Fast forward a few years and I found myself in a position where I need to use the HP Laserjet to print onto some fancy paper that the Canon MP610 ink jet isn’t all that compatible with.

Following is the driver installation process I have just used in Windows 7 to get the HP Laserjet 1010 working. Your mileage may vary to mine, depending on the year of your printer or computer setup but it has worked for me.

HP Laserjet Driver Install Process

1. Click the Start button and open Devices and Printers
2. Click “Add a printer”
3. Click “Add a local printer”
4. Click “Use an existing port” and select DOT4 from the dropdown list
5. Select HP from the Manufactuer listbox
6. Click “Windows Update” button to download the latest set of drivers from Microsoft
7. Browse the Printers listbox and select HP Laserjet 1015
8. Give the printer a name or use the default
9. Finish the process

At this stage, you should have installed the Microsoft provided HP Laserjet 1015 printer driver. Coincidentally, I think that same driver will also work for a HP Laserjet 1010, HP Laserjet 1012 and obviously a HP Laserjet 1015.

If the above driver installation process doesn’t work for you, HP provide a Windows Vista 32bit and Windows Vista 64bit driver for the HP Laserjet 1010 that it states works with the 1010/1012/1015. I don’t know if the Windows Vista drivers are compatible with Windows 7, though it might be worth a shot – keep in mind though that it would of course be unsupported by HP; then again so is what I outlined above.

Related posts:

1. HP Laserjet & Windows Vista Driver Support
2. Making HP Laserjet Printers Work In Windows Vista
3. Windows Vista Business Double Clicking On Single Click

Like I’ve become accustomed to and so many others around the world, the upgrade from WordPress 3.0.x was seamless, fast and error free. I was impressed that all of the plugins that I’ve got installed, which while not all were tested with enough volume against the pre-releases of WordPres 3.1 – all seem to be working without a hitch.

Now I just need to learn to grapple with all of the new functionality, to see how I can leverage it moving forward!

Related posts:

1. Upcoming WordPress Plugin Releases
2. WordPress Upgrade
3. WordPress 2.1 Plugin Compatibility

One of the social networks that the Windows Live profiles had a web activity for was Twitter. Without any hesitation, I configured the Twitter web activity and all of my tweets were seamlessly imported into my activity stream within Windows Live. My only criticism at the time was that Twitter is a real time service, however my tweets were slow/sluggish to appear in my activity stream – sometimes taking a few hours to show up.

I was disappointed to receive an email on 30 June from the Windows Live team stating that they were no longer able to support the Twitter web activity and that they’d be disabling that functionality, until such a time as they could work with Twitter on their policy change which meant that Microsoft could no longer use the service.

Fortunately, Microsoft provide a generic web activity named “Blog RSS Feed” which will import any valid RSS or Atom XML feed into the Live profile activity steam. Of course, Twitter being the good netizen that they are, also provide an individual RSS stream for each user. Joining the dots and it means that Windows Live profiles and Twitter integration is still possible.

The downside is that because it is using a ‘generic’ web activity, how it is displayed within my activity steam isn’t as elegant and neat as it was prior – bug beggers cant be choosers.

Related posts:

1. Windows Live WordPress Web Activity
2. Windows Live Is Getting Smarter
3. Windows Live Messenger Upgrade

I’ve gone through and updated all of the sites I own with the latest version, which is why my site looks different at the moment as I haven’t installed my old theme or bothered to make any changes to the new default Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress 3.0.

As predictable as the sun rising, the upgrade from the 2.9.x series of WordPress was simple, fast and no fuss. Back up your database and site contents in case something goes wrong as a precaution & then hit the go button. By the time you’ve depressed your mouse button, the upgrade is nearly complete.

I now just have to go through the paces of installing and checking all of the WordPress plugins that I use work with version 3.0, which should only take about half an hour or so.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Upgrade
2. WordPress Upgrade
3. WordPress 2.1 Upgrade

Related posts:

1. Slow Fast Food
2. Google Chrome, Faster Than A Speeding Potato
3. Select, Option, Disabled And The JavaScript Solution

Like the majority of internet users, my web browser journey started with Internet Explorer from Microsoft in mid 1990′s when it was back at version 4. At the time, I wasn’t aware there were competing products and used it because it came pre-packaged with Windows. My disdain for Internet Explorer began at university, where I began learning about web development and soon realised that its lack of compatibility for web standards was the bain of the internet. Couple an ever growing frustration for needing to apply ‘hacks’ to the web development process with a history of security issues which have plagued the product even to this day and it was enough to begin looking else where.

Else where came in the form of Mozilla, which I have used nearly exclusively since it was released. It offered a better user experience, tabbed browsing, was far more stable than Internet Explorer, web standards compliant and came with a killer feature – a plugin architecture that third party developers could build upon. That plugin architecture for Mozilla and Firefox has been the single greatest thing about it, especially looking at it from a power user and technical users point of view. As Firefox continued to add more and more features to its stable though, the browser began to use more and more memory, was beginning to be slightly less stable and wasn’t as responsive as many users had become acustomed to.

Enter Google Chrome, built from the ground up with performance, low memory consumption, security and fault tolerance in mind – it has rapidly become a favourite among the switchers. Since the beta releases of Google Chrome, the performance of it has been like a drug – once you get a taste for it, it is hard to stop. Like any good addict, I haven’t – and have been using Chrome as my primary browser, falling back to Firefox for certain tasks and very seldom do I bother or need to open Internet Explorer.

