How to print shipping labels from PayPal on a Mac

My wife does a lot of USPS shipping via PayPal for her jewelry business. She has been printing the labels on 8.5 x 11 on our laser printer, but to not waste labels, she would print the labels to PDF, put them in Word, crop them and print 2 to a page. This, of course, takes a lot of time. Things got even worse when she runs out of labels; she cuts out the label and tapes it to the shipping envelope.

I decided to look for a better solution and decided to get her a DYMO LabelWriter 4XL. The printer prints 4x6 labels. Unfortunately, PayPal's Mac support for this printer is non-existent. After a lot of research, I came across an article that explained how to get PayPal to print to the printer. I started following the instructions, but had trouble installing CUPS-PDF on my wife's Leopard machine. After I managed to get it installed and running (I finally found an older version), I was testing it and found a much simpler solution.

Here's the quick and easy way to print shipping labels on the LabelWriter 4XL printer using a Mac.

1. Install the DYMO drivers (make sure you grab them from the DYMO Web site as DYMO using strange numbering and version 8.2 isn't the same as 8.2; the latest version is 8.2.2.1172. I had an 8.2 version that was earlier and didn't support the 4XL.
2. Set PayPal to print labels to a laser printer or inkjet printer. From the PayPal home page, click Profile. Click Shipping Preferences. Click Edit Printer Settings. Select  Laser/Ink Jet Printer. Click Save.
3. Print the label by clicking Print Label on the Print Postage Page.
4. When you goto print, create a custom paper size called 4x6. However, configure it a little bigger than 4x6.
5. Setup the printer to be landscape, print page 1 to 1 (sometimes there is a second page).
6. Click Print.

The screenshots were taking on Snow Leopard, so Leopard is a little different. However, that's the jist of how to "easily" print shipping labels from PayPal. Granted there are a few steps involved, but this sure is easier than taking the labels into word, cropping them, printing them and then cutting them out. This seems quite simple, so I'm not sure why no one else figured this out with other 4x6 printers. Granted the LabelWriter 4XL is a new printer, but there are other printers like it.

I hope this helps someone.

Review: JetPhoto Studio

Last August when I received the i-Got-U 120, I started looking for software to compliment the device. I found a number of products to make geotagging easy, but didn't find many applications to actually do something with the geotagged data. One product that I found which could do something interesting with the photos was JetPhoto Studio and the accompanying JetPhoto Server. Up until now, my only experience with the software was under test conditions. This past weekend, I finally got to put the software through its paces when I got a chance to actually do something with geotagged photos.

The first thing that had me a little nervous about the software is that there are more Mac and Windows versions. In a lot of cases, the Mac versions are ports of the Windows version. As I've written about before, I'm not a huge fan of software ported to the Mac. The user interface doesn't strike me as a Windows port, but doesn't strike me as a potential winner of the (former) Apple Design Awards. I did a bit of digging into the application package, into the company, as well as the developer information on their site and it looks like the Mac version is the primary version and the Windows version is the port. Perfect, this lets the program pass the first cut and stay on my machine.

I decided to take the pictures from my recent ride on an airship and put it into the software. I noticed that I had to import the pictures into a new JetPhoto Studio album; I had already put them in iPhoto and had to copy them somewhere else. Unfortunately this eats up more disk space (this album is about 250 MB, so now I have 2 copies of all the pictures on my machine). I selected about 50 pictures and "starred" them so that they would be part of what I uploaded. I wanted to simply delete the pictures I didn't want to recover some disk space, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so I starred them. I had already geotagged the photos using PhotoLinker and some open source software for the i-Got-U, so I didn't give the geotagging part a go. In addition, since I wanted my original photos geotagged, I had to do it outside of JetPhoto Studio (as I mentioned before, JetPhoto Studio copies the pictures into its own albums).

