What are the different ways you can print without wires?

talk to you a little bit about wireless printing. Yeah. Actually, it's been sort of a thing in our house lately. We've been trying to find a way to hook up this really old PC that I have. It's the only Windows computer I've got, but the only way that my wife can work from home. Uh, since she doesn't have a laptop computer from her from her work. So I talked to her into getting an Apple Airport Extreme, which is actually Airport Express. The Airport Extreme him is the

regular hub. The Airport expresses a tiny, um tiny wireless hub sort of looks like a giant white plastic now and later, except it's got a little green light on one side and some ports on the other side. And what this does is I can plug this into my electrical outlet and it will hook up to the wireless network and extend that network. But for this wired, this old wired machine that I've got, we can actually plug it into there and it will allow the wired access

to the wireless network, which is pretty nice. But it also has a USB port on it which allows us to hook up a printer. And now instead of having to go down the hall and plug our laptop computers into the printer itself and go ahead and you know, get everything spoiled up and print it out, we can actually turn on the printer, do work from the other room and print something out over the wireless network. And it's so much easier. It's so very convenient that uh uh.

You know, we're just really happy with the way it worked out. And there are many different ways that you can do wireless printing, um uh. And they date back to well the mid to late nineties. That was really when we started seeing infrared systems being used. I r d A, which stands for the Infrared Data Association, came

up with this. It's a standard where computer signals are converted into pulses of infra red light, and this light is then sent to a receiver which then decodes the signals and UH turns it back into a print shop and your printer prints it out. And it requires some adapters, both on the computer side and the printer side, but it would allow you to print wirelessly, um, which is kind of neat. You know, you got to cut back

on the cables that were cluttering up. I mean, I don't know what your home office is like, but mine, I've I've got it looks like a squid has exploded behind my desk. So coming back on the cables is very attractive. But it had some downsides to it too. Um. The biggest downsite to infrared. The infrared approach is that it requires line of sight. That means that there needs to be a direct path pretty much between the transmitter and the receiver. If there's not, then the signal just

doesn't make it and you won't get anything. So if you put that printer in a room down the hall and you send a print job, chances are it's not gonna make it. Yeah, I've had pretty good experience using infrared. When I try to change the channel with the remote for my TV. However, trying to sink a Palm Pilot and my old rev Aimac with the I r D A port on the front, you know, mostly involved me shaking it and going well won't you sink? So, you know, it's sort of a it seems sort of limited in

that capacity. I'm guessing your wife would not want to pick up that desktop computer and yell out why won't you print? Well, I would talk about that. Okay, well we'll move on. So so that's the the infrared approach, but there are others as well. Um, one huge improvement was taking the bluetooth approach. Um. Now, bluetooth technology doesn't require line of sight, it's a it creates a personal area network and um it uses radio signals instead of

infrared light. That's that's true. And computers are on a on a higher scale than that than your mobile phone would be. It's a pretty common mobile phone technology. There's people with wireless earpieces you see that seem to be talking to themselves in public places. You look kind of

like cyborgs, right right, Um they are. They're using Bluetooth technology to communicate from the wireless earpiece to their phone, right, and that you can find this in all sorts of things, not just computers and printers and phones, but also a MP three players and other devices as well. And um, you can network multiple devices into the same Bluetooth network.

I think up to eight according to our Bluetooth article and how stuff works, and um, so it's very handy and and these devices can talk to each other and and keep each other informed of where you are, and there's lots of neat tricks you can do with it. But as far as printing goes, uh, it just means that you can have a printer in one room and computers in other rooms and and have all those computers

be able to print to that printer. Um. But the limitation is that, again the distance is not that great. So if you are in a multi story home or a very large ranch house where you've got the computer on one and then the printer on the other, it may not may not pick up the signal. Uh, And

in that case you have to go with a third option. Well, but before we get to that, I was just going to point this out that when we went to the Consumer Electronics show, UM I saw a product that actually ended up as an article on our site called how ink Free Mobile Printers Work that Jane McGrath wrote, but it was about the Polaroid Pogo, which is a very small ink free printer that you can essentially stick in your pocket and while you are out and about you

can take pictures with a Bluetooth enabled camera and send the signals directly to this little bitty pocket Polaroid printer. That was a pretty nifty bit of alliteration and print things out wirelessly, so you can even the Bluetooth wireless

printing even allows you to do that. You don't have to carry around a cable and have it, uh, you know, something else to lose with you while you're out running around, you know, taking nature photos or you know, going to c e s and taking pictures that you want to print, you know, whatever you happen to be doing while you're

you're on the gust. So it's that that's sort of a neat application of it that that you wouldn't be able to do if you had to worry about, you know, keeping track of all your cables, or at least it would make it a little bit more difficult. That's true. That's true. Bluetooth has made mobile printing uh possible. Before it was just uh, you know, you're pretty much were tied down to some sort of physical location. But that's that's pretty nifty nifty now granite Bluetooth also has some

