Macgasm

It’s been a slow trek, but it looks like Apple’s AirPrint technology is about to get another boost from a third-party printer company, and this time it’s a big one — Canon.

Canon has just announced that some, but not all, of their Pixma printers (MG5320, MG6220, MG8220) can now take wireless print requests from the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch using Apple’s AirPrint technology. Canon now joins HP and Epson as the only companies currently taking advantage of the AirPrint technology. But the question remains, who prints anymore?

Okay, maybe I should rephrase that. I don’t print any more. All documents end up as PDFs or text files that I can peruse on my iPad. There may be some cases where printing is absolutely needed (tax filings), but even then it’s a rarity for me.

I own a networkable (Bonjour support included) color Lexmark laser printer and it just sits in my closet collecting dust. I’m not exactly sure AirPrint is going to change that for me, ever.

Do you still print? If so, why?

Source: Canon
Via: Macworld

As expected, Apple has topped the American Customer Satisfaction Index for the 8th consecutive year, scoring 87 points out of a possible 100-point scale. The next closest competitor is HP, who comes in at 78, followed by Dell, Acer, and Compaq, all coming in at 77. Apple is the gold standard when it come to customer service in the technology industry, clearly.

In an environment where it isn’t uncommon for companies to pass the buck from one company to another when problems arise (ie. Internet providers), it’s nice to note that some companies still go out of their way to provide excellent support to their customers. It’s not unusual for customers to tell stories about Apple going above and beyond to right a wrong, even when it’s clearly the customers fault.

(more…)

Find yourself needing to get just a little bit more juice out of your iPhone speaker while you’re out and about these days? Have you ever thought about getting a self-powered speaker for your iDevice? How about one that connects to your iPhone, iPad, iPhone, or MacBook through the headphone jack? What about one that has a nice looking Apple logo on it that glows?

If you have, you should check out the iAudio Mini Portable Rechargeable Lithium Battery Speaker (say that 100x fast) while you can. Something tells us that it won’t be around very long once Apple’s legal team gets wind of it. You can currently buy it for $19.95, but again it won’t be around very long.

Buy. Buy. Buy. There are only five left.

You may want to check out that 1-star review. It may not put out much power. At least it looks snazzy, right?

Hat tip to Gagan Moorthy for the find

Love it or hate it, MSN Messenger (or Live Messenger) is here to stay for some of us, especially for those of us in Canada and South America. When Americans were off getting their AOL accounts and using them for chat, the rest of us were rocking MSN Messenger accounts, and sadly, a handful of people that I know still use it, which means I can’t cut it out of my workflow just yet.

We’ve seen a few Jabber hacks to get MSN contacts into iChat, but all of them provide headaches that just weren’t worth it for me, but as of now you can use an iChat plugin called Cocoon.

The plugin still has some bugs but on the whole I can chat with those MSN users that refuse to get onto other chat programs (*ahem*Mom*ahem*). It’s a quick and easy install, and works for me in Lion. That being said, we’d recommend taking precautions like you would any other time you install a plugin and back up your stuff first. Just because it worked for me, doesn’t mean that it’ll work flawlessly for you.

Hat tip to Newton Mota for passing this along

I remember the first time I picked up my guitar. It was Christmas morning, and I thought I was a natural. Much to my chagrin, I didn’t know anything really, and I had zero musical training. I sat down with my tuner, tuned the guitar, then tried to pluck out my favourite tracks from Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album. That went on for about a good month and a half until a friend of mine introduced me to OLGA (the online guitar archive), and then proceeded to show me how reading tabs worked.

At that moment everything changed. Then it changed again when the NMPA, and MPA and every other corporation standing to make money from suing tab websites decided it was in their best interests to take down one website after another. Luckily by that point I was able to play most songs that interested me by ear, as well as take a couple of guitar classes in high school.

When I noticed Songsterr being featured on the App Store I was plenty interested. Not only did it bring me back to the days of printing off one song after another on my parents bubble jet printer down in the basement, but it also reminded me how much fun it was to thumb through hundreds of tabs, finding new songs along the way.

Songsterr is a tab book for your iPad (or iPhone), and frankly put, I wish it had been around when I was beginning my life-long love affair with my guitar. The application is built around the website, but the iPad interface certainly provides a better user experience than the experience on my MacBook Pro ever could.

Merge Songsterr and the iPad with the iKlip from IK Multimedia and you’ve got yourself a pretty powerful teaching aid.

(more…)

Since Jobs’ retirement Apple stock has climbed 7.2 percent, reaching an all time high today of $410 per share, which is something that many pundits were sure wouldn’t happen leading up to the news that Steve Jobs was going to retire. It took a month to break the last all-time high record set by AAPL, but it’s happened again, and it looks like it might continue to happen for the foreseeable future.

Since starting this website back in 2008, it’s been one comment after another from people I know all lamenting the fact that when Steve Jobs retires Apple would fail miserably. ‘Steve Jobs is Apple,’ they would say. I would try my best to dispel those comments by offering up my own thoughts on why Apple would be alright once Jobs left his post, but very few people would actually listen.

(more…)

Passwords, as weak as they may be, are the common man’s only real protection when talking about access to our protected files. A new Lion security slip-up pretty much makes having a password pointless in multi-user environments.

(more…)

Famed jailbreak app Redsn0w just got a pretty major upgrade to version 0.9.9b1, and amazingly, this new version doesn’t even require you to point it at an IPSW file for most iOS versions.

The jailbreaking process, outside of Comex’s JailBreakMe exploit, has always been a tedious one. You were always required to download the version of iOS you were running and point your jailbreak app of choice at said IPSW file. Now though, MuscleNerd has patched Redsn0w so that it detects your software version from DFU mode, pulls the required files directly from Apple, and stores them in a cache to make future jailbreak attempts even less time consuming.

(more…)