Gene Roddenberry always talked about how amazing humans were, because we could do amazing things when we worked together. He was right.- Wil Wheaton
My experiment to replace my home laptop with my iPad is not going all that well. I find myself constantly reaching for my real computer for all sorts of needs. Even writing this, what I really wanted to was super-impose the two images to create a single image. How? What photo editing software on my iPad should I use? I tried doing it in iPhoto, but that's not really the point of iPhoto. So in the end I shrugged my shoulders, cropped it and just left it as two separate photos.
Earlier this week I was using the iPad around the house and made a purchase (or some such) online and got back a confirmation and though, "I would really like to save that." I took a screen capture (power+home) and so I have an image of it. Not that great a solution, is it? Still I know that there is this AirPrint thing and that I can print to specific HP printers. So I started wondering if it was possible to AirPrint to a PDF printer on my home server.The answer is that there is a trivial way for $19.95 using an app called Printopia. It runs as a service on a computer and will share all printers as AirPrinters and includes a "Print to PDF" feature. Still, $19.95 sure does seem like a lot of money. A little more research and I cobbled together a pretty simple solution that I am quite happy with.
- Install "PDF Writer for Mac" which gives you a virtual Printer that prints PDFs
- Share your printer by restrict the sharing to whatever account is your primary one
- Install "AirPrint Activator" and all of your shared printers magically become AirPrint destinations
- The sweet spot! Make you the folder you print to automatically sync via dropbox: ln -s /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/jordan "~/Dropbox/iOS Printer"
