Let’s face it – Twitter is the digital fortune cookie. You have 140 characters to say something interesting and informative, but typical tweets are more along the lines of “Dance like no one is watching” or “Just saw Twilight – OMG Edward is sooo hot!” That said, maybe you are the Confucius of Twitter, or maybe you have a talent for saying a lot in a limited format. If so, you may want to try out PrintYourTwitter.com, where you can print your tweets for free.

I tried it out for myself, and the basic features work well. You log into your Twitter account through the website, and you can choose to retrieve your own tweets, or tweets from people you follow. You can also filter tweets via keyword, date, and whether or not the tweet has an image attached to it. Once you have the set of tweets you want, you click the print button for neat, easy-to-read output that looks like a chat transcript.

Overall, PrintYourTwitter.com looks like an easy way for people to print from a website that they use all the time. While customization isn’t as flexible or elaborate as something like Blog2Print, I could see the site being used for business purposes. For example, a corporate marketing department can quickly catalog and analyze a Twitter ad campaign, and companies and individuals can filter and track what people are saying about certain brands and products without being tied to a PC.

One word of warning – to fully log out of PrintYourTwitter.com, you have to close the whole browser, which might be a little unsettling for multi-tab users. Regardless, I’m all for anything that makes it easy for modern computer users to print from the web, and PrintYourTwitter.com is a site worth bookmarking.

If you can build houses out of recycled ink cartridges, why not make an eco-friendly bike path? According to Inhabitat.com, that’s exactly what developers have done at the West MacDonnell National Park in Australia, where a new bike path has been made with recycled printer ink cartridges. The material is called Replas, and it’s produced by Repeat Plastics Australia.

Replas is made from plastic waste materials “diverted from landfill,” and the company asserts that the eco benefits from the waste it saves outweigh the energy costs of recycling. In any case, you often see old ink cartridges being used to make new ink cartridges with mixed results. I think it’s cool that with a bike path, people can see and feel the benefits of eco-friendly manufacturing up close. And maybe more importantly, while an ink cartridge needs to be recycled (or re-filled) every time it goes empty, you figure a bike path will last longer and require less energy to maintain over time.

(Photo via Morguefile)

Like a lot of pre-teen kids, I used to play with Legos, but they weren’t my favorite toy. I didn’t have the patience to sit down for more than 10 minutes and build something interesting, and I didn’t like having to clean up afterwards. So it’s safe to say there’s no way I would’ve been able to make the elaborate Lego printer that a dedicated hobbyist recently posted on the web. Besides the impressive construction, the notable twist is that instead of a traditional ink cartridge, the printer uses a felt tip pen, which seems to rule out multi-color output.

One word of warning from a former Lego builder – if you’re ever able to make a printer like this one on your own, keep it away from small children and curious pets. It looks pretty difficult to build, and seems equally easy to break down. Regardless, I have to say this is one of the coolest working devices I’ve seen since the Candyfab 3D Candy Printer. Hopefully one day, the designer releases the blueprint and enables Lego fans around the world to make this unique and functional contraption.

(Photo via Morguefile)

The $400 Canon PIXMA iX7000 is a large format business inkjet printer that can roll out professional-looking posters, documents, brochures and marketing materials. It features auto-duplexing to help you save paper, prints output as big as 11”x17” and 13”x19” in size, and you can share the printer with a workgroup via Ethernet. In other words, the specs sound interesting, but does the printer come through under real-life office conditions? The critics have spoken, and the PIXMA iX7000 gets good marks all around.

David English of ComputerShopper.com gives the PIXMA iX7000 an Editors’ Choice worthy 8.7 out of 10. He calls it “one of the most versatile single-function inkjet printers you can buy” with its three paper input paths, and maximum paper size of 13”x19”. Ink cost per page is affordable, and while print speed isn’t exactly blazing, “the quality of its prints are among the best we’ve seen, especially for text on plain paper.” English notes that this printer is big and bulky, so smaller offices may need to plan ahead to properly accommodate it.

M. David Stone of PCMag.com gives the PIXMA iX7000 an Editors’ Choice worthy 4 out of 5. He classifies it as one of a new breed of “budget tabloid printers suitable for a small office on a tight budget,” comparing it to the Epson WorkForce 1100 and HP Officejet 7000. Stone notes that the PIXMA iX7000 is the “most expensive of the three, but also the one with the fewest compromises.” The three paper trays give you extra flexibility, print speed is decent, and photo quality is very good. Stone also likes the auto-duplexer and Ethernet.

Peter Piazza of About.com gives the PIXMA iX7000 a solid 3.5 stars out of 5. The 13”x19” max paper size is a plus, and photo quality is “excellent.” On the other hand, Piazza would’ve liked memory card connectivity, and the lack of Wi-Fi coupled with the printer’s big size makes it feel like office furniture – you’ll need to plan out where you put it in order to comfortably connect via Ethernet.

Jerry Jackson of PrinterComparison.com gives the PIXMA iX7000 a good 3.5 stars out of 5. He echoes the sentiment about the large size and advises you to set aside “at least 30 by 40 inches of office space for this printer.” Jackson also notes that with six ink cartridges, it’s nice that you “only have to replace the specific ink color that runs out,” which minimizes waste. Setup and operation are easy, paper input capacity is high, and output quality is good. On the other hand, print speed is notably slow, and the lack of Wi-Fi compounds the printer’s size issue. Regardless, Jackson calls the PIXMA iX7000 “the ideal wide-format printer solution for small and medium sized businesses.”

