HP Developer Community Blog

In order to provide a more secure access to the BIOS, HP introduced Sure Admin on commercial systems. HP Sure admin depends on a cryptographically secure infrastructure, the Secure Platform Management (SPM), previously released in the BIOS to support features such as HP Sure Run and Sure Recover. 

HP Software Engineer Melanie Robertson got so tired of being interrupted while she was coding that she decided to do something about it.

Value of print - In a world where screen media gets all the buzz, paper can lament, "I don't get no respect." Everyone says, "Paper is going away." Yet a steady 100 million printers sell every year. What can you do with a worldwide installed base of about half a billion printers?

As an experimental psychologist, I spent more than a decade learning the art and science of collecting (and protecting) data from human subjects.

Find out how to keep your system BIOS up to date using Microsoft Endpoint Manager Proactive Remediation and HP Client Management Script Library.  

Find out how easy it is to manage battery health with Microsoft Endpoint Manager Proactive Remediation and  HP Client Management Script Library (HPCMSL)  

Learn how to deploy HP Client Management Script Library (HPCMSL) via Microsoft Endpoint Manager

The HP Omnicept VR platform is a ground-breaking collaboration between HP’s VR software team and scientists at HP labs. Driven by research in neuroscience, psychology, and affective computing, Omnicept VR combines physiological sensing with cutting edge machine learning to create human-centered, AI solutions.

The combination of a remote workforce with Work From Home (WFM) needs in the age of Covid-19, and mobile users now utilizing their notebooks always plugged in, increases the likelyhood of battery damage.

Version 1.5 of the HP Client Management Script Library has been released.  

HP Image Assistant can install/update drivers and other components from an offline repository that has been populated with Softpaqs for HP supported business systems. A Repository folder, if to be used by HPIA, requires to be configured correctly. Configuring can be done with HP's Client Management Software Library.

With the move to the DCHU driver model many of the typical tray applications have migrated to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application. These applications are typically installed from the Windows Store into a specific user profile.

Modern Standby: Why HP System Default Settings The HP System Default Settings Softpaq was developed to optimize settings and battery utilization on HP systems. HP recommends the Softpaq be installed on all supported mobile platforms, with and without Modern Standby support.

Installing Driver Appx packages during MEMCM/OSD 4/30/2020 The implementation of the UWP driver model by Microsoft imposes restrictions on how a complete driver package can be deployed when a PC is (re)imaged. Drivers with a control UWP application are split between the hardware-enabling driver and an appx package, typically installed with DISM.

Anchore is a tool that scans Docker images for common vulnerabilities and not so common vulnerabilities if you purchase the paid version. However, the free version is useful and should still be used on your team to avoid the common vulnerabilities.Thankfully, the Anchore team is nice enough to have created an entire shell script to both install the Anchore Database locally and run the Anchore CLI all in one line.

HP Image Assistant (HPIA) has become a useful tool for IT shops helping to automate the deployment and updating of PCs in an Enterprise. HPIA can be used to (not-including capabilities such as, quick access to Readme and CVA files, Advisories and Bulletins, etc.):

HP Image Assistant (since version 4.5.4) and the HP Client Management Script Library (since version 1.4.0) can team up to deliver intelligent and efficient installation of HP drivers, bios, and other HP software in a Microsoft Endpoint Management Configuration Manager (MEMCM), or other similar management environments.

Read what's new in HP Client Management Script Library v1.4.3 (hint, just bug fixes) and also an important note about addressing potential issues caused by a recent security bulletin.  

Learn how to provision HP Sure Recover with the HP Client Management Script Library.  

Managing Driver Packs as Software in a MEMCM environment

Learn how to configure the HP Secure Platform with the HP Client Management Script.  

Check it out, HP Client Management Script LIbrary 1.4 has been released.

Join the HP Developers Portal team in giving a salute to the first website dedicated to Print Developers:  www.print-dev.com. The new HP Developers portal has saved the best of print-dev.com com and will carry forward Will Hertling's vision of developers sharing their best code for printing from mobile, web, and PCs.

