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I’ll never buy another printer that requires a cable. Wireless printing, that’s the ticket. Fortunately, you don’t have to pay a premium for this enviable capability, as evidenced by Dell’s V305w–an all-in-one model currently on sale for $79.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Shipping is free (make sure to choose three-to-five day delivery at checkout), though you’ll probably have to pony up a few bucks for sales tax.

The V305w works only with Windows systems, and it can be plugged into a USB port if necessary. (It even comes with a cable, which is weird). CNET has yet to review this model, but check out the gushing user reviews at Dell’s site.

(Credit:
Dell)

The Wi-Fi-enabled V305w features a 100-sheet input tray, borderless photo printing up to 8.5 inches by 14 inches, and media-card slots for printing photos without your PC. (Alas, there’s no preview LCD.)

Dell promises 25 pages per minute for black printing, 18 ppm for color, and 17 ppm for copying–impressive speeds given the entry-level nature of this model. You’ll pay around $19 for replacement blank black cartridges and $25 for color.

I’ve embedded a demo video below. You can also give it spin here.

On top of the basic layer of search interaction there’s also a paying element to the site. Every query you make has a certain point value, with interactions like commenting and voting giving you more points. Once you reach a certain point limit you can then convert points you have into a cash gift card. There’s also a referral program where you get a small percentage of the points from the searches your friends do.

Scour is a search tool that blends results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN together in one stream. You can hot-swap between the three, or break out any single result into another search. If you come across a bad result, or one you think should go above the others, you can also vote it up (or down) or leave a comment–something similar to what Wikia did with its hackable search engine.

For a relatively low monthly fee, you’ll be able to pick out certain magazines you want to receive, and they’ll show up on your doorstep for you to read and dispose of. If you like something, you can simply keep receiving it, while replacing less-liked titles with new ones at a much lower price than it would cost to go out and buy them at the newsstand. Each plan can also be scaled up to higher tiers, meaning that you can continue to expand on your read publications while experimenting with new titles.

According to Folio Maghound is opening up for business in September, also known as back-to-school time for high-school and college students. The site’s reportedly been in development for four years, all the while the company’s been tweaking the distribution and billing system.

The company also has an inside track to your tastes and the tastes of others. It has the potential to build in a recommendation engine like what Netflix has to tell you magazines you would like or not like, based on what you’ve thought of your past orders.

Of course, the results won’t be nearly as deep as Netflix, which currently has a library of more than 100,000 titles and a veritable arms race between teams of statisticians and software engineers to build better algorithms. Maghound is starting out with just less than 300 magazines (published by companies ranging from Time Inc. itself to rival Conde Nast) from which to choose. There will be “premium” titles, which cost a buck or two per month, something not found on Netflix.

It sounds like it’s been worth the wait, if only for privacy. The service will act as a proxy for your billing information, meaning that even if you’re subscribed to 30 magazines, only one company is going to have your information–Maghound. This could theoretically keep it from being sold to other companies, something nearly all publications have done to bring in an extra stream of revenue.

A site that’s slipped through the cracks of our coverage is Time Inc.’s upcoming service Maghound. It’s best described as a cross between a beer-of-the-month club and Netflix.

I’m eager to give the service a look when it launches. I think there’s a real potential to grab folks who want to save some money but not commit to certain titles. There’s also a nice possibility for publications that tend to have better seasonal content, such as cooking and video game magazines, to get a few more subscribers at critical times.

How do you get your magazines?

( surveys)

Either way, it’s a pretty cool video, and one of the things that’s compelling about it–other than the fact that it’s a space shuttle launch filmed from miles above the ground–is that you can get a very good sense of just how fast the shuttle is going when it blasts off.

It was great to watch the shuttle land, but I was a bit disappointed I hadn’t been able to make it to Cape Canaveral just a couple of weeks earlier to watch the launch.

One of the first things I did on my Road Trip 2008 project this summer was report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Well, it turns out that all I would have needed to do to see the launch would have been to fly by. At least, that’s how it seems, given a video that’s going around the Web right now that purports to have been shot from an Air Canada flight that just happened to pass close enough by Kennedy Space Center for a passenger to shoot video of the shuttle rocketing into the sky.

Next time there’s a launch–this fall, in fact–maybe I’ll find out what flights might be in the vicinity at the time. On the other hand, given how hard it can be to book tickets on flights serving popular destinations on impacted dates, I might not be the only one.

