Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
aschmelyun.com
aschmelyun.com
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02732...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/bpa-subst...
I have this one: https://www.creativebloq.com/reviews-niimbot-d110
iirc if you have wet hands you absorb way more and it is toxic
Rat studies like https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236345183_Pathologi... come up with acutely lethal oral doses around 2000–3000 milligrams per kilogram, by which measure it has about the same toxicity as table salt. It also has about the same pharmacokinetic half-life as table salt. The concerns (documented meticulously in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_Bisphenol_A) are largely about its possible effects as a xenoestrogen, and in particular its potential to cause obesity. There have also been concerns that chronic exposure might be carcinogenic, but so far those haven't panned out, so it's clear that if BPA exposure has an effect on cancer risk, either positive or negative, it's very small in magnitude.
I don't think there's anything in the obesity concern, because the obesity pandemic seems to be associated with eating ultra-processed food rather than handling thermal-printer receipts or drinking out of Nalgene bottles. My best guess is that we'll find out that a few food additives that became popular 50 years ago upset the intestinal microbiome in a way that promotes obesity.
In the meantime, though, it doesn't seem unreasonable to try to minimize your exposure to the stuff, even if ultimately it turns out to be harmless or only slightly harmful. But I wouldn't worry about it.
Eating synthetic imitations of food, though, seems overwhelmingly likely to be bad for you.
That's like talking about cigarettes and claiming people don't die from nicotine, therefore smoking isn't a problem. Missing the point terribly.
Perhaps your intended reference, however, is to the other toxic components of cigarette smoke, such as benzo[a]pyrene. That is, cigarettes kill something like one out of ten people, but the vast majority of those deaths are not due to nicotine. (Except in the indirect sense that nicotine is addictive and induces people to smoke cigarettes so that they are exposed to the other poisons in the smoke.)
Very well, then. What are the other toxic components of thermally printed receipts you're concerned about?
I'm open to hearing what point you think I'm missing, but so far all you've done is strike a pose of fatigued knowingness. If you have knowledge to share on this matter, by all means, share it; certainly I won't be the only one who needs the point spelled out for them, because as dumb and uninformed as I admittedly am, I doubt I'm the dumbest or least informed person reading this thread.
I think the point CapstanRoller was making was just that their understanding of toxicology is limited to vague hunches, so they feel comfortable in dismissing any information from anyone who knows more than they do about the subject.
I bet it's mostly just sugars. That and plain overconsumption and lack of exercise. Excacerbated by societal shifts that mean people don't get shamed into behaving better as much as they used to be. Trying to blame evil chemicals for making you fat is just a cope for those that don't want to take any responsibility for their unhealthy lifestyle - even if there are additives that "promote obesity" it's going to be a relatively minor effect compared to the basic energy in vs. energy out balance.
The cause might be sugars, but they'd have to be sugars that were little used 50 years ago when the obesity pandemic began. One promising candidate was high-fructose corn syrup, with a promising hypothesis about how a fructose/glucose ratio of 1:1 was harmless. That hypothesis was always somewhat unlikely and basically didn't pan out. Glucose syrup was also an interesting hypothesis‚ but fructose/glucose hypotheses all run up against the sucrase-isomaltase problem: people in some places, such as the US, ate plenty of sucrose before 01974, and it gets split into fructose and glucose in the small intestine. So you need an explanation of why the modern sugar-heavy diet has such dramatically different health effects from historical sugar-heavy diets. Maybe it's fucose? Chlorinated sugars like sucralose? Massive galactose doses? You could be right, but you've chosen to take on a heavy burden of proof there.
As for your "shame people who don't want responsibility" ideas, I suggest reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/12/the-physics-diet/, which begins:
> There are at least four possible positions on the thermodynamics of weight gain:
> 1. Weight gain does not depend on calories in versus calories out, even in the loosest sense.
> 2. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, but calories may move in unexpected ways not linked to the classic “eat” and “exercise” dichotomy. For example, some people may have “fast metabolisms” which burn calories even when they are not exercising. These people may stay very thin even if they eat and exercise as much as much more obese people.
