Happy New Year!

Click the picture to see it larger. It appeared on the Travel Channel tonight and says “Happy New Year Travel Channel Disney fans and to Disney Echo, our family and friends, from Rich, Carol and Michael K. in Louisiana

“To VMK online, my dear, to VMK online…” Missing VMK on New Year’s Eve

Many of us have travelled to a Disney “land,” be it Disneyland in California or Walt Disney World in Florida. But Disney had truly created a virtual Magic Kingdom we could go to anytime, even for just a short time — and virtually meet up with our friends there in a magical place.

Sometimes we still use our imaginations, daydreaming we’re in a far-off, fanciful land. Such was the case with Disney’s “Virtual Magic Kingdom,” which switched from online to offline, closing forever earlier this year on May 21, 2008.

New Year’s Eve is a time for new beginnings but also to look back at the year gone by. And many Disney EchoEars are still missing VMK — and we look back fondly at the times we shared  there.

So on this New Year’s Eve, a toast to VMK:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind,
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, VMK we shared online.
To VMK online, my dear, to VMK online,
We’ll share a pic with kindness yet, VMK of old, online!

Print anything on your iPhone, wirelessly!

I have a HP Photosmart C4385 All in One printer.

I also have a first-generation iPhone.

And now I can print anything on my iPhone directly to my printer, without even using my computer as go-between. It’s done wirelessly, using WiFi, and the new free app from HP available through iTunes: iPrint Photo (click that to open it in iTunes).

It installs very quickly on your iPhone and works flawlessly for me — without even a need to set anything up.

Starting up iPrint Photo is also fast and you see a list of the photo albums in your iPhone that looks just like when you access your photos through the built-in Photos app. Choose one of your albums and then tap on a photo and the Print Photo page appears with a large blue Print button on on the bottom of the screen.

Just a tap of the bottom starts the printing process. That’s it! No cables to connect, no setup screen… As Chef Tell on “PM Magazine” used to say, “Very simple, very easy!”

Out came a 4×6 inch (10×15 cm) printed picture from the printer.

Can you imagine if you could print your photos this easily while traveling? All it needs is a compatible HP printer that is on a WiFi network.

But I said you could print anything, remember? So far, it looks like you can easily print pictures you’ve shot on your iPhone with this app… but print anything?

Sure! All you need to remember is the handy little feature that was introduced with the iPhone 2.0 software: Screengrabs!

It’s easy to take a screengrab. Hold down the sleep button at the top of the iPhone and then also press the Home button. Release them both at the same time and you’ll see the iPhone’s screen flash white. That indicates you have successfully taken a screengrab of what you had on the screen at the time.

You can make a screengrab picture of anything on your iPhone: a webpage, email, notes, even the calculator. Once you’ve taken a screengrab, it appears in your iPhone’s photo album like any picture you took with its camera. And the iPrint Photo app does as great a job with screengrabs as it does with photos.

Use the keyboard to type in contact information you want to hand to someone you’ve just met, for example, and as long as there’s a compatible HP printer within WiFi net distance of your iPhone, you’re good to go: print it out, then give the print-out to your new friend.

Sometimes you might want to copy and paste something from a web page (a business address, for example) or your brilliant idea you jotted down into the Notes app into one of your iPhone address book contacts and you don’t want to find a pen and paper or can’t remember it. Make a screengrab, print it, then enter it.

Here’s another idea, great for travelling: After getting your route in the Maps program, print it out before you leave the hotel. The print-out is actually larger than it is on your iPhone screen, making it easier to read on the go.

I’m glad that printing has finally come to the iPhone! I’m also glad I previously bought the kind of HP printer this app works with.

Here’s hoping that other printer manufacturers quickly put out apps compatible with their printers, like HP has done.

By the way, the pictures printed this way look exactly like ones which I transferred to my computer first — but i sure saved a lot of time printing them this way!

Being All Alone in the Crowd at Disneyland

My wife Carol has a great writing style which makes you think of a deeper meaning than the obvious, and she has just updated her blog entry here, ‘Believe fireworks from Main Street USA in Town Square – Alone at Disneyland, Tuesday Night” to include her thoughts on what it was like to be on her own in the Happiest Place on Earth after dark when Michael and I had gone back to the Disneyland Hotel to rest. Check it out!

Passing of the Torch at Disney’s Polynesian Resort

UPDATE: The Torch Lighting Ceremony was brought back on December 26th. No word if Kaleo will be rehired…

______________________________________________

They’ll leave a light on for you, but they also used to have a nightly Torch Lighting Ceremony at Disney’s Polynesian Resort.

Used to. December 13th was the last one. I knew this might be coming when I read some time ago that the Polynesian’s tiki torches had been upgraded. Now they don’t need anyone to light the torches, that can be done remotely.