Elasticsearch can store, scale, search and analyze humongous amounts of data in near real time. It is usually used in applications that have complex search features. But it can also be used to retrofit legacy apps that lack heavy duty search. You can add search to a legacy app running on a MySQL database by bringing up Elasticsearch as a secondary data store to handle the search load. The relational database remains the single source of truth while Elasticsearch rips through searches, giving a legacy database value that it never had before.

In the summer of 2019, AWS announced support for using Regex Expressions for their WAF CloudFormation Templates. However, at introduction, no one had figured it out from a solely CloudFormation solution. In this post Toul DeGuia-Cranmer explains what can (and cannot) be done through editing the CloudFormation WAF template.

Announcing HP Client Management Script Library 1.3.0. Please read on for what is new in this release.    

I recently took on the role of Cloud Security advocate for HP's Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) team. I saw first-hand that preparing a team to be interested in security is a daunting task, especially when the team’s imperative is to deliver software fast. Here are some simple steps that you can follow to get your team engaged.

HP PrintOS is a cloud-based system that connects HP's Graphics devices. In this short, introductory video, Dave, our PrintOS architect, shows how device manufacturers can connect their devices to PrintOS and send real-time status.

Kops is a popular open source tool that makes it easier to provision and deploy Kubernetes clusters in Cloud Service Providers. However, Kops probably cannot achieve a one-size-fits-all security solution. Use of kops may vary, so you should be aware of default security choices and know how to configure the security to your needs. In this article I'll show you how to run kube-bench against a kops provisioned cluster and how to change the cluster spec to add additional security to the provisioned k8s cluster.

Learn how to leverage the HP Client Management Script Library to automate driver management and injection for a Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Deployment Share 

The world is awash in data. It is overflowing data centers and pooling into data lakes. There is a tendency to dump everything into the lake – device data, usage data, financial data. As homes get smarter - we may soon put everything, even the kitchen sink data, into our data repositories.  A data lake can quickly become enormous, but if it is all unstructured, it isn’t a lake. It’s a swamp. Cloud Software R&D Director Gaurav Roy explains how HP is keeping its data lakes clean to enable Artificial Intelligence implementations.

Second post in the Zombieload Special series. In this post, we consider an alternate way of working with security bulletins and the HP Client Management Script Library.

This the inaugural post in a Zombieload Special series. Here's how you can leverage the HP Client Management Script Library and a little bit of your own PowerShell magic to quickly identify whether your platform needs a softpaq mentioned in a security bulletin.

Have you ever laid in bed at night and realized the garage door was wide open? HP Tech Lead C.K. Fong decided he should be able to control his garage door using Alexa for far less than the cost of commercial voice controllers. So as a software R&D engineer who likes to automate his house, he used a Wemos D1 Mini microcontroller, similar to the popular Arduino Uno, to trick Alexa into thinking the garage door was a light bulb. "Alexa...turn off the garage door."

One of the oldest axioms about innovation states, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." HP developer C.K. Fong shows how he reinvented the trap by adding a remote control IP camera, a mobile app, and automatic email alerts.

Ah, the drama of pair programming! Arguing over what needs to be done. Fighting over how to do it. Bickering over coding style or test completeness. Will Hertling offers some do-it-yourself couple's counseling for paired programmers.

Humans have great difficulty reading and transcribing shortened URLs that contain a random assortment of numbers and letters in upper and lower case. To give users URLs that are easy to type and transcribe, avoid switching keyboards and types of characters more than once, use a separator character to create subgroups, and eliminate ambiguous characters. Human-friendly URLs are ideal for printed materials and anywhere shortened URLs are needed.

In early April 2019, Will Hertling, a 3D printing developer for HP Inc. and an accomplished science fiction author, delivered a message of technological disruption to the 71st annual Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colo. In nine panel discussions, Hertling spoke about the promise and perils of technological innovations in social networking and Artificial Intelligence.

A brief how-to for interacting with the Product Warranty API using the cURL command line tool.

Docker is now all the rage in the field of containerization and as a consequence is a target for attack. Although Docker does have some security defaults set right out of the box, those defenses may not be enough to prevent attacks. This article explains how to use Docker Bench for Security to tweak Docker settings in keeping with recognized best practices.