Now that I had an album put together, I had a few options for doing something with the pictures. I could export the photos as a Flash gallery, Lightbox gallery, Cover Flow Web Gallery, Google Map Gallery, or sync it to JetPhoto Server. The first options would effectively create a static site that if I wanted to modify, I'd have to re-upload the gallery. So, I went ahead and installed the JetPhoto Server. This was a simple installation that required creating a MySQL table, unzipping the server, and configuring a few items. I've installed so many Linux programs, that the whole process took under 5 minutes. I selected the Web Sync option, entered the credentials, and boom, the site was ready to go.

One of the features that I find extremely compelling is the "Google Maps" mashup which shows the GPS locations and when you click on a pin, it shows the picture at that location. This is almost exactly what I envisioned when I wanted to geotag my photos. This resembles what iPhoto does on its map; however, this method allows you to publish your photos on a Web site. In addition, the server lets you choose how you want the photos viewed (Lightbox, Flash Gallery, etc.) without having to re-upload the pictures.

I'm pretty impressed with the results of JetPhoto Studio, but the management interface is a bit awkward. If you wanted to store all of your photos in JetPhoto Studio instead of iPhoto, then maybe this would be less of an issue.

Pros

• I really like the different output options for the web galleries.
• The Google Maps gallery is a great way to handle geotagged photos. Once I get more geotagged photos from other areas, I think it will be more useful.
• Installation of the server was quick and easy.
• Web Sync worked with no hassle and worked well.

Cons

• Adding images to albums copies them using up extra storage.
• The user interface could use a bit more polish.
• If the application focused on just creating the output and less on the management of the photos, I think it could simplify the interface.

Summary

If I put on my blinders and simply use the software to upload certain albums, I can definitely see myself using it again as I really like the results. In most cases, I don't overlook user interface, but I haven't seen another application (maybe I need to look harder) that quickly and easily produces similar results. I'm not sure what the differences between the Pro version and the free version, but for ease of use, the $25 for the Pro version is likely worth it as Web Sync isn't part of the free version. The developer's blog indicates that some new features are coming to JetPhoto Studio; I can't wait to see them.

A ride of a lifetime

Today, my wife and I got the opportunity to rid in a Zeppelin run by Airship Ventures. The other day, I realized that I've been on a number of different aircraft ranging from airplanes (commercial down to a homemade one my uncle built), a hot air balloon, and 4 separate helicopter trips. Today I got to add an airship to that list.

The tour took us from San Diego's Montgomery Field to the coast, south to downtown and then back to Montgomery field. The ride is some much different than any other type of aircraft as it's quiet, moves pretty slowly (top speed is less than 80 mph), and flies relatively low. Like the other passengers, I didn't stop taking pictures; I posted a bunch of pictures on my server. I didn't realize that my GPS data logger wasn't on until part way through the flight, so the map is missing some points. This site is using a product called JetPhoto Studio which I plan on reviewing at a later time (putting the site up with the map took just a few minutes, so that's one feature that is really cool about it).

It's really hard to describe the flight other than amazing. While you can take a helicopter tour of San Diego, I don't think you can beat this for getting a full view of the city and getting to take in the breathtaking views.

Coding tip for if statements

When I was a young engineer, a more senior colleague of mine taught me a lot about writing code and helped me adopt my own style. Just like an artist, every developer has his own style with no style being wrong. However, there is one coding convention that he taught me I think all developers should use. Here's what developers shouldn't do:

if (something)
       dosomething;

Instead they should do:

if (something)
{
      dosomething;
}

(or if you prefer, put the { on the if line).

Why do I say is? It's simple, if you come along later and add a line to the first statement, like:

if (something)
        dosomething;
        dosomethingelse;

you could have the wrong thing happen. If you wanted the "dosomethingelse" to only happen if the if statement was executed, that's not what would happen (it would always execute). The brackets make it explicit what will happen on the if statement. I've seen this type of coding in a lot of code and it will definitely lead to failure at some point or another.

I'm sure some people will take offensive with what I say, but this tip will save lots of time in debugging at some point.