It’s not 100 percent clear that the launch in the video is Discovery, which went up on May 31. But it seems likely, given that that was the last shuttle launch and the video only just went up a few days ago.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how close we are to achieving some of the scientific “miracles” that had previously belonged solely to the realm of science fiction. Advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and other fields are certainly making lots of exciting things possible in the laboratory, but that’s just the beginning.

U.S. Air Force Capt. Drew Goettler demonstrates prototype laser weapon

Well, those are a few that came to mind. If you’re like me, you read about this stuff from time to time and wonder why we’re not further along. What’s your pet fantasy technology, and where is it today?

Like many of you, I’m a geek, and it extends well beyond my interest in technology. I still read an occasional science fiction novel and look forward to the release of superhero and James Bond movies.

Time travel. Come on, Einstein, get real. Seriously, I read a paper in Scientific American the other day about a new approach to quantum relativity that, unlike prior attempts, does a decent job of predicting the observed characteristics of our universe on both quantum and cosmic scales. And they did it by introducing causality into the equations. So much for the laws of physics being indifferent to time travel. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does take some of the wind out of its sails.

Here are six off the top of my head. And yes, some of them are out there, but my goal was to leapfrog all the usual stuff, like virtual reality, robotics, and the like, which I’ve written about previously. Some of it may surprise you.

Human bionics. In April, I wrote a post about Bluetooth implants that got some attention. My half-serious thinking at the time was more along the lines of implantable gadgets, but now I’m wondering about human bionics such as electromechanical organs. The first applications already exist in the form of artificial hearts and bionic ears, and there’s a long way to go, but I see this as a field that will explode over the coming years.

Kirk and Spock wield their phasers

Invisibility. On August 11, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley reported a giant leap forward in invisibility cloaking. Using newly developed nanomaterials, scientists were able to successfully bend light around 3D objects, albeit not quite at visible wavelengths yet, though they’re getting much closer. The first application for this technology is in telecommunications, so Harry Potter and the Klingons may have to wait a bit.

Colonizing a second planet. I watched a special on the History Channel the other day called “The Universe: Colonizing Space.” It was both encouraging and discouraging. The good news is that NASA is working on a program to send humans to Mars for an extended stay and eventual colonization. The bad news is that they want to test everything out on the moon first, which means it’s not going to happen for a long, long time.

(Credit:
U.S. Air Force)

Handheld laser weapons. In late 2005, the U.S. Air Force demonstrated a prototype nonlethal, green-laser weapon. It’s big and heavy, and intended to be used for crowd control or to temporarily blind an enemy, but hey, it’s a start. And yes, I know there are lots of lasers in use out there; I’m talking specifically about handheld weapons. Why? Because, I believe this inevitable transition will drive advances in energy beam technology that might be used for who-knows-what applications.

What I’m interested in is early academic, defense, medical, or even hobbyist applications. Remember, that’s where computing and communications started, and look where we are now.

(Credit:
www.phasers.net)

Commercial human space travel. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Paul Allen’s Mojave Aerospace Ventures recently announced a joint venture to take tourists up into space for about $200,000 apiece. I guess that’d be fun, but I’m thinking more along the lines of mining asteroids and stuff like that. You know, commercial business. Perhaps the technology developed for colonizing Mars could help in that endeavor, as well.

Surely, some will attribute Google’s success to its better search results or Yahoo’s management troubles or Microsoft’s poor offering, but it goes far beyond that. Search isn’t simply about relevant results or the competition. Instead, search is all about getting you to your destination as quickly as possible.

Basically, more Web sites try to keep you from going elsewhere for fear that you will never come back. But Google doesn’t worry about that.

Google wants you to leave and feels like it has done its job when you do. Now, part of that equation revolves around the quality of search results and the service’s usability, but we can’t downplay the fact that letting you go is a key to the company’s success.

But Google, unlike Yahoo and Microsoft, has made it a key point in its business model to ensure that you get off the Google search result pages as soon as possible. Its competitors, on the other hand, fail to fully understand that premise.

Search engines are nothing more than middlemen that are designed to get your thought to your destination. In other words, if you’re looking for places to live in Naples, Fla., you get to Google, ask it for places to live in Naples, and hope that one of the results will give you what you want. But if you don’t, you’re forced to keep searching until you find what you’re looking for. And as anyone who queries search engines on a daily basis knows, nothing is more frustrating.

