[HN Gopher] Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
___________________________________________________________________
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Author : chrisdemarco
Score : 470 points
Date : 2024-10-04 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aschmelyun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aschmelyun.com)
| ozarker wrote:
| I love it. I've switched a lot of my news consumption to RSS.
| This feels like another step in that direction that I'd love to
| try.
| h2odragon wrote:
| from '92 to '96 one of my jobs was producing a daily news summary
| from usenet and a feed of the Federal Register. delivered as 40
| to 100 densely printed dot matrix pages. Couple boxes of paper a
| month. Re-inked ribbons so often they'd wear through.
|
| The Epson LQ printers were _incredible_ machines. the one (an a
| half) I used for that job did that, plus millions of mailing
| labels, with hardly a burp. There were some part swaps and a
| couple of printheads, iirc.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Still have my LQ 100 in my parents attic, perhaps I could do
| something like this. Sadly I don't have the paper feeder (I
| only used A4 paper with it).
| h2odragon wrote:
| I pulled a couple out of my pile a few years ago to look at.
| The rubbers were pretty well gone on mine, belts gone, the
| rails had some sort of blooming corrosion.
|
| unless you've got very lucky it's probably a real
| refurbishment job to make one run today. Quick look suggest
| Epson 9pin and 24pin form feed impact printers are still
| being made.
|
| https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-
| Matrix/LQ-590...
| jprd wrote:
| This is fantastic. I'm all in on this, here I come eBay!
| Odenwaelder wrote:
| I did something similar with a receipt printer, an Arduino and a
| PHP script in 2011. It got replaced by an iPhone very soon after,
| but I'm thinking of reviving it, because it forces you to filter
| what's important.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'd definitely
| recommend BPA free paper if you don't use it already!
| ale42 wrote:
| Matrix printers can actually do quite a lot... depending on the
| models, you can change fonts, use bold, underline, sometimes
| italic, double-width and double-height characters and even
| graphics (although often are relatively low resolutions like 90
| or 180 DPI).
|
| One funny thing I did once for a escape-room-like game, was a box
| with only a parallel printer connector on it. When connected to
| the printer, it was parasite-powered from one of the control
| lines of the parallel port (it was just a tiny PIC
| microcontroller drawing a few hundred uA) and was sending a hint
| to the printer.
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's pretty cool actually.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing
| the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually
| looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still
| have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.
| sitkack wrote:
| You could probably make your own multicolor ribbon.
| bitwize wrote:
| Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs
| out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and
| later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like
| PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a
| simple markup language.
|
| It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution
| graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were
| capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch
| between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the
| vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font
| rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in
| this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were
| as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the
| early 1980s.
|
| Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser
| printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out...
| the writing was on the wall for such a system.
| aschmelyun wrote:
| I've been wanting to explore more with this design-wise.
| There's literally dozens of pages in the manual regarding font
| sizing, emphasis, italics, sub and superscripts, etc.
|
| Maybe for version 2.0!
| layer8 wrote:
| It would be fun to have a terminal that understands ESC/P,
| supporting different fonts and CPI and the like.
| smartmic wrote:
| I remember printing huge banners in landscape mode on those
| endless paper rolls, basically ASCII art stuff which commands
| like figlet would produce today on a terminal (maybe it still
| supports printers as output?)
| milkshakes wrote:
| > Additionally, since this is an experimental project, I wanted
| to remain super cheap for this data, free if at all possible.
|
| There's also NewsCatcher which is free for open source side
| projects:
|
| https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...
| aschmelyun wrote:
| Oooh, awesome! Thanks for the heads up
| canpan wrote:
| This is great! I am currently thinking about getting a weekend
| paper newspaper like FT weekend. Reason being: I read news on my
| phone too often. And the news create negative emotion without
| being useful. News on paper and only once per week would make me
| more relaxed. His paper printer news daily would be great to
| bridge the gap in between!
|
| On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any
| hackable open source printer like this available?
| i5heu wrote:
| I cannot recommend FT. I tried to get their physical paper,
| never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10
| mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I
| unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and
| a lot of time on my side.
|
| That is why I am also super interested in just printing news
| from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a
| screen.
| eponeponepon wrote:
| Are you in the UK and within some short distance of
| civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by
| you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a
| paper delivery round.
|
| Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk
| then this may be less useful advice for you.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My first reaction was "why print, just send it to yourself as an
| email" but then realized that the major motivator for this
| project was to cut down on screen use.