HP Developer and science fiction writer Will Hertling has been watching how new people on his team pick up software development -- specifically Ruby/Rails. He sees two markedly different approaches, which he calls Surface Learning and Deep Learning. Both have their place.

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and HP is going the extra mile by stretching the day into an entire week of activities. Here at the HP Developers Program, we asked ourselves, “Who is our all-time favorite woman software developer?” The answer came back Margaret H. Hamilton, former NASA software lead for the Apollo space program.

Most web service are built on a microservices architecture with test-driven development. That makes sense for most large-scale, mature applications, but it may by counterproductive for rapidly evolving prototypes. Senior software engineer and science fiction writer Will Hertling explains why. 

The idea that you can design an API without writing code seems somehow backwards, like putting the cart before the horse. But “full lifecycle API engineering” is an emerging field with a new set of tools that let you do just that. You don’t need to hammer nails to design a house. Neither do you need to code to initially design and document an API.

In the first week of December, thousands of teachers and volunteers around the world gave millions of student their first exposure to computer coding in Hour of Code events. But what happened after the Hour of Code events were over? A new teacher's guide provides a path forward: Computational Thinking {and Coding} for Every Student.

In his years pioneering Augmented Reality at Aurasma and now HP Reveal, Chris Burgess has watched companies struggle to measure ROI – how Augmented Reality can improve the company's Financial Reality. As with any new technology, there is confusion around what AR can and can't do. In this blog post, originally published on LinkedIn, Chris shares lessons learned and wise advice for anyone using – or thinking about using – Augmented Reality.

When Pokemon Go came onto the scene, Augmented Reality finally received the prominence early adopters like HP's Chris Burgess had been expecting. With the arrival of ARKit and ARCore, the world really went AR mad. Apple and Google unleashed their latest tech for developers to start demonstrating what they can do, and so far it seems the possibilities are endless. However, Burgess wants to see AR content generation made even easier for "non-techies."

At HP we work tirelessly to improve the print experience. We thank everyone who integrated our Mobile Print SDK. You demonstrated print's impact on usage and engagement and helped us evangelize a streamlined printing experience. Now that print is integrated into iOS and Android Oreo, we are moving into the next phase of our print API journey and deprecating the Mobile Print SDK by February 28, 2018.

HP's Galo Gimenez, a Distinguished Technologist in the HP CTO's office, introduces Istio, a new open source project announced by Google, IBM, and Lyft. Istio is developing a high-level network fabric to provide key capabilities uniformly across services, regardless of the language the service is written in.

At the Calapooia Middle School in Albany, Oregon, the Makers Club ordered Arduino bots named Buzz from SolderingSunday.com. When the kids plugged their Buzz bots into their Arduino boards, they knew they would learn about programming. The surprise was how much they learned about music.

The San Jose Museum of Art, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, wanted to add something cyber to an exhibition about Beauty. An HP Sprout, running as a walk-up kiosk, allowed museum visitors to express their own visions of beauty. This story shows how the museum's staff discovered Sprout and why the Sprout has a promising future at the museum.

Two-year-old Ava stood transfixed in front of a plasma screen at The CO·, the fourth annual Corvallis Maker Fair hosted by Oregon State University. She didn’t know it, but Ava was watching a flashy show about 3D printing, a technology that will transform her world as surely as computers changed her parents’ lives.

On Wednesday, March 8, the world will observe International Women's Day. HP is stretching the day into a full week of events. Here on the HP Developers Portal, we highlight the contributions of three women who pioneered computer technology: Admiral Grace Hopper who taught a generation of military leaders about computing; Margaret Hamilton, whose software guided the Apollo space missions; and Dorothy Vaughan, a black woman in Alabama who taught herself Fortran and was portrayed in the hit movie Hidden Figures.

Users of the PicCollage app (a Top 10 mobile photo/video app) have printed 5 million photos and collages since the app added a Print at Home button 18 months ago. PicCollage used the HP Mobile Print SDK to add the button. The immediate demand for at-home printing was a pleasant surprise for app co-founder Ching-Mei Chen. The Print at Home button also boosted orders for photo products, like phone cases.

