How to print from your iPad or iPhone to a non-AirPrint printer

If you have an AirPrint-enabled printer, the act of wireless printing from your iPhone or iPad is pretty much a no-brainer. If you don't, then there are a number of apps that use a laptop as a print server. While these, on the whole, work OK they do require that your laptop is up and running whenever you need to print something and that's inconvenient at best and often simply impractical. What would be cool would be if there were some fire and forget hardware solution that just worked with the printer you happen to already have at home. Enter the Lantronix xPrintServer, which promises to do just that. But does it work?