| freetanga wrote:
| Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me
| realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging
| sessions...
|
| On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on
| this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound
| manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I
| recall)
| FredPret wrote:
| I miss the soundscape of old computers:
|
| - the POST beep
|
| - the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting
|
| - the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer
|
| - even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Just today at a shop I saw a self checkout terminal crash and
| reboot - featuring the old AMI boot screen and a nice POST
| beep. Made me wonder what ancient hardware might hide behind
| these modern cases and UIs.
| rockostrich wrote:
| If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I
| highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin
| [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative
| about a college student going to work at a computer repair
| shop.
|
| I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but
| that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny
| anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East
| Side.
|
| [1]
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii
| [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/
| toast0 wrote:
| > even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
|
| I do. It's like the walk-up song to talking to my friends and
| having a good time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter
| and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I
| can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with
| what I got.
| hansonkd wrote:
| My current project right now with my thermal printer is
| responding to emails via typewriter.
|
| Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the
| response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner ->
| sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer.
|
| PoC worked well.
|
| Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who
| it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic to
| do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify
| that the final content of the email after OCR.
|
| So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to
| day.
|
| More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess
| you would call them word processors) could be a better way...
| But I like the click clack of each key stroke.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > I can't afford a proper ASR-33
|
| If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find
| one?
|
| Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn't produced anything
| in years.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The one that was in the Living Computer Museum was recently
| sold by Christie's.
| beala wrote:
| I did this. Wrote it up here:
| https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewrit...
| rbanffy wrote:
| You made my job a whole lot easier. Thank you!
| HPsquared wrote:
| Reminds me of the dusty stock ticker in Mr Burns' office:
|
| https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU
| jollyllama wrote:
| I wonder how long before these pages fade. Could be good for
| archival purposes.
| aschmelyun wrote:
| It's physical ink on paper, I feel like as long as you store it
| in a cool, dry place, you can probably get decades out of it if
| not more.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| From someone who hordes papers(j/k but if I don't get back to
| digitalizing them it might be considered more of a problem
| later on lol fortunately some of my reading and writing is
| supplanted by digital devices now)... You probably don't want
| to keep all of it. Most news doesn't even matter a week from
| when it was made. If you had to, it would be better to have an
| LLM or better summarize the year's end. Or maybe bury them in
| the backyard for future generations to potentially discover.
| But yeah there will be other copies of the news, and you don't
| have to store them these days
| every wrote:
| It's been a long time since I've heard that dot matrix sound.
| Wide carriage OKI Data and a big pile of green bar...
| aghilmort wrote:
| so pure -- easily as awesome as this lovely post, (What Hath Woz
| Wrought)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321
|
| picturing room full of dot matrix printers, fax machines, &
| thermal printers & modems & old-school saving programs to
| cassette recordings
|
| all talking to each other via mic relay where each uses AI to
| subtly detect what character each other just printed via audio
| and we can read their LLM convos
| joeyparsons wrote:
| til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot
| matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce
| resource for a project like this! kudos!
| aschmelyun wrote:
| It's pretty expensive though! I got the smallest box I could,
| 1000 sheets, from Staples for $30.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| You can still buy new impact printers.
|
| https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/
| awad wrote:
| I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't
| totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses
| exitb wrote:
| It seems like an attractive concept. I tend to fluctuate between
| consuming too much news and getting fed up leading to not
| consuming any.
|
| BTW, I like how this is literally just a daily newspaper.
| Something that we've figured out at least hundreds of years ago,
| but effectively lost to an infinite breaking news cycle.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I did something similar with a receipt printer.
|
| a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily
| controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR
| codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment
| messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you
| can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and
| has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of
| hooking into to control a light or something.
|
| I had it set up for emails and every morning it would print off
| my calendar.
|
| I think the interface works well especially if you pair it with a
| physical control like buttons or NFC reader. That way you can
| issue "commands" and get output. Like I had one NFC card to make
| it print my calendar, one for unread emails, etc.
|
| I have some more features I want to add to it. Its very fun way
| to cut down on screen time, but ironically i have spent more
| screen time coding with it and setting it up then it probably has
| saved me. lol.
| ustad wrote:
| Whats the printer you have? I've been thinking of getting one
| and did not know about the notification and external feature
| you mention.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I have a Rongta RP331.
|
| The thing I wish it could do different is that when printing
| a single line, the autocutter hides it, so you have to line
| feed about 5 times until the line you printed is visible.