To discover innovative uses for the Sprout Pro, HP turned to its employees. The company set up the "Sprouts in the Community" program and asked employees to suggest worthy organizations that would benefit from a Sprout. Christopher Huffman helped Mighty Oaks Children's Therapy Center win one for special needs education.

At Google I/O 2016, members of the Android Framework team explained Android's printing architecture and shared make-it-easy code for printing from mobile Android devices.

The idea that you can design an API without writing code just seems somehow backwards, like putting the cart before the horse. But “full lifecycle API engineering” is an emerging field with a new set of tools that let you do just that.

“Of all the different ways I have monetized my blog, printables were the easiest and the most no-brainer.”

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the second generation of the Sprout Pro by HP caught the attention of Melissa Riofrio, executive editor of PC World. She concluded, "HP’s Sprout Pro is here to remind us that Microsoft’s Surface Studio is not the original creativity-oriented PC, let alone the most creative. Now, the Sprout Pro brings an upgraded set of talents to a market that may finally be ready for it.”

Downloading a cloud-based app to a smart phone has become so easy that most children can do it. That same behavior is coming to HP office printers. HP has launched JetAdvantage on Demand, the printing industry's first Software as a Service solution management platform. "Think of it as the app store for printing."

What happens when Hour of Code – a worldwide initiative by Code.org to teach the basics of coding – shows up in a 2nd grade classroom that champions a "Growth Mindset"? HP Corvallis volunteers in Mrs. Hicks' classroom may have witnessed the start of something big.

Like HP, GE is a global industrial icon that is engaged in reinventing itself. Here are a pair of articles that show GE's progress as it pursues a "digital industrial" future on the "Internet of Really Big Things."

HP’s Julie Anderson, Developer Outreach Manager and Maker Space advocate, was invited to New York City to attend Martha Stewart’s American Made Summit 2016. There she met U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, who delivered the closing keynote.

In the fall issue of HP's Innovation Journal, CTO Shane Wall wishes he could bring back Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who founded HP in 1938 and sparked all of Silicon Valley. "Time travel is one innovation our Labs team hasn’t cracked yet. Just now, I wish we had." Read what Bill and Dave could never have imagined.

See how baristas at Drupa, the giant printing exposition in Germany, served up piping cups of HP jet-printed coffee. 

Drupa is the Olympics of printing - a giant trade show that happens every four years. Dave Staas, chief architect for HP PrintOS, HP's new cloud-based operating system for print shops, traveled to Drupa 2016 to debut PrintOS APIs.

At Drupa, the world's largest trade show for graphics and industrial printing, HP has taken the biggest space to tell its biggest digital printing stories. Watch it go up, then take a 3-minute video tour, and learn about PrintOS, new at this year's show.

PicCollage, a Top 10 photo app, added a Print at Home button and learned four key lessons: Millennials love to print photos and collages (nearly 2 million in 8 months) HP's Mobile Print SDK is printer agnostic and took just 10 minutes to integrate.  Print-at-home users are 7 times more likely to order photo products from Kite, a data e-commerce platform for print In-home photo printing boosts engagement and retention

May 10, 2016:  Today HP Inc. announced the creation of HP Tech Ventures, a corporate venture group dedicated to finding "early stage companies with cutting edge technologies." The team, led by Andrew Bolwell, HP's "Chief Disrupter," will be looking for disruptive technologies in: 3D transformation, immersive computing, hyper-mobility, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, and smart machines.

Want to know what HP is thinking about today that will impact your world in the future? The Spring issue of HP's Innovation Journal is dedicated to "Charting a course for the future." (Read it on mobile, web, or PDF.)

Print Service Providers and 3rd party developers that want to improve their operations and profitability can now tap HP’s new PrintOS APIs, available through the HP Developers Portal. Two APIs – "Box Submission" and "Site Flow" – are now available on this Developers' Portal.

HP was one of the eight business partners selected by Facebook for its release Tuesday of the Facebook Messenger platform. The result of the collaboration is an HP Print Bot that will make it easy to print from Facebook. 