And although countless tech pundits will chime in and discuss exactly why Google has been able to run roughshod over its competition, few will point out one basic fact that is too often overlooked: Google search is designed to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

Think about that for a second. Doesn’t that run directly against everything we know about the Web? Practically every site is designed to keep you there. How many times have you tried to click links in a blog post, only to find that it links you back to another section of the same site? It happens all the time.

It may sound counterintuitive, but if Google has shown us anything, getting rid of you in the search space works extremely well.

Nielsen yesterday released a study it conducted on the popularity of the top 10 search engines for July. As expected, Google sat atop the list, commanding more than 60 percent of the market after enjoying 16 percent year-over-year growth. Trailing behind, Yahoo and Microsoft captured 17.4 percent and 11.9 percent of the market, respectively. More importantly, both companies lost ground to Google–Yahoo witnessed an 11 percent decline, while Microsoft suffered through a 10 percent decline.

And so far, it’s quite apparent that only Google understands that basic premise.

Google was the first company to embrace the idea that letting users go can actually turn into a business model. And so far, it’s really the only company that still believes it. But maybe site owners can learn something from Google. Instead of worrying about where you go and making sure you don’t stray too far, site owners need to be willing to let you go and be confident enough to stand on the quality of their content to keep you coming back.

A quick jaunt to Yahoo’s search page tells you everything you need to know about the company’s ideas about search: it wants you to stay on Yahoo’s pages and look around. But Google doesn’t feel that way. It’s of the opinion that the less time you spend using Google search results, the more often you’ll go back instead of using a competitor’s service.

This is notable because YouTube doesn’t offer live-streaming technology.

Performers at the San Francisco event will include Web-birthed “celebrities” such as rapper Soulja Boy Tell’em, Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday, LisaNova, and William Sledd, as well as a few mainstream acts, such as Akon and Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman whose Barack Obama-supporting “Yes We Can” music video was a wild success on YouTube. Will.i.am will also be unveiling a new “awareness” video created from user-generated contributions.

The event is scheduled to take place in front of an audience at the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason Center and streamed live on the Web, as well as in the air, on the planes of sponsor Virgin America.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced earlier this year that live video would be coming to YouTube later in 2008, but several months later, there were scattered rumors that those plans had been scrapped.

Google video site YouTube is planning to host on November 22 a San Francisco gathering its active users called YouTube Live–”part concert, part variety show, and part party.”

An event like YouTube Live would indicate that live streaming is indeed still on track–though the company has not yet said anything about further live-video plans or whether the streaming will be handled through a partnership with one of the many start-ups that specialize in it.

He also said that he’s got additional servers that are soon going to be in place.

Everett said that there had been about 7,000 views of the picture before the site went down, and that there were about 500 additional requests to view it every 15 or 20 seconds.

And while the circumstances of Thursday’s accident were unfortunate–though, miraculously, no one died in the crash–Everett admitted that the fact that Krums’ photo got so much attention was validation of the utility of TwitPic.

Perhaps because of the national interest in an airplane accident taking place in direct view of Manhattan, the traffic produced by Krums’ photo was higher than in the case of the Denver accident, Everett suggested.

“It’s shocking, and it’s a good feeling–though (also) not a good feeling because it’s bad news,” Everett said.

“In a month’s time (something like) this will not affect us anymore,” he explained. “We’re working to be able to handle our growth, but this is definitely a wake-up call showing the power of breaking news and TwitPic.”

TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums.

He also said that while he couldn’t be immediately sure, it was likely that Krums had used an
Apple iPhone to take the picture, given that it was 600×800 pixels, the average size of an iPhone picture.

By 2:35 p.m. Pacific, about two hours after the photo was taken, TwitPic was back up.

“We haven’t gotten so much press coverage before,” Everett said.

(Credit:
Janis Krums)

Everett called it a “snowball effect.”

The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

Everett said, “I hope it stays up. I’ll be working on this through the night.”

This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded. Click image for larger version.

According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site’s servers.

In fact, Everett said this wasn’t the first time someone had used TwitPic to post a photo of an airplane accident. He explained that a passenger on a Continental Airlines plane that went off the runway in Denver in December used the service to post a photo. But that time, the service was able to stay up.