|
| If i did it different, maybe i would try to find a printer
| that is able to do reverse line feed so I can "peek" at a
| single line and then not waste paper. but i think those are
| about 3-4 times more expensive.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are a lot of cheap Chinese dot matrix printers. As an
| American if you search by mm size you will find those, if you
| search by inches you will find more reputable (and culturally
| sensitive) brands.
|
| I bought two Chinese printers, one burned up pretty quick
| when I was testing it but I might have been printing too much
| black. The other is fine I think but really I am not so
| motivated to make thermal prints when I have a good quality
| inkjet. (My best thermal print was a small Lusamine
|
| https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741
|
| which demonstrates how Nintendo official art is designed to
| render on cheap screens like the Nintendo 3DS)
| mtoohig wrote:
| Please share some of your code, I would like to see and get a
| feel for some personal ideas.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I am currently working on an "input" interface to scan
| resposnes that I write from my typewriter and am planning on
| releasing a github repo on it when im done. conveniently you
| can type directly on the receipt printer if the response is
| short.
|
| Right now all my credentials are hardcoded so i can't push
| out what I have without some cleanup, but I can point you to
| some of the libraries: python-escpos and nfcpy were what I
| used for the bulk of it.
| Instantnoodl wrote:
| I use Thermal Printer for a different use-case (TTRPG stuff).
| Feel free to check it out :)
|
| https://github.com/BigJk/snd
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| wow I love this. I like using spellcards but havent had a
| good solution for items... might need to buy a receipt
| printer now.
| autoexec wrote:
| Receipt printers are fun but take care not to buy toxic paper
| https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...
| aschmelyun wrote:
| Receipt printers are a blast! I had a project from a couple
| years ago printing out GitHub tickets using a similar setup to
| what I have for this dot matrix printer.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Whatever vendor(s) decided that the restaurant industry needed
| to switch over to thermal printers, I hope Cory Doctorow has a
| chat with them.
|
| "Let's just tape this thermal receipt to your to-go container,
| and ... refund? What do you mean refund?"
| hggigg wrote:
| I had something similar to this at home except it was a laser
| printer and it got a postscript file out of LaTeX which was
| parsed out from a bunch of Perl.
|
| A couple of months in, my naive Perl parser broke and I woke up
| to half a ream of paper with "a" printed continually down the
| left hand side of the page.
|
| Now I don't bother!
| acomjean wrote:
| In the early 90s my daily college paper had a dot matrix printer
| for the AP news feed. My last year I think they discontinued the
| service.
|
| Editors would take the stories and type them into our system
| again. The agony was mitigated by the fact we didn't run a ton of
| AP stories and better ways were entirely obvious back then.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and
| I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've
| ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That
| sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and
| there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on
| them...
|
| ...my SO would kill me.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Yes - the sound on the video reminded me of waiting for my
| homework to print out in the 80s.
| The_Blade wrote:
| the sound is better than an hour with a high-end therapist, er,
| executive coach
| bityard wrote:
| Neat. Reminds me of when I (briefly) worked at a radio station. I
| forget basically all of the details now, but I'm pretty sure it
| would automatically dial up some Associated Press number, fetch
| the latest headlines, and send them to a dot-matrix printer. This
| was in the late 90's and it ran MS-DOS.
|
| In case the author is reading: on most printers of the day, you
| could set the font via control codes and many printers even had
| variable-width fonts.
| Lonestar1440 wrote:
| Legitimately great product idea, I think? Just the idea of a
| personalized (truly! by you! Not by MSN or whomever), off-screen
| news feed every morning is cool. The idea that I could *also
| replace my alarm clock with a dot matrix printer* is even cooler.
|
| I could easily customize the php to hit my own news sources, but
| wouldn't know where to begin doing the hardware side on my own.
| Probably many others in this spot.
|
| I'd buy it, for way more than the cost of an old printer, if it
| was available on the market!
| zackproser wrote:
| Very cool. Thanks for sharing
| whartung wrote:
| So, curiosity today.
|
| One of the things that this person does is simply echo to
| /dev/lp0.
|
| Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the
| interface, and the printer printed.
|
| Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still
| printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser
| printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it
| printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the Apple
| Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was
| an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript
| down the wire.
|
| As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got
| more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of
| backward compatibility.
|
| So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls >
| /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?
|
| If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes
| -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but
| I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today
| (to me anyway).