To showcase just how fast Google Chrome is, Google have just released a Rube Goldberg inspired video:

It might not be obvious what is going on in that video at full speed, watch the making of Google Chrome Speed Test to get a full appreciation of what I mean when I say fast.

If you haven’t used Google Chrome before, I urge you to give it a try – you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Related posts:

1. Opera Fast, Potato Slow
2. Google Gears, Shifting Into The Offline World
3. Google Image Labeler Included In Google Webmasters Tools

When the WordPress team release a minor revision, moving from 2.8 into the 2.9 version space I like to wait until the next point release has been made before upgrading. Normally a raft of very subtle issues will arise when it hits the community and millions of people are using it instead of only tens of thousands.

On the 4th January 2010, WordPress devlopment team released version 2.91. after going through a beta and a release candidate which included about 25 bug fixes and enhancements over the initial 2.9 release.

Instead of doing a standard upgrade, which involves me taking a databae backup, unpacking the WordPress source and uploading it – I instead opted for a completely clean installation. This time around, I still took the backup (good practice) but instead of just uploading the source code – I deleted everything first and then uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress – which mean no extraneous files laying around.

At the same time I’ve gone back to the standard WordPress theme for a short period of time and installed a raft of very popular WordPress plugins to make things run a little more smoothly. In the next few days, I’ll be moving back to my old theme and will update my own WordPress plugins to make sure they work with the latest version of WordPress.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Upgrade
2. WordPress 3.0 Upgrade
3. WordPress Security Vulnerability

While I have viewed plenty of blogs using a mobile device and was surprised how functional they were, I’d never attempted to use the WordPress administration area. When visiting the WordPress admin with an iPhone or another internet enabled mobile device, you are served the exact same version of the administration interface that you’d receive if you viewed it using a desktop computer. That might surprise a lot of people, however WordPress isn’t mobile device ready by default – you require a plugin such as WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King. Even with that plugin enabled, it generates a mobile friendly reader experience and doesn’t provide a mobile friendly administration interface.

To my surprise however, it was quite a simple task to navigation around the WordPress administration area using Safari on the iPhone. Thanks to the convenient zooming functionality that the iPhone provides, it makes working with busier sections of the interface straight forward. While functional, it certainly isn’t the kind of user experience that you’d want to use daily – as a good amount of screen real estate is wasted and when you’re using a small screen device – every pixel counts.

As I tested out different sections of the interface, about the only thing that I noticed didn’t work ‘as expected’ was the text area used to write a blog post. By default, I enable the visual or rich editor in WordPress. Normally when you give focus to any form element that you can type into, the iPhone automatically pops up the keyboard. However, because the visual editor is a JavaScript implementation – nothing triggers the keyboard to show up. Of course, selecting the ‘HTML’ tab on the blog posting page fixes that immediately.

All and all, very impressed with how the iPhone handles complex interfaces – it certainly gives me a lot of confidence that there’d be a limited number of sites that I’d have problems with using Safari on the iPhone.

Related posts:

1. Apple iPhone, Why I Love Thee
2. WordPress 2.7, First Impressions
3. iPhone 3GS

After completing the creation aspect of my Apple iTunes Account on my iPhone, I was sent a verification email to finalise and activate the account. The normal procedure followed is straight forward, an email is sent with a specific link within which when clicked verifies the newly created account. No messing around with needing to have software installed or any strangeness, just click the link and you’re done.

In the case of Apple, they provided the verification email with a simple link within.  However, after clicking it on the iPhone the website informs me that it cannot verify it – but it is just a link, why not! I click the link from the desktop computer and after fumbling around for a while, click the ‘Done’ button thinking that’d do the trick but I was wrong.

As it turns out, the verification URL that is provided is a secure link (HTTPS) and not a standard link (HTTP). That is completely acceptable, in fact I’d go as far to say that I’m pleased they were using HTTPS to verify my new account. What Apple have completely failed to do, is make sure all of the different resources within that web page are all on HTTPS.

As most internet users are well aware now, if you’re viewing a secure web site over HTTPS and there are images, CSS or any other assets on the page that aren’t secured – the browser will throw up a security warning asking the user if they want to download the unsecured items.

Being a generally security conscious kind of guy, I clicked the option to only show me secured content. It turns out, that was a big mistake as there was an asset on the web page that was going to make iTunes perform the final stages of the account verification process.

I find it incredible, nearly unbelieveable that Apple would or could have such a completely crap signup process. They are one of the largest businesses in the world with a market capitalisation of some USD$40 billion and the can’t manage a smoother verification process.

All of the above rigmoral could have been avoided if they’d followed the route of virtually every other service that uses two phase signup processes and simplly verified my account when I clicked on the link instead of requiring iTunes to be involved.

Related posts:

1. Apple iTunes Store Account Signup Process Needs Work
2. Apple App Store Inaccessible With Verified Account
3. Bad Luck & Poor Timing

After finally managing to get my new account verified and confirming that it worked by signing into iTunes, I am still unable to access the Apple App Store via my iPhone. After providing my credentials when attempting to install an application, I’m presented with an error stating that my account isn’t yet verified – even though it works on my desktop.

Realising the error of my ways after stumbling through the account verification process already, I fired up iTunes on the iPhone and then clicked the URL within the verification email. To my surprise, the URL loaded up again and was presented with the same response, that I couldn’t perform this action on my iPhone.

What is the next course of action?

Related posts:

1. Apple iTunes Store Account Signup Process Needs Work
2. Apple iTunes Account Verification Has Poor Usability & User Experience
3. Using WordPress via iPhone