It is the little differences between the US and the UK that really interest me.

I was out in Berkeley visiting a friend, it was late and we were sharing a few beers in his apartment before we retired.

On thing I notice is that Americans, contrasted with much of the rest of the world, seem to have much more faith in technology than most. I’m not sure what it is, perhaps just a symptom of the infectious American optimism and the idea that all technology is fundamentally a positive and infallible force.

Perhaps it was the beer.

Anyway,  in a moment of inspiration I realised this sort of bathroom lock (pictured) – which I’ve not seen anywhere outside of America – may be the perfect example of this sort of optimistic faith in technology.

When in the bathroom, you push the central button in order to lock the door from the outside. A twist of the handle springs the lock and opens the door.

What was interesting to me was that there was no feedback as to whether the lock was actually engaged. You pushed the button, and that was it.

There is no way to test it since twisting the handle would automatically disengage the lock. In other words, you had to trust that the mechanism was working as it should… which to my European software engineer’s mind left me with nagging doubts as to whether or not I would be interrupted while in the middle of something, so to speak.

This is to my mind a very good example of how an attempt to create a simple interface unintentionally creates a poor user experience.

Perhaps its just a cultural difference (which is nonetheless an important consideration), but I think many would find feedback comforting in this sort of situation.

Apple Airprint is a technology (a zeroconf implementation under the bonnet) which allows apple devices to detect, configure and print without any overt configuration on the part of the user.

The bad news is that in only works for a handful of printers natively. But never fear, Linux to the rescue!

At this point I’m going to assume that you have a Linux box somewhere on your network acting as a file and print server (pretty regular kit in most geek homes).

Set up your printer

The first step is to set up CUPS on your linux server and then installing the appropriate printer driver for your printer.

I won’t go into detail here as there are numerous guides out there on the wider web, but mostly this is a matter of installing cups and foomatic and then visiting the cups configuration website on the server (localhost:631 usually) and adding your printer.

Make sure that the printer is shared. Print a test page.

One gotcha I found is that my default configuration only allowed connections from the local machine, even though the printer was marked as shared (although frankly I was cheating since most of my computers printed to my server over a Samba relay, but that’s by the by).

Take a look at /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and make sure that has an Allow From from your local network. E.g.


<Location />
Order Deny,Allow
Deny From All
Allow From 127.0.0.1
Allow From 192.168.0.0/24
</Location>

Export the printer

The next step is to install the zeroconf demon, which is called Avahi. This varies from system to system, but on debian this is pretty much a matter of apt-getting avahi-daemon. You may also want avahi-discover so you can browse the exported devices on your network.

Assuming you’ve correctly set up and shared your printers in CUPS the next step is to generate an avahi configuration for it. Thankfully, there’s a handy Python script called airprint-generate, available on github which does much of the donkey work.

Copy the resultant file to /etc/avahi/services and restart the avahi demon.

If your printer is password protected, you will want to add a <txt-record>air=username,password</txt-record> field to the file before doing so. Where username and password is the literal cleartext strings sent.

Profit!!!

Theoretically that should be it. After the configuration, and restarting the various demons involved your printer should be available to the various iOS devices kicking around your network.

Let me know if you have any questions!

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