|
| (Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-
| printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)
| dasfsi wrote:
| I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects
| via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When
| connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like
| that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the
| customers who buy these things new want them compatible with
| whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50
| years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's
| escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers
| I had from the 90's didn't).
|
| What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt
| driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not
| very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some
| reason.
|
| Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An
| inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes
| though, but it was 20 years ago.
| slsii wrote:
| I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers
| through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can
| tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo
| "Hello printer" | lp -d <printer_name>, and find the name
| through lpstat -p.
|
| And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.
| blenderob wrote:
| Wow! What a delightful exchange this is! Curiosity asked and
| answered in 12 minutes! I literally got goosebumps on my arms
| as I read your comment and reached the last part where you
| say "this works!"
| hawski wrote:
| With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding
| printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook
| and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems
| and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer)
| I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I
| always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this
| machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and
| emulate whatever is needed for this to work on Linux.
| sangnoir wrote:
| IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which
| is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has
| been available on Linux for even longer. I would be
| surprised if the feature was _not_ available on Linux for
| your printer.
|
| Edit: added footnote
|
| 1. The _chief_ maintainer - not _the only_ maintainer,
| between 2007-2019
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > which is/was available on MacOS for network printing
|
| Very much _IS_ there in the background.
|
| See http://localhost:631/printers on your OS X machine.
| mcculley wrote:
| I thought the default was disabled at some point. On my
| macOS laptop, I get:
|
| > Web Interface is Disabled
|
| > The web interface is currently disabled. Run "cupsctl
| WebInterface=yes" to enable it.
|
| But I cannot remember if I disabled that.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > But I cannot remember if I disabled that.
|
| Its ok, you're not going mad. ;)
|
| They disabled it by default as part of security hardening
| a few releases back. Probably around the same time they
| stopped shipping PHP and other stuff.
|
| CUPS is still running the printing in the background, its
| just the web UI that's been disabled. IIRC.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Safari can't open the page "localhost:631/printers"
| because Safari can't connect to the server "localhost".
| hawski wrote:
| I know about CUPS. There is no real alternative on Linux,
| is there? But it doesn't work like on macOS. I am sure
| they added some of magic on top.
|
| On macOS I think it either recognized my printer or I had
| to select it from a list. I don't remember which for
| sure. It was a few years ago.
|
| On Linux my Brother printer is not on the list. Brother
| offers a deb and rpm packages which may be obsolete for
| all I know. Then you have to install it manually. But in
| my case it never offered double sided printing.
|
| For years I am using a crutch in terms of Android driver
| and Brother's own app. This despite being offered by the
| producer doesn't offer double sided printing either. It
| doesn't even give ability to print in grayscale.
| bch wrote:
| > I know about CUPS. There is no real alternative on
| Linux, is there?
|
| I don't know what lifting _" real"_ is doing here, but
| lpd(8)[0] (line printer daemon) is what we used to use,
| and printcap(5)[1] to configure. It was general enough
| that you could make a music playlist system out of it[2].
|
| [0] https://man.netbsd.org/lpd.8
|
| [1] https://man.netbsd.org/printcap.5
|
| [2] https://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2003/05/23/lpdfor
| funandm...
| nextos wrote:
| Usually, drivers for similar printers might work. There
| are also generic driver sets like Gutenprint.
| Nonetheless, note that CUPS now discourages the use of
| any drivers, and support will be removed in the future.
|
| They claim that modern printers implement IPP and that
| should be the preferred protocol for printing. In IPP,
| printers advertise capabilities and are able to handle
| different high-level printing requests.
| freetanga wrote:
| I used this (CUPS) to add my Remarkable 1 as a Printer in
| MacOS. Worked like a charm, nothing to install on the
| laptop...
| daggersandscars wrote:
| Are you using Brother's Linux printer driver for your
| device? If not, I'd start there.
|
| https://support.brother.com/g/b/midlink_productcategory.asp
| x...
| hawski wrote:
| It never offered the option in my case.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Huh, my first thought was that it ought to be somewhat
| mechanically obvious if the printer supports double sided
| printing. But now I'm thinking, some printers do just
| magically suck the paper back in for the second side,
| right? And I'm wondering if my printer might secretly
| support double sided printing as well.
| hawski wrote:
| Exactly this magical sucking the paper back. I was
| amazed.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Mine did not. I am, therefore, non-amazed. Mazed?
| SllX wrote:
| Whelmed.