Fleets of HP LaserJet printers are deployed in enterprises around the world. Many have special software functions – customized buttons on the control panel – that are the work of developers who have joined the HP JetAdvantage Partner Program. The JetAdvantage program is welcoming more developers to its Open eXtensible Platform for devices (OXPd).

I have been writing about new computer technology since tablets were paper, Apples grew on trees and Amazon was a rainforest. Now HP introduces Blended Reality and Immersive Computing. To understand what HP means by those terms, I recommend a pair of 1-minute videos that give you the Big Picture.

It's more than unusual for a Windows PC to make a list of "coolest new tech gadgets," but the Sprout by HP is much more than the usual Windows PC. It's also a projector and 3D scanner -- basically an input device for home 3D replicating. That's why Cool Mom Tech picked the Sprout as one of "the 15 coolest new tech gadgets of the year." 

 To wrap up HP's International Women's Week, the Developers' Portal offers an answer to the question: "Why are there so few women in Computer Science?" In a TED Talk the founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, calls on us all to "teach girls bravery, not perfection."

Noha Elarief, a developer on HP’s mobile print program, has personal experience with the decline of women in Computer Science courses in the United States. It wasn’t that way in Egypt. “When I came to the United States to earn a Ph.D., I was shocked when I saw how few women were in my classes.”

Attention Northwest makers! The Corvallis Oregon Maker Fair wants to exhibit YOU on Saturday, April 9, 2016. Get your exhibitor form here.

 To recognize and honor the contributions of women in society and technology, HP has expanded International Women's Day (March 8) into a full week of worldwide activities. Nothing shows the structural challenge that women face in Computer Science better than a chart published by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

In the world of Agile software development, embedded DevOps teams have proven their worth. But what happens when a project matures and joins a large company's portfolio of established services. Then the project must bridge to Central Ops to save money. Developer Joe Teibel, an HP veteran, explains how crossing that bridge is all about constraints.

"Good morning Berlin!" HP CTO Shane Wall greeted the hub conference. For 25 minutes he shared HP's vision for not only 2D and 3D printing, but also 4D printing. He set these advances against a backdrop of three key megatrends: urbanization, hyper-globalization, and technology disruption.

Joe Teibel, a veteran HP developer with deep knowledge of cloud services and application development, has strong opinions about agile development, scaling software projects, and the "right way" to do Ops. Here he explains why he thinks Scala is superior to Java. 

Can a junior-class product designer who can't code make the podium at a university hackathon? See what Nicolas Capaldini and Team Virus pulled off at QuackHack, the first hackathon held at the University of Oregon, a school famous for its duck mascot.

When engaged in an epic battle, it's great to find an ally. Here at HP, we have found like-minded thinkers at MOO Inc., a paper-loving design company. In a blog post, Kai Turner, MOO's Senior Product Manger, explores the "physical-to-digital space and the future of paper." Like HP, Kai sees paper going digital and joining the emerging Internet of Things.

HP unveils Sprout Pro by HP — designed for schools and creative professionals. The collaborative, 2D/3D hands-on experience of "blended reality" offers new ways to transform classrooms and workspaces. In a worldwide press release, HP details the features of Sprout Pro and its place in the evolution of HP's Immersive Computing platform.

The University of Oregon, a school best known for its duck mascot and football play, is making a technology play Jan. 15-17 in association with Major League Hacking (mlh.io), the "official student hackathon league." The HP Developers Program is supporting the 3-day event, dubbed "Quack Hack," by furnishing an HP Sprout and a cloud-connected wireless printer. HP is also making connections between the university program and the local dev community.

"There's still something special about having a physical print out of your creations to hang on the wall or send to friends and family." That's not HP talking. That's PicCollage, one of the Top 10 photo apps. Adding mobile printing to PicCollage boosted engagement and monetization — something every developer wants.

When new technologies get applied to old challenges, you know they are coming of age. Sprout is a revolutionary 3D scanner and computer, but Tyler McGahee, founder of Seraphim, Inc. and maker of the Seraph drone for athletes, discovered its power for collaboration.