> 3. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, and therefore of how much you eat and exercise. However, these are in turn mostly dependent on the set points of a biologically-based drive. For example, some people may have overactive appetites, and feel starving unless they eat an amount of food that will make them fat. Other people will have very strong exercise drives and feel fidgety unless they get enough exercise to keep them very thin. These things can be altered in various ways which cause weight gain or loss, without the subject exerting willpower. For example, sleep may cause weight loss because people who get a good night sleep have decreased appetite and lower levels of appetite-related hormones.
> 4. Weight gain is entirely a function of calories in versus calories out, and therefore of how much you eat and exercise. That means diet is entirely a function of willpower and any claim that factors other than amount of food eaten and amount of exercise performed can affect weight gain is ipso facto ridiculous. For example, we can dismiss claims that getting a good night’s sleep helps weight loss, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
> 1 and 4 are kind of dumb. (...)
4 is your position. Read the article to see why it's dumb. It's a short, easy read.
Also I suggest reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry..., a review of The Hungry Brain by neuroscientist Stephen Guyenet, who specializes in nutrition. Also, and I know this may be a big ask, maybe read an actual book on the topic too. Also, you would probably find it illuminating to read https://www.bpni.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2020-UPFs-ob..., "Ultra-processed food and the risk of overweight and obesity: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies," and although observational studies aren't the strongest form of evidence (you could hypothetically have some kind of widespread undiscovered brain infection that both causes obesity and also makes you eat Cheetos and Cheez Whiz, without the latter causing the former, or fat people might settle for ordering Domino's Pizza because it's too hard for them to travel all the way to Whole Foods), there are also randomized clinical trials showing the same thing.
Maybe also https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13668-024-005..., "Ultra‑processed Food and Obesity: What Is the Evidence?", whose summary says:
> Greater UPF [ultra-processed food] consumption has been a key driver of obesity. There is a need to change the obesogenic environment to support individuals to reduce their UPF intake. The UPF concept is a novel approach that is not explained with existing nutrient- and food-based frameworks.
It's shorter than the SSC posts I linked, but it demands a higher level of literacy.
People can get drunk enough to fail a breath test, just from eating industrialized bread.
There's so much chemical crap added to industrialized food we're not even aware of, unless we send each item to a lab for testing before we eat.
But yeah, people sure must be getting fat because the McDonald's cashier gave them a receipt made of bad paper...
I don't think this is unique to industrialized bread; in cases like this, what the yeast are fermenting is starch in the bread, which has been the main component of bread as long as there has been bread. They aren't fermenting the xanthan gum, guar gum, calcium propionate, titanium dioxide, etc. In fact, if anything, I'd think the anti-fungal preservatives like propionate would tend to make industrialized bread harder for yeast to ferment.
Just spread lemon juice on paper, wait for it to dry, and try printing on it.
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.
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)
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.
At least you did something cool with your screen time!
"Let's just tape this thermal receipt to your to-go container, and ... refund? What do you mean refund?"
However, thermal receipt printers at restaurants seem to be among the cheapest ones around - you can get thermal printers that result in receipts that withstand decent temperatures (but, obviously, not all).
Many shipping labels are printed by direct thermal printers and those labels stand up quite well. Check Zebra for examples.
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!)
And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.
Edit: added footnote
1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019
extension link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/Read%20on%20reMarka...
Very much IS there in the background.
See http://localhost:631/printers on your OS X machine.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/lpdforfunandm...
If you install the specific driver it generally should have parity with their Windows / macOS driver though.
But you should in theory also be able to do this without any Brother-specific driver since pretty much all modern printers speak IPP for mobile device compatibility.
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.
cupsd[873]: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS. See https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/103
> As for printer drivers, those few printers that "need" them can migrate to standalone applications/services using the CUPS API to provide an IPP Everywhere-compatible Printer instance. PAPPL provides a convenient framework for easily creating these applications and porting existing CUPS raster drivers, and the following printer applications are already available or (in the case of Gutenprint) under development:
[...]