| sgt wrote:
| Works for me as well. This is a network printer available via
| WiFi.
| jahewson wrote:
| I guess your printer driver is free to emulate an LPT if it
| wants to.
| gpvos wrote:
| Well, that's easy to check out as long as you have a printer
| connected. It's going to depend on the printer. Doesn't work on
| my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid
| Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0 . Piping it to lpr works of course,
| as long as you have a default printer selected.
|
| Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can
| expect that the printer's escape codes will work.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't
| think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer.
| Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.
|
| It would be possible to write a PostScript program that
| emulates ESC/P (or PCL), although then you would have to send
| an entire page (or a page break) before the page would be
| printed, unlike the old dot-matrix line printers that you can
| print one line at a time, PostScript can only print one page at
| a time.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Its not like a laser printer can really print line by line
| though.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| An old HP laser printer will buffer plain text line-by-
| line, and will print a page once the last line is buffered.
|
| That buffer could have several random programs' outputs in
| it, all just dumped as simply as possible to /dev/lp0 (or
| lpt1 or whatever), and it works.
|
| A LaserWriter can't do these things.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >will print a page once the last line is buffered.
|
| You could usually set a timeout to eject the page if no
| data had been received for a while.
|
| >A LaserWriter can't do these things.
|
| The LaserWriter could emulate a Diablo printer which
| would do the same thing. It wouldn't accept PostScript
| then though.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| You can even do this with network printers, netcat a pdf to the
| open port and it will print.
|
| https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-with-ne...
| rwky wrote:
| Just did this with my HP Envy injket and it worked, had no
| idea this was a thing it's very cool.
| pm215 wrote:
| Back when I was at school in the 1990s, there was a dot matrix
| printer in the computer room still, which was the default
| printer for any of the computers on the network. One of the
| classic user errors was that somebody would try to print a
| document from Word and it would send a load of PostScript to
| the dot matrix printer, which would dutifully print it all out
| as PostScript source, wasting paper and printer ribbon until
| somebody told the printer to stop...
| yellowapple wrote:
| > So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls >
| /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?
|
| I can't attest to whether piping directly to the device works,
| but I routinely do stuff like lpr -o raw -P
| $SOME_CUPS_PRINTER < $SOME_FILE
|
| Back when I was doing warehouse IT work I'd hand-write ZPL code
| and shove it directly into Zebra printers for things like asset
| tags, printed instructions on equipment, etc. This was also my
| approach for various tools I wrote to automate the printing of
| packing slips and shipping labels - except these programs had
| to run on Windows machines, and I tell ya hwat Windows sure
| doesn't make it as easy as CUPS does.
|
| More recently I dusted off that particular skillset in order to
| print a bunch of labels for my kitchen. ZPL really ain't that
| bad of a language; sure beats trying to write PostScript or PCL
| by hand :)
| kn100 wrote:
| I discovered this in the most amusing way ever accidentally a
| few years ago.
|
| https://x.com/normankev141/status/1146547923758538755?t=oZrj...
|
| text of tweet: So I bought a networked printer recently and as
| you do decided to try connecting to it a few different
| undocumented ways. I tried telneting to it. It turns out that
| whatever you type, it prints typewriter style. That was a
| pleasant and hilarious surprise. #internetofshit
| saomcomrad56 wrote:
| I wonder if this works with a sharp M205 I have in storage.
| jolmg wrote:
| > One of the things that this person does is simply echo to
| /dev/lp0.
|
| > So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls >
| /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?
|
| Both of the following worked for me: printf
| 'hello\f' > /dev/usb/lp0 printf 'hello\f' | nc -N
| $printer_ip 9100
|
| This is on a Brother laser printer. Its programming guide is
| linked next to its manual online. The language is PCL, but you
| don't really need to know much about it to get simple stuff
| printed.
|
| Neither of the above involve CUPS. Using the `lp`/`lpr`
| executable like in other comments requires the printer to be
| registered with CUPS first.
|
| For `ls >`, the printer expects DOS line endings. `\n` just
| moves to a new line without "returning the carriage", so you
| need to pipe through `sed 's/$/\r/'` or use `nc -C`.
|
| With the USB connection, you can print multiple times to build
| a single page and it won't come out until you provide the form
| feed. With the TCP connection, the page will be printed when
| the connection is closed.
| mrighele wrote:
| > Using the `lp`/`lpr` executable like in other comments
| requires the printer to be registered with CUPS first.