Overall, the experts agree that the PIXMA iX7000 isn’t the fastest inkjet printer around, but it’s affordable, and it can save you a trip to the print shop if you need good-looking graphics output and promo materials. Just be sure to reserve some extra office space near an Ethernet port for this sizable device.

Remember when we told you that Memjet printers were more hype than substance? It took a couple of years, but the widely publicized technology with the pagewide printhead is finally ready to be released. There’s a catch though – if you were anticipating home and office inkjet printers that churn out documents and images at up to 60 pages per minute, you’ll have to wait a little longer. The first Memjet printers will actually be geared toward the “on-demand labels, trans-promotional and mailing and addressing markets.” According to PCMag’s M. David Stone, who has contacts at Memjet, the company is releasing this first set of products “with the goal of maximizing feedback on how the printers work in the real world.” Apparently label printers just so happen to be the first kind of Memjet device that’s market-ready, so it seems like a move driven more by circumstance than strategy.

Stone implies that it’s easier to get customer feedback from smaller, more specialized markets like the one for label printers, so it makes sense for Memjet to bide its time before making its big splash into the mainstream market, where “contact with the customer is a little looser.” That said, I wonder how much of the info you learn from label printers can actually translate to the development of general consumer printers, considering the potential differences in terms of functionality, applications and the needs of their target markets. In any case, you can learn more about the technology behind Memjet label printers at Memjetlabels.com. I watched a video of a prototype model in action, and the print speed puts the ticket machine at your local Chuck E Cheese to shame. In any case, at this point, Memjet is like a highly hyped band that just released a 5 song EP. It’s better than nothing, and it’s a tangible preview of the full-length album to come.

(Image via Astromachine.com)

When it comes to printer ink and toner, high prices for OEM cartridges are like taxes – we complain, but we pay them anyway. So it’s interesting to read the Wall Street Journal blog post about HP’s Thom Brown giving a media presentation to explain why HP OEM ink costs so much. According to Brown, the main factor is the high cost of R&D.

Using a “bag of props including a trio of shot glasses, squares of foam and some disassembled print heads,” he explains that the print mechanism is complex, and therefore expensive to develop. Apparently HP also puts a lot of money into examining broken ink cartridges to find out what went wrong. The “challenges in shooting drops of ink at moving pages of paper” can add to costs, and the “perils of refilling ink cartridges” are cited as a reason to buy new HP cartridges despite the higher prices.

So should we believe the reasoning? It’s interesting to note that when consumer advocates recently protested that ink cartridge packaging fails to report the amount of ink in each cartridge, Lexmark gave a similar “it’s complicated” explanation, referring to ink cartridges as “micro-machines.” Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s a copout. Either way, as a consumer, I don’t really care how much it costs for OEMs to develop their ink and toner cartridges. All I know is that compatible and refilled ink cartridges are more affordable than OEM cartridges, and they work just fine for what I print. So in this case, I’ll go with the free market over a bag of props.

(Photo via Morguefile)

A few years ago, I had to use the men’s room at a bar in lower Manhattan. As I was about to wash my hands at the faucet, I turned my head up to look into the mirror, only to find there wasn’t one. Instead, there was a brown bulletin board surface on which someone had written in black permanent marker, “You look good.” And when you’re checking yourself out, that’s all you really need to know. On a similar note, there’s an interesting article on PCWorld.com about how inkjet printers automatically enhance the color and richness of your photos to make you subconsciously print more of them. In fact, HP marketing manager Thom Brown has admitted that, “We tune for what the customer wants, not for accuracy.”

So what is it in particular that makes HP photos more appealing to users? Robert L. Mitchell, the author of the PC World article, recalls that in comparing photos from the HP Photosmart C5180 and the Kodak EasyShare 5300, he found that while the “Kodak photos appeared a bit washed out, the HP photos were noticeably oversaturated.” And he confirms that he naturally “gravitated toward the brighter images.”

From a publicity standpoint, this revelation may not go over too well with consumers who already feel like they’re getting the wool pulled over their eyes by overpaying for OEM ink, and getting less than full disclosure on cartridge yields and ink volumes. And compared to Xerox’s user-driven Natural Language Color interface, it seems like HP’s automatic photo enhancement is almost telling the consumer, “if we want your opinion, we’ll give it to you.” That said, users like you and me aren’t exactly powerless in the process. OEMs and third party developers give us plenty of ways to edit photos on our own with software and online photo editing apps. And in our quest to create our own reality, we may not mind our printers doing some of the work for us.

(Photo via Morguefile)

According to imdb.com, the upcoming Captain America movie won’t be out for another year. Until then, fans of the shield-wielding defender of justice can get their fix by downloading a PDF paper figure template from the My Paper Heroes blog. You print it out, cut out the pieces, and then fold and attach them based on the instructions. The blog offers a bunch of designs for other popular superheroes like Iron Man, Wolverine, the Incredible Hulk, and more.

If you have some time to spare, and you don’t feel like springing for a fancy 3D printer, the projects on My Paper Heroes can be pretty cool decorations for your desk or locker. Thanks to designer Xavier Leo Gale-Sides, the figures look attractive and well-proportioned, with rich colors that make them easy to recognize from a distance. Just make sure your ink cartridges are full, and the paper you use is thick enough to support the completed figure.

(Story via Robot6.Comicbookresources.com; Image via MyPaperHeroes.blogspot.com)