> ps-printer-app: PAPPL-based PostScript printer application that supports all CUPS/PostScript printers via PPDs and includes all of the Foomatic and HPLIP drivers.
So drivers will still be supported in a sense, just not directly by the CUPS daemon.
You are (like so many other people) confusing IPP the protocol with IPP the driver, which is honestly not your fault and a terrible naming mistake.
And like you mentioned, people have way older printers because if all you do is print monochrome and mostly text, a printer from 2004 doesn’t lack much aside from AirPrint / Mopria. Which is why I suspect CUPS will not deprecate at least PPD drivers.
So yes, CUPS itself will only support IPP without any printer-specific driver. Since mobile phones also only directly support IPP this sounds like a reasonable decision.
Ah, yes. Thanks for pointing that out! I wonder how much more secure that will make things for those who have to use legacy printers.
> Since mobile phones also only directly support IPP
Technically AirPrint is not IPP Everywhere, they use a different raster format and some different glue. For example my Brother printer supports AirPrint but fails ~50% of the IPP Everywhere self-certification tests. But that’s splitting hairs.
https://support.brother.com/g/b/midlink_productcategory.aspx...
"You're overwhelmed, Freeze was underwhelmed. Why isn't anyone ever just whelmed?" https://youtu.be/UdBcnRFN4Vg
> 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 $printer_ip 9100
Neither of the above involve CUPS. Using the `lp`/`lpr` executable like in other comments requires the printer to be registered with CUPS first.
For `ls >`, the printer expects DOS line endings. `\n` just moves to a new line without "returning the carriage", so you need to pipe through `sed 's/$/\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.
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.
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.
https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-with-ne...
PDF includes pretty much all the printer needs, like pagesize, colour palette, font information, etc.
It's not the greatest format in the world... But everyone can shove in one of dozens of PDF parsing libraries without a lot of effort. So it happened.
For those who want to look into the horse's mouth, USB printing device class:
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbprint11a021811.pd...
"Printers have two different types of commands: those that transfer data, and those that control the USB interface or printer interface. The host prints something on a printer by delivering data on the Bulk OUT endpoint. This data may take the form of PostScript, HP PCL, or any other PDL. This data may also be encapsulated in a PCP, such as IEEE 1284.1, or something that is vendor-specific. In addition, the data may also be simple text, or it may be a proprietary PDL."
The rest of the spec makes it very clear that this is intended to work exactly like a standard parallel port at the "application layer". Use the bulk OUT endpoint to write data to the printer, and the bulk IN to read data from it. There is a status request that returns the same signals (out of paper, etc.) that a parallel port has.
If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work?
ESC/P and ESC/P2 which followed are backwards-compatible and based on the MX, so likely yes.
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.
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.
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.
Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can expect that the printer's escape codes will work.
It's probably expecting ESC/P or PCL. Laser printers also usually wait for a formfeed before they will process a page.
[0] I'm assuming PCL is most likely supported, and I remember having worked with an EPSON dot-matrix printer (i.e. probably using ESC/P) in 8-bit days and that it didn't require special commands to print basic text.
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
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 :)
Many commented that it still works... This brought back good memories of sending native PostScript files to an HP LaserJet 4M+'s IP address, over the LAN, using netcat. Amazing stuff.
The gotcha of course is when the shit hits the fan: it can quickly degenerate into pages upon pages of garbage getting printed.
On the plus side back when things were, and still are, simple like that, typically just turning the printer of and terminating the command and you'd be good to go. As opposed to, say, weird spoolers/cache sometimes relaunching print jobs people thoughts were long gone.
This is still a thing... I was setting up a modern Brother laser printer in FreeBSD (Brother only supplies Linux "PPDs" which run a bunch of binary blobs with Ghostscript and weird stuff) and figured it was easy enough so I did it remotely. Could only watch helplessly on the security camera as the printer spit out every page in it's paper cassette covered in junk... Remote stop commands did nothing.
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.
For PostScript printers, there was a filter application (provided by Adobe) that would turn plain text (without the %! magic) into PostScript.
