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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

It's baffling that you have to carry a mobile phone to access a show. What if you run out of battery? Or if you accidentally break the screen just before entering the venue? The more the technology evolves the more we find horrible uses for it. People should fight back by refraining from purchasing tickets from them, I know is not easy for people to miss their favorite artist but until a monopoly is broken there is no other effective way to prevent them from doing what they want.

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I had to use something like this to get into The Killers gig last week at the O2 in London (fantastic gig btw, and Andy Bell from Erasure made a special guest appearance to sing A Little Respect which was the cherry on top, but I digress).

The WiFi in the O2 was woeful, and even on "The best network" EE the app wasn't loading.

Eventually after stepping aside and letting a load of people go in front of us I managed to get it to load, but it was a dreadful experience.

Contrast that with seeing the Pet Shop Boys last month in Birmingham where the ticket was on my phone in Apple Wallet was night and day (and you could print the ticket if you didn't have an iPhone, or wanted a physical version).

I mean Ticketmaster’s current best practice seems to be NFC tickets stored in a mobile wallet which do work offline

You can still print the ticket on paper. Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me, since I refuse to keep buying inkjets I only use a couple times a year.

> I refuse to keep buying inkjets I only use a couple times a year.

Laser printers are the solution, and Brother laser printers seem to remain the most highly-regarded.

Yep, I've bought 3 laser printers over the past 30 years... 1 about every 10 years, and not because I needed to... because I wanted more features. I've passed the old models down to others and they're still running. Toner never dries out, heads don't need cleaning. I would never buy another inkjet. The only use I can see for inkjet is photo printing, and even then I'd rather get them done at CVS or walgreens unless it is a special size or printing material that they can't handle.

A brother laser can often be had for $100 these days.

Another printer lifehack: Goodwill (which has a 'computer' store near me, they send all the best tech stuff there) sells laser printers of all kinds for like $20-40 and that plus a $20 Amazon non-official cartridge will basically have you set for life for the occasional print job. Since they're heavy, the Goodwill route saves most of the cost compared to eBay, though I did get mine on eBay.

I actually recommend HP but Brother is great too. My current HP is at least 10 years old, and it's the second I've owned. My first was a 2000 vintage which I used from 2005-2017. (Its rubber rollers eventually got dried out and I wasn't as skilled a refurbisher as I fancied myself)

Yup, I use my brother laser printer to print probably 20 pages a year and it’s been going strong for 5 years now on the cartridge that it came with when I bought it on eBay.

You should consider thermal printers like the Brother PJ line. A bit expensive but so small you can put it in a drawer, and no cartridge or toner at all. Just thermal paper, which I run off the same pack since I bought the printer 3 years ago.

No, you actually can’t for the tickets the article is talking about. This is increasingly common. It’s insane

> Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me

I've really appreciated my local library for allowing 20ish pages of printing per day, which has allowed me to limp through the no-printer lifestyle. Plus I usually grab a DVD movie while I'm there.

Life's good in the mid-2000s.

For sure. Additional info... many libraries also let you stream movies through kanopy.com, and read/listen to e-books through the app Libby.

Laser printers have solved this - I don’t expect to change the toner for a decade.

I bought a laser printer, I think something around 19 years ago, and it broke before I could finish the toner

Stop buying overpriced ink jets. I get knock off laser cartridges for cheap and they last a couple years each. I did have to push a few random buttons on my Brother to let me do it, but it works now

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