other downsides besides the range. Um. We didn't actually mention that, but there's some security issue, is there too Bluetooth devices. It's it's if you're not careful, you can easily get eaves dropped upon or blue jacked. We talked about that in another podcast. Um, so yeah, there's some downsides to that technology as well. That's that's true. And um, you know that seems to be common with all the different

wireless platforms, uh you know. And then and of course the the largest and more common of these, especially with regard to wireless printing, is WiFi, which is the uh A O two dot eleven standard A b g N element O P see um. And basically what that is is this is the wireless network that you access when you go to your local coffee shop and you open

your laptop and there you go, there's a network. Well, you know, this is the same kind of printing that you might find it, you know, maybe a bigger office, not a small office, home office. More like, uh, you know a the wireless printer on your floor if you have one at your company. Um, and it's what I've got set up in my my office at home, I've got a WiFi extender and that's how it's making a connection. Yeah, I have the same sort of thing. It's UM, use

a wireless router to create my wireless network. And uh. This ATO two point eleven standard was set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers the I Triple E, or as Chris has learned, the way I like to say it is as my friends in Louisiana do I E. Uh, Joe just never gets old, does it. Uh? Not to you, No, not to me, And that's all that really matters. But at any rate, so this standard allows you to to transmit signals and it's a it's a radio signal like Bluetooth,

except it's more powerful, so there's a greater range. UM. Now, grant, if you have a really large house, you might need an extender so that they they the signal can go throughout the entire home. Uh. Some people just recommend that you put your router um in the middle, or if you have a multi story home in the top level of your home to kind of extend the signal throughout the rest of the building. Um, that can work, or you might just need to buy a booster of some sort.

But that that is, uh, there's one way to print wirelessly. Now. In fact, you were saying that there's some printers coming out that or there are printers that are out that have these wireless cards already installed, so you don't even have to buy an adapter. Yeah, the black and black and white UM back to school Uh circulars I've seen lately. Uh, ironically enough in color UM have a lot of printers. I was surprised a lot of them have the print servers built in. And they're using that as a major

selling point right now. Uh they're saying, you know, get a printer back to school and you know what's wireless. It's wireless. And I'm thinking, well, that's that's kind of new, because you know before that just wasn't a selling point.

But I guess with uh, you know, with the state of networking in the home right now, it's pretty common and to have our wireless network, it would be very easy to uh to do that, and if you didn't have if you bought a laptop or desktop computer and didn't have a wireless network, but you know, had the equipment install, had the card install, that would be very easy for you to network right to that printer across

the room. Then you don't have to worry about fishing the cables over or trying to to hook it up to the computer if you don't have room. It's just a nice advantage of you know, having that baked right into the printer hardware. And and since wireless networks are getting more popular, I guess it's it would be irresponsible of us not to address the security issues of of WiFi. Um, if you have a wireless network, it is really important

that you make sure it's secure. That's because anyone going near your house, anyone who or apartment or whatever, if if they can, if they can detect that network and it's unsecure, they could tap in and at at the very least they could end up using up all your bandwidth and you would get a huge bill from your internet service provider. But at worst they would be able to infiltrate your network and check up on all your

personal information. If you do internet shopping, they might even be able to hack into that sort of thing or bank records. It's really really dangerous to have an unsecured network. So, uh, make sure that you you do all the right steps. Make sure you you have a firewall in place, and that you've got the settings set properly. Make sure that you have a difficult password so that people can't just guess at what it is. It's um, it's no joke. I mean it. It can really really ruin lives if

you don't if you don't secure that wireless network. Yeah, you know, I've actually read reports that well. Of course, because the internet connection is traceable to you, people have been in trouble with the Recording Industry Association of America because yeah, r I double a yeah, And basically people were camping out outside people's homes using their wireless connection and downloading music from some of the file sharing services.

And the people who are getting hit with these lawsuits and there haven't been I haven't seen but maybe one or two, I think, and it's been some time now, but you know, I you can imagine what it would be like if somebody came up and said, here's a uh,

you know, a summons. You're being sued for downloading music and you're thinking, well, I've never done that, you know, But if you leave your wireless network open, I mean, they may not necessarily be going through your files, but they may be using your internet connection to do something

that you might not want to use for. But um, as far as the printers go, I saw an article in on the INC website for INC Magazine Business Magazine, and they say that really, if you could just add it to the VPN, added to your your firewall, put it behind the firewall, you can still enjoy the benefits of using wireless printer without necessarily having to worry about going into the printer and you know, messing with the sittings because some of those are easier to to affect

than others. So um, you know it may be just that simple to to keep your printer secure. Right. Well, I guess that wraps up this discussion on wireless printing in general. I hope you guys learned something new. If you want to learn more, please go to how stuff works dot com and read our article what are the different ways you can print without using wires? We'll talk to you again soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com.

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