Print this file, your printer will jam

nedbatchelder.com

29 points·joshwa··7 comments

This reminds me of the legend (even featured on car talk) where a guy's car will not start when he buys vanilla ice cream...

http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp

Nice link. One of the comments also points to the "Case of the 500 mile email"

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

The file to print is nothing more than a music score the printer has to follow.

I'm wondering if there is a file that makes a specific printer play music, just like a virtual instrument following midi instructions... Oh, it's the Internet, there IS such a score.

There's a record called "Symphony For Dot-Matrix Printers" which consists entirely of music made from printing special patterns to a load of dot-matrix printers. I heard it in a record shop once and it sounded pretty cool but not having the equipment to play vinyl I didn't actually buy it. Wish I had now, if anyone knows where to get it on CD then let me know...

Also, this article reminds me of the Tortoise's "I can not be played on record player X" record from Godel, Escher, Bach :)

Not a CD, but:

http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/downloads/en/frame_index.ht...

Hard to imagine those collections of sounds just being made from those objects.

Thanks

Here's a Radiohead cover using a similar idea: http://www.vimeo.com/1109226?pg=embed&sec=1109226

To me, his use of the scanner is most interesting.

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