printer. I selected this, and was finally able to get the printer working, with the above test page as proof.

Why not just connect the printer directly?

In step 4, I mentioned you can simply connect your printer directly to the virtual machine, thus avoiding the dilly-dallying around with Bonjour. This works, but it’s flaky; once you’ve connected your printer to Windows, you may need to reboot your Mac before any Mac applications can print to it. Whilst setting up Bonjour is more effort initially, once it’s done, you should find it easier to work with.

If anyone’s interested, I went through all of this because I wanted to print out a coupon for a free one litre carton of grape juice and couldn’t get the Coupon Printer to work correctly on my Mac.

Fun with HP Printers

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Do you have an HP printer with an LCD display that is network addressable? Want to have a bit of fun with it? Follow these instructions to get something like this:

Emo printer has feelings too
Emo printer has feelings too by Joe Attardi, used under license

There’s more on the ‘hpinsertcoin’ tag on Flickr.

All the printers we use at work are HP, but if the office was evacuated because I’d made a printer say it had a radiation leak I probably wouldn’t have a job for much longer. Besides, I don’t know their IP addresses.

[Via Utterly Boring]

Ho ho ho…

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Merry Christmas everyone!

The screenshot is from one of my presents – the Hornby Virtual Railway. It’s a CD-ROM game that allows you to build your own virtual train set, based on the real Hornby Railways kits. It doesn’t have Hornby’s full range, but I imagine it could be useful for people wanting to build their own layouts from scratch but not wanting to buy loads of track that they don’t need. Indeed, the initial planning of where to put the track is difficult as not all pieces go together; you have to get the angles and lengths correct. A little frustrating but fun once the final layout is ready. It’s quite quick – the layout I built took me the best part of half an hour to do.

I also got the Epson Stylus C42Plus printer that we bought on that expensive day in November, along with chocolate and several items of clothing; 3 t-shirts, 2 shirts, a sweatshirt and some ‘karaoke king’ socks (it wouldn’t be Christmas without socks, now would it?). I also got a mousemat, a portfolio wallet and a FiloFax diary, which was nice.

Expensive day (but not for me)

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My Christmas present has been bought, and at a cheaper price than we originally thought. The NUS have a deal with Curry’s that lets you buy an Epson C42Plus printer for £59.97 with 1000 free sheets of paper, which saves £20 off the normal price. Except today the total price was £49.97, so we ended up saving a further £10. Can’t argue with that.

However, that £10 saving was nothing compared to what my parents spent. They had intended to look for a new video recorder (VCR if you must), but ended up buying not only a VCR, but a DVD player and a flat widescreen TV. All for £550. It arrives on Friday, so I’ll be able to watch it over Christmas.