$ sudo apt-get install cups-bsd
It's similar to the terminal emulation situation: despite being decades old, the VT100 has become a de-facto terminal command set due to its popularity.
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
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 µA) and was sending a hint to the printer.
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.
Maybe for version 2.0!
Also, EeePC is something I haven't heard about in so long. That took me back!
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!
If you're in DOS (not NT/XP+, not sure about 9x), you can use the debug command to write to the serial and parallel ports. You can also use `ECHO > COM1` for serial, or for the parallel port `ECHO > LPT1`
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.
On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any hackable open source printer like this available?
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.
Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.
At least I could then afford to buy a packet of cigs, and then upsell them to the chavs for a higher price...
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.
There's also NewsCatcher which is free for open source side projects:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...
d=$(date +%d)
m=$(date +%m)
y=$(date +%Y)
wget -q https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.p... && open ./scan.pdf
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Compa...
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.
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)
At the same 30 years ago there were already printers doing 1200 DPI (HP had them by early 1996 for sure: I was there). This beats the shit out of retina displays. And yet they're called "retina displays". That one makes me chuckle much more!
I'd previously built a parallel port for the Ace on veroboard from TTL logic, based on a design a friend of mine came up with for his ZX Spectrum, so I could use the Ace to ride around on a micromouse. To drive the ASR-33, I had a 24v smoothed power supply that I'd scavenged from a skip when my mother's employer had scrapped some prototype ATMs (cash dispensers), so I wired that up to give +/- 12V and switched that from one line on the parallel board using some power transistors desoldered from the ATM. Then I wrote code to bit-bang 110baud RS232 in Forth on the Ace. It took a lot of trial and error, as there wasn't exactly a lot of documentation available in the town library, but I got there in the end.
I'm not sure if I was the only person who ever had a printer connected to a Jupiter Ace, but I'm pretty sure I was the only person to print Ace code listings to an ASR-33. I wish I still had that ASR-33 but somewhere along the way my parents decided they were fed up with storing all my junk, asked what I wanted saving, and I didn't think to save that.
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.
May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?
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.
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)
- 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.
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/#/
I do. It's like the walk-up song to talking to my friends and having a good time.
most boards won't have any. if you pay premium, you get post beep. if you pay even more you get post stage led indicators.
so this item on your list is not about the past but enshitification.
That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend task.
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...
Does anybody have any idea what model of printer this might have been? I'd love to see a video of it again.
Interesting though. Been reading sbout old teletypes the last few days, so this is quite fitting for me.
But mostly that dot-matrix printing was printing D&D characters templates: after one too many eraser/pencil these D&D cheats were all dirty, so we'd print new ones and re-copy our character's stats/inventory. I don't remember the name of the DTP program I was using but it was a blast discovering DTP as a teenager!
Now... I miss that noise and TFA certainly doesn't help.
I've got two itches I want to scratch with a dot-matrix printer (well, with two printers really, I wouldn't want to mix the two usecases), since a very long time:
- have it print one line everytime a user account logs in through SSH (yeah, a paper trail *and* a sound notification seen how noisy the thing is)
- have it print a summary each time an option expires:
SLV241004C0030000 expired OTM, premium collected: $x.xx
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.
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!
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.
I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the memories...
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Looks like I just need a receipt printer, which comes in dot matrix or thermal. Whoa, I need one.
My only online news source these days is text.npr.org which might as well be a dot matrix printer.
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?
Just skip the news entirely. It’s an utter waste of time. Your life will be better for it.
My understanding of THAT story is that the town is very protective of the black workers who moved there to work, and that it wasn't the politician but his subordinate who 'turned his sights' there, and did so to say horrible things about those people with no evidence. That's my understanding of what that story is. To claim 'he fueled a fire that was already smouldering' seems a wildly irresponsible thing to say as a headline.
Maybe try pulling from the Associated Press? I'm a bit at a loss. You can at least avoid bad faith headlines.
Yes... Just add lp group to your account (since /dev/usb/lpX are root:lp)
What you need now is a line printer to spit it out faster!
...my SO would kill me.