Value of print: A YouTube video of a toddler swiping and pressing images in a magazine fueled the popular debate between paper and digital readers back in 2011. The video, titled A Magazine is an iPad that Does Not Work, has been watched almost 5 million times. In 2013, Scientific American editors took on the debate, reviewing research that compared reading on paper to reading on screen.

Some of the hottest holiday gifts in 2015 look like wrist watches. The keys to the watch's comeback are a cloud connection and a host of new digital tricks. The same resurgence is happening for HP printers. What can you develop that takes advantage of 40 million cloud-connected printers on the Internet of Things?

For a family in Oregon, Hour of Code classes led by HP volunteers have over-delivered. Hour of Code not only showed every child  at Lincoln Elementary School that they can code, it gave the Gilpin family something to share at home.

Growing up, Kiki Prottsman was always one of the few girls in computer and programming classes. Now, as Education Program Manager for the Hour of Code, Kiki is seeing her vision of egalitarian computing realized around the world.

HP Inc. announced that more than 800 HP volunteers will take part in Hour of Code – the largest learning event in history – during Computer Science Education Week, December 7-13, 2015.

HP has created a Sprout plug-in for Unity 5.0 developers. In this webcast, Sprout engineers show how you can use Sprout's dual-screen system, 3D image capture, and Intel RealSense camera to create 3D experiences.

Three ways to print from a web app directly to a printer (without going through the computer): Print by ePrint Print by Google Cloudprint Print by local network

Tom Carrico has been making and inventing inside HP for almost half of the company’s existence. He retired in 2015 to pursue his “wonderful hobby” – astrophotography. "Taking photographs of the night sky still requires a maker mentality and do-it-yourself determination."

A common question I see is how to print headers and footers when printing a webpage. An old stackoverflow post posed this question:

Some content needs to be printed in landscape. This is fairly common when you have spreadsheets or data-filled reports. This can be tricky when printing from the browser, because it relies on the user to select landscape printing, which is rarely the default orientation. If you use PDF generation on the server, it's relatively easy to enforce landscape orientation.

The Sprout Tour truck, criss-crossing America to show off immersive computing and "blended reality," parked at the World Maker Faire in New York in late September 2015. Check out the video interview by Makezine.com. 

At the third annual Mobile Photo Connect conference in San Francisco, HP's Mobile Print SDK was picked as one of the Top 6 apps.

Web Printing Tutorial: Do your web pages print differently in different browsers? Use these PDF techniques to make printing from your website consistent and beautiful across all browsers.

Value of print - It has been half a century since Businessweek predicted the paperless "Office of the Future." Decide for yourself whether paper is going away, or whether half a billion installed printers can add value to your apps and websites.

Web Printing Tutorial: One of the most common needs when formatting a webpage to print is turning off regions that don't need to be displayed. As explained in the full tutorial, this is usually done with display: none;

All print APIs trace their code roots back to the humble Print Button – an on-screen button that opened the print dialog box. It is still one of the handiest pieces of code around.

Web printing tutorial: This tutorial explores the world of page layout using HTML and CSS to design printed pages. The goal is not merely a nicely printed web page, but a specific piece of printable non-web content, such as a brochure or book,

Value of Print - A scene from the classic British comedy says a lot about the attitude some screen-only developers take toward paper and printing.

Value of Print - Eric Weiner, a reporter for National Public Radio, also used the famous not-dead-yet scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to underscore his report about the endearing, enduring durability of paper.

Web printing tutorial: As a web developer working on print, I've often needed to see the impact of stylesheet changes to print media. This isn't always easy to do. It turns out you can preview print stylesheets directly in the browser on Chrome!  The basic functionality has been present for a while, but Google occasionally changes how you access this feature. These instructions work as of Chrome v.43.

Value of Print - More than 20 years into the Internet revolution, why are there still catalogs in my mailbox? Why did Lands' End bring back its catalog and create a host of specialty catalogs?  

NPR headline: Paper Notebooks Are As Relevant As Ever.  Handy, easy-to-carry moleskine notebooks are returning to classrooms. Taking notes with pen and paper requires a mental synthesis that typing lacks.