|
| In modern Linux distros, lp/lpd are usually shims provided
| for backward compatibility, but it doesn't have to be that
| way. For example FreeBSD seems to provide support for lpd
| without for cups [1], although I don't see any real advantage
| in doing that.
|
| [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/printing/
| fluoridation wrote:
| In my experience, inkjet printers can print line by line like
| teletypes, but laser printers can't.
| heroiccocoa wrote:
| I wish we could go back to this uncomplicated UX. I just spent
| literally 2 hours setting up a brand new Epson ET-2850 printer
| for my dad. I'm quite disgusted at how slow, bloated and
| disjointed the process was. The printer ships with an android
| app, which worked fairly well, and, on the Epson website, some
| Microsoft Windows software, which was one of the worst software
| experiences I've ever had. The Wi-Fi setup is totally
| disjointed on the printer, app and windows release. You enter
| the Wi-Fi password via the app, which should then forward it to
| the printer. That's fine, it's better than using the dreadful
| printer interface. The printer saw the right SSID right away.
| No confirmation was given whether it connected or not. No big
| deal.
|
| The software on their website was a Windows executable .exe
| file that seemed outdated even 10 years ago. To complete the
| last few steps, the printer network connection had to be set up
| once again, even though I had already previously connected it.
| Each attempt would take around 10-20 minutes, only to fail. The
| network errors and troubleshooting steps were incredibly
| generic and unhelpful. The worst part, until that point, was
| that the printer shipped with outdated firmware, and I did an
| online firmware update via the printer itself, confirming that
| the printer's Internet connection had indeed already been
| established. Rebooting the printer did not help. It turned out
| that, despite only just downloading the Windows executable that
| same hour from the Epson website, they were shipping an old
| version .exe, with some bug that causes the network setup to
| not be detected. However, it never prompted me to update. Only
| after restarting the Windows computer, and then re-opening the
| .exe, did some update trigger, and it allowed me to finish
| setting through to the last step of the installer to download
| the rest of the bloat and let the printer appear in the list of
| available printers on the network on the computer.
|
| I then did a test print via an iPad. Took about 15 seconds.
| fionaellie wrote:
| Wow. That brings back a lot of memories. Those escape codes,
| figuring how to insert a form consistently (line it up with the
| mark on the left, maybe click it three times or press an insert
| button to suck it in a bit), then continual adjustments until
| things mostly fit. Good memories!
| hiidef wrote:
| Hacker invents the newspaper
| hiidef wrote:
| hacker invents the newspaper
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The most interesting part of the article for me was the
| _Gathering the Data_ section.
|
| Because honestly, this would be a project better targeted for a
| large e-ink display. Maybe you've even seen the photo of the
| large wall-hanging e-ink display that in fact displays the day's
| news [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspape...
| whall6 wrote:
| Why can't people just simply exercise self control
| chwilson wrote:
| There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who's
| sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as
| neuron-activationally possible
| whall6 wrote:
| So we should just accept our fate. Got it
| aschmelyun wrote:
| I ask myself the same thing every day
| bubblesnort wrote:
| It got stuck in 1984.
| krylon wrote:
| Until very recently, dot matrix printers were still common in
| doctors' offices in Germany (for reasons), and the sound they
| make always gives me huge wave of nostalgia, even bigger than
| hearing a fax/modem emitting its handshake sound.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I periodically run into them in places that still use multipart
| forms (e.g. manufacturing, shippping/logistics).
| aschmelyun wrote:
| I was at a tires place that still uses them as of last month.
| forinti wrote:
| When I was in school, I would use an Epson LX80 to print a
| stencil for a Mimeograph. I would remove the tape so that it
| would hit the stencil harder.
|
| I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the
| memories...
| G_o_D wrote:
| Back in time: Dont have fancy big screen monitors just echo >
| /dev/lp0. Like Redirect output to physical stdout
| thesurlydev wrote:
| This is fantastic. I can't remember the last time I've interfaced
| with a dot matrix printer. It might have been in college getting
| a print out of Fortran programs. Thanks for sharing!
| behindai wrote:
| Very environmental
| donohoe wrote:
| And there you have it folks - print is back! The old monolithic
| newspaper execs were right after all.
|
| That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend
| task.
| acka wrote:
| OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would
| be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot
| matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The
| same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe
| bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a
| photo of its backside.
| sanex wrote:
| The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB
| adapter even though he has it called a serial one.
| acka wrote:
| Ah, that explains it. Thanks for pointing this out.