And so, the end of an era begins with the flick of a switch and the laying off of Kaleo, the Cast Member who had performed the ceremony and had worked at that Walt Disney World resort for over 18 years. If you hadn’t seen Kaleo performing as Master of Ceremonies of the torch lighting you might remember him entertaining on the guitar at the Polynesian’s Tambu Lounge. You can see what Kaleo is up to now at his website, bighawaiianguy.com.

Mahalo, Kaleo.

Here is a YouTube video of the very last tiki lighting ceremony at the Polynesian

And recently, Jim Hill had an informative article about why the Polynesian Resort is so popular

I Can Has Pixie Dust?

 

Inspired by the fun “ICanHasCheezburger?” blog, the Disney Echo has started a Disney version of it: “I Can Has Pixie Dust?”

It’s Snowing!

Inspired by a rare New Orleans area snowfall last week…

…for a limited time snow is now falling on the Disney Echo Eyes And EchoEars Travel Blog!

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?

I love this blog! Perhaps the internet was invented for such things…

more animals

We have made our own Disney version of it! ICanHasPixieDust! Come see some funny Disney captions!

Copy and paste with pastebud on iPhone and iPod

Similar to iCopy, there’s now a new — and perhaps easier — way to do copy and paste on your iPhone or iPod touch: pastebud.

Take a look at this YouTube video which explains how pastebud works.

Good news: You don’t need to jailbreak your iPhone/iPod touch to use it and you don’t even have to download anything from the App Store!

It is free to use pastebud as many times as you’d like, but when using pastebud it adds this footer below what you pasted:

Pasted from my iPhone!
http://pastebud.com

If you don’t want that to appear, you can upgrade your pastebud clipboard by donating $5 — or you can manually edit it out of the message. The other option you have is simply to keep it there, as a way of thanking the developers for coming up with this cool copy and paste method for iPhone.

When you go to the pastebud website, it gives you instructions for installing two bookmarks — and the instructions are based on what device you are using to view their website at that time.

When viewing the instructions via your iPhone or iPod touch, the instructions include information on how to save their Copy and Paste links as bookmarks and then how to edit the bookmarks to work.

When using another web browser to view their website instructions, such as Internet Explorer or some other browser on a desktop computer or laptop, the links you save do not need any editing but then you will have to sync your bookmarks using iTunes. I find it easier to edit the Copy and Paste bookmarks myself, directly on the iPhone — and that  had to be done when using the previous copy and paste method using iCopy, by the way.

Using pastebud lets you actually highlight by touching and dragging your finger on your iPhone (or iPod touch) the portion of what it is you want to copy. iCopy has you tape the paragraph, and it copies the entire paragraph (or not, if the paragraph is too large). With pastebud you can easily select part of a paragraph — a sentence or two, or even a word or two — and I’ve found you can keep your finger held down and add another one to scroll the page up a bit, selecting more text as you go. There is a limit to the amount of what pastebud lets you select each time, though, before it apparently reaches a memory limit.

One drawback to pastebud is the same as when using iCopy: When you paste from the clipboard into a website’s text entry box (like writing a message here on the Disney Echo), it completely wipes out any previous text that might have been in there. So, it is best to do any copying/pasting before writing something to prevent this from happening.

Another drawback is that after using pastebud, it will not put the page you copied from back to normal… It remains in a text-only version of it with the pastebud menu bar at the top fo the screen. Perhaps this will be addressed in a future upgrade. My advice is to bookmark the page you want to copy from before you use pastebud… so that you can easily go back to that page to continue reading if you want to (then delete your temporary bookmark to that page when you are done.

The other drawback to pastebud is the same as iCopy’s: You have to have a connection to the internet (more of a problem for iPod touch users) — although I can’t think of why you’d want to copy something from an internet page if you didn’t have an internet connection… — and you can only paste into other internet pages or an email message. You can’t paste into Notes, a text message, or your address book, for example.

You also have the option of copying text with pastebud and pasting it into an email message. This is an improvement over how the iPhone and iPod touch have the native application which allows you to email the URL of an interesting web page. However, you cannot copy and paste the URL of the page along with text from it.

Until Apple provides us with a better method of doing copy and paste, I recommend pastebud! It certainly can make writing trip reports on the scene a lot easier!

Three Disney Ships at Castaway Cay

This photo is courtesy of my friend Mary Kraemer, a MouseEarVacations travel specialist. Mary and her family were on a Disney cruise for Thanksgiving, and Mary’s husband Vince took a great photo of BOTH Disney Cruise ships with the Flying Dutchman prop ship there from the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3 movies. Mary reports that the Wonder sailed by on her “at sea” day, and the two ships exchanged “When You Wish Upon A Star” horn blasts numerous times!