SD card readers tend to die on me rather frequently, and frankly, I seldomly write to SD cards on desktops these days anyway. But today I needed one, and, well, I was able to use the one in my HP OfficeJet (7500A) just like that. Awesome.
Somehow, my bloody Eye-Fi card in my Panasonic DMC-ZS10 failed to connect — as configured — to my (mobile) WiFi yesterday, and I now wanted to upload these images. But on the Nexus 7, although allegedly mounted as ../sda, nothing was visible. The only available SD-to-USB converter only created error messages.
I was just about to head out an grab an USB reader from a local retail store, as I looked a the HP OffieJet All-in-One, and indeed, it did have an built-in card-reader. And what’s more, it’s rather easy to use it even from Linux, as has been pointed out in an HowTo for Ubuntu already, e. g.:
# mount -t smbfs //${YourAIOsIP}/Memory_Card /mnt/
/mnt usually is unused; I actually went the route via Desktop -> Places -> Connect to server and just connected to my HP’s IP as an SMB server, which worked as well.
Really nice, this way the only feature I still miss — running Linux — from HP’s line of printers is “scan to PC”.