Technology Links Daily

“Your printer is lying to you” by Christopher Null of Yahoo! Tech Blogs is the story of a man who refused to believe his printer when it claimed to be running out of toner. Farhad Manjoo covered the sensor on his toner cartridge with electrical tape, and his Brother printer is still churning out prints from the same toner cartridge eight months later.

Printer companies make a significant portion of their profits from ink and toner sales, and many of them use various methods of “expiring” perfectly good cartridges in order to motivate customers to spend more money on refills. Manjoo’s toner cartridge wasn’t empty — his printer was just giving him a little extra nudge towards the office supply store.

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that uses a number of clever rules to filter out potentially meaningless comments on YouTube videos. Some of the criteria available are excessive punctuation and capitalization, profanity, and spelling errors.

Link via Laughing Squid on FriendFeed.

“Convert Video_TS Folder To One Video File” by tech site gHacks shows you how to use Autogk to convert a Video_TS folder to a single AVI video file. Video_TS folders are the usual output from programs that rip DVDs to a computer.

In “Personalization and the publishing business”, David Sifry talks about why he started Offbeat Guides. The site lets customers build personalized travel guides to many places around the globe, using publicly available information and media from across the Internet and various social networking sites.

“iPhone : Disable Camera Connected Message in Windows XP” from tech help site tech-recipes contains step-by-step instructions for turning off the “Camera Connected” message that pops up when you connect an iPhone to a Windows XP computer.

FaceYourManga.com has been making the rounds online lately. It’s a site with a flash-based application for creating a cartoon version of yourself. The artwork is similar in style to many Japanese cartoons, and features a variety of ways to customize a colorful cartoon version of yourself.

The entire process ends with your avatar being sent as an attachment to your e-mail address, which tech blog gHacks notes is probably a clever method of collecting e-mail addresses. Given that possibility, you might want to use a separate e-mail address rather than your person or work account.

iAlertU is security software for your MacBook. I’m not talking security as in virus protection, but rather security as in “Stop, thief!” Enable iAlertU when you leave your Apple laptop unguarded and it will sound an alarm and use the built-in iSight camera to photograph the thief in the event that the computer is moved, unplugged, or accessed in any way.

Link via Chris Pirillo.

GPS Route Converter is software that can read and display information contained in GPS data files. Different GPS data files may have different data formats, but GPS Route Converter is able to make sense of everything. Once your data is loaded, GPS Route Converter has a few different tools that let you play around with the route.

Link via gHacks.

iPhone blog iSmashPhone shows you how to use Facebook profile pictures for your iPhone contacts’ photos in “Quick Tip: Use Facebook For Contact Photos”. Just bring up a person’s FB profile pic full screen, take a screenshot, and set it as their photo through the “Contacts” app.

“Use Parental Controls to Limit Time Kids Spend on the Computer” by Mysticgeek shows you how to define exactly when your children are allowed to use the computer. Windows Vista’s parental controls allow you to select specific blocks of time each day, during which your child’s user account will be permitted to use the computer.