| aschmelyun wrote:
| Yep, parallel! My bad, I'll have to make some adjustments to
| the article.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| I was wondering how he plugged it in and magically there was
| /dev/lp0. but it makes more sense if its a parallel than a
| serial adapter.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I've got a DEC LA75 Companion Printer that uses serial. Still
| works.
|
| https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Compa...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For a while I've been printing "three-sided cards" which have an
| image on one side and a QR code with documentation on the other
| side
|
| https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029
|
| the "third" side is the web site linked by the QR code.
|
| I got bored with photography and made up a character who goes
| around with a cheap lens and always keeps the aperture around
| f/18 or more, uses heavy processing, color grades and shoots a
| standard non-standard aspect ratio so it looks like he's using
| some weird camera from an alternate timeline.
|
| I just started printing this series and came to the conclusion
| that 4x5 can be easily made by cutting down a 4x6 but instead of
| cutting it I'd have an inch to put in a QR code and documentation
| on the front: similarly I could cut down a 5x7 to a square 5x5
| and fit documentation in there. I have a few boxes of glossy
| paper that aren't printable on the back and I think I'm going to
| use the, that way. (Found out later that instagram has a 4x5
| standard and that my sports photos taken with a good lens really
| look good in that format)
|
| One question though is what the documentation looks like and I am
| split between: (1) minimal changes to what I have, (2) some kind
| of fake dot matrix or other effect that looks like an old printer
| that might have been built into that fantasy camera or (3)
| something that makes he most of what the inkjet printer can do.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The headline gave me flashbacks of doing the Friday morning news
| slot for my college radio station back in the early 90's, and
| printing out the stories off our news feed that I wanted to read
| on the stations big noisy dot matrix printer.
| waymon wrote:
| This is awesome. Well done.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Leave it to a PHP programmer to immediately disregard the
| security system as soon as he encounters it. ;)
|
| Interesting though. Been reading sbout old teletypes the last few
| days, so this is quite fitting for me.
| chillpenguin wrote:
| I'm surprised that old printers like that go for $80-120 USD. I'm
| pretty sure you can buy a new inkjet for $50.
|
| If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of
| printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for
| the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any
| recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| I am also in this boat. I don't want to have to buy in for ink
| for $50 every 3 months.
| vetrom wrote:
| Nifty project, this also reminds me of m68k.news which I think
| was on here a few years back. (source:
| https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news )
| throwup238 wrote:
| I'd use the Wikipedia current events portal [1] to generate the
| headlines/news. It's less sensationalist that news headlines and
| contains a lot more global news.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
| neilv wrote:
| I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was
| 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at
| home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount.
|
| It's hard to make out the dots in the photo, but I'd guess this
| is probably around a 24-pin, printing in near-letter-quality
| (NLQ) mode, and (barely) doing true descenders.
|
| Note how straight the vertical lines of the line-drawing-
| character box at the top. If it was alternating printing one line
| while moving the printhead to the right, then the next line while
| moving printhead left, the slight imprecision of the drive in
| many printers would tend to be visible when the pixels of the
| line don't quite line up. Or if it's doing NLQ mode, it might be
| printing bidirectionally on the same line, overlapping dots, and
| might be more forgiving.
|
| I would guess this model probably has features like italic and
| bold (or at least double-strike), maybe condensed, double-wide,
| toggle from 10cpi and 12cpi, etc. And you can usually mix those
| within a page, like you know that you can print twice as many
| characters horizontally at condensed in just a small spot of the
| page, and do the layout arithmetic based on that. That printer
| might also do bitmaps, and/or let you define characters.
|
| If you can't find the doc for a particular model, but it might be
| some degree of Epson-compatible, search for "epson esc/p printer"
| documentation, and see what codes work. And know about form-feed,
| for a smooth finish to your page.
|
| Or, if you you just want to treat it as an 80x66-character array,
| but get a little fancy within that, in a one-hour project, you
| can make a shell script that fetches data with Curl, generate
| HTML, and pipe it through something like `w3m` or `elinks` for
| formatting. Or use Svelte and pull in 100 packages from NPM to
| print to the vintage thing.
