I’m not referring to hosting space (I luckily don’t need it, as I have my own site, as you remember), nor I’m referring to hard disk space (that is quite cheap nowadays, enterprise has 500GB on two disks), nor to outer space (that ain’t cheap either, but I can’t even take a plane, figures if I would go that up)… I’m referring to actual space you got at your home, or office, or whatever.
I don’t live in an apartment or in a small house, so one would suspect I had enough space here, but I’ve started needing a lot more space especially to handle stuff for my job. So I’ve had to move stuff around to make space for what I have without having to get a house all by myself.
Unfortunately, as I said, space ain’t cheap: if you want to make space up for more stuff, you need to buy new furniture, and Ikea is not always an option, so you need quite a lot of money. As I don’t really have that much money to spend on furniture, I’ve started looking for alternative solutions. One of these was to move my laser printer out of my «home office» and into the corridor, on a little table I had in my room before; the problem is that there isn’t connectivity there, just power supply, and even the network card of my printer would cost me €170, which is way too much for what I can afford myself to spend for space; so I decided to try this one: I bought an Apple AirPort Express; I can do that because I have OSX, unfortunately there is no way, as far as I know, to configure this one with Linux 🙁 .
I don’t need the AirTunes thing, as my only speakers are in this room, and are connected to the home theatre, but for €99, it seemed a pretty decent way to connect the printer, and it is also quite small, that is one of the requirements for me at the moment, I need stuff that is small. So I ordered it Monday, and today it arrived. I read a few users around the ‘net saying that it was using a non-standard 9101 port for JetDirect protocol, or that it didn’t work with CUPS after updating the firmware, so I was ready to try it out and in case send it back to Apple if it didn’t work.
Instead, even after updating the firmware, my printer is still at port 9100, CUPS prints fine on it (although it does not do Bonjour/MDNS autodiscovery, that would be pretty nice, to me), and the connection is stable.
If Apple was to release some public interface to set it up, so that you could buy one and use it with Linux, I think I would buy a couple more of them, the hardware is good, and the services too.