|
| For a more telegram-y aesthetic, you might be able to source
| yellow paper (search keywords "tractor-feed", "continuous form"),
| preferably unperforated. For more computer-y, search keyword
| "greenbar". A 9-pin or similar printer will look more vintage
| than the crisp one in the article, or you can try running a
| 24-pin in draft/fast mode.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first
| time in over 30 years. It seems like an admission that the
| quality was better than before, but still not great. Sounds a
| bit quaint - if printers were new in 2024, 9-pin printers would
| be "high quality", 2-pass printing would be "super quality",
| and 24-pin printing "extreme quality"
|
| In the video, you can see it's doing both of the techniques you
| mentioned: each line in printed in 2 passes, both in the same
| direction, presumably for better alignment. But the next line
| is printed in the opposite direction, again with 2 passes.
|
| In the 1980s, I had first a 9-pin printer (Star SG10) and then
| a 24-pin printer (NEC P6)
| sneak wrote:
| News headlines can cause just as much cognitive negative
| influence as news websites.
|
| Just skip the news entirely. It's an utter waste of time. Your
| life will be better for it.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| There were startups back in the dot com boom days that were doing
| this when the internet first came out. "No need for newspaper
| delivery! You'll get it printed right at your house."
|
| Today it probably seems nearly unimaginable to teens that we used
| to have to get newspapers delivered and before you got the paper
| you just didn't know what had happened.
| bobek wrote:
| Perfect, I do the same thing for daily quote.
| codazoda wrote:
| I'm fascinated with printing calculators. Does anyone know of a
| printer that will print on calculator paper roles and print A-Z
| numbers and some symbols, like demonstrated here?
|
| Edit: Looks like I just need a receipt printer, which comes in
| dot matrix or thermal. Whoa, I need one.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Like a thermal printer in general or specifically attached to a
| calculator?
| codazoda wrote:
| There's just something about the paper rolls. I was thinking
| dot matrix. I suppose either would work. I might buy one and
| do something like op did.
| wgrover wrote:
| Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels
| and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer:
|
| https://github.com/wgrover/jamie
|
| The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's
| meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries.
|
| The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on
| the label using the largest possible font size.
| chaps wrote:
| Many years ago I worked at a company that had to print out every
| transaction with a dot-matrix printer every evening. It was my
| group's job to do very minimal maintenance on it like adding
| toner/paper and such. When filling the toner though, you had to
| screw the toner container onto a special.... gyrating.... setup
| just to make sure all toner came out. A thing that struck me
| about it was how uncannily, uh, sexual, it was in its gyrations.
|
| Does anybody have any idea what model of printer this might have
| been? I'd love to see a video of it again.
| Animats wrote:
| I had this machine connected to a news feed for years.[1] It's
| the mechanism from a Model 14 Teletype tape printer. It's still
| in my living room, and the tape feeds out into a wire basket.
| It's driven by a Python program running on an old EeePC
| subnotebook.
|
| [1] https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html
| sixothree wrote:
| Beautiful machine.
| snickmy wrote:
| Glass onion's vibes
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And in the movie this was being use as a parody, to emphasize
| how much of a cargo culter the enterpreneur was...
| 0x0 wrote:
| A large chunk of that php code could probably be replaced with a
| call to https://www.php.net/wordwrap
| capitainenemo wrote:
| A long time ago we used to output certain key server logs
| summarised to a dot matrix printer. It was a neat place to see
| the history at a glance, but the idea was also that it was an
| unhackable audit. Probably done more efficiently with WORM drives
| nowdays, but without that immediate tactile presence.
| yalok wrote:
| I remember printing the whole K & R "The C programming language"
| book on my dot-matrix printer, with some roll-paper, and then
| drilling the pages through to staple it with some thick paper
| clips wires. Legendary devices.
| fdfgyu wrote:
| I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting
| data.
|
| Everything about dot matrix printers suck for data, except the
| roll of paper that can print arbitrarily long logs.
|
| To the community, other than a dot matrix, what other roll paper
| based printers can I use for this?
| gaudystead wrote:
| Receipt printer, maybe? Depends how wide you need it to be
| though.
| keroton wrote:
| This is the most Hacker News post ever made
| mesh wrote:
| This brings back so many memories. When I was in graduate school
| in the mid 90s (economics and European politics), it was
| difficult to get detailed, daily news in English on Eastern
| Europe. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was one of the
| best resources, with a daily email with an overview of news from
| the region.
|
| I would print this out every single day on an old dot matrix
| printer so I could then take it to the library where I would read
| it with everything else.
|
| Can find the archives (in a not very user friendly format) here:
| https://www.rferl.org/Newsline
|
| btw, second best source of daily news in English in Eastern
| Europe was shortwave.
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