I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
aschmelyun.com
aschmelyun.com
https://github.com/ValdikSS/printer-driver-funnyprint
I use it to print barcodes, and it's very handy compared to serious enterprise printers: it's lightweight, battery-powered, and works over Bluetooth.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
Note: no idea how it has evolved over the years but I’m sure “something something app” sums it up
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
Handling receipt paper is what turned out to be the cause of the high BPA numbers when boba tea was tested https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1899641377002025252
I worked as a cashier for years in my teens and twenties though, so it’s probably already in my blood.
this was like 20 years ago, still makes me shudder after i learned about the BPA stuff
I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
This is what I pictured, but now I'm curious how you'd use the inside of the can.
"In the 2010s public health agencies in the EU,[81][82][83] US,[84][85] Canada,[86] Australia[87] and Japan as well as the WHO[12] all reviewed the health risks of BPA, and found normal exposure to be below the level currently associated with risk."
If it has some health effects, they've been incredibly hard to actually pin down..
You just can't polymerize plastics without a plasticizer. It's just not allowed by chemistry. No free lunch.
If you want something that's not going to leach huge amounts of plasticizers onto your fingers, use an inkjet or a laser toner printer or a laser marking machine.
They don't really make those for receipts, though, because fingers tend to be wet and powdered toner is expensive.
Thermal paper was widely used for fax machines and portable printers years back as well.
Fun fact: when Apple first opened retail stores, they printed receipts on big Lexmark laser printers, 8.5x11, on VERY nice paper, like resume paper, it was absurd how nice and thick the paper was. It was preprinted with return policies etc on the back (and maybe a color Apple on the front?) It only lasted a few years like that and they eventually got cheap thermal printers installed.
> live in city
> breathe vehicle exhaust and tire dust everyday
> drink alcohol
> drive to my desk job
> live on ultra processed food
> salt and sugar for a treat
> better not touch this piece of paper - for my health
> open another Monster energy drink (tm). I can sleep when I’m dead.
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
So, yeah, there could also be a window of opportunity by which other readers of the zine could send their own message to be included in the distribution channel (i.e. the bog roll) and things could propagate.
Well, I guess the point is, that suddenly I think that receipt printers are really the only printer I want to deal with, ultimately. I've gotta stock up on rolls.
Among other things it has very broad printer support and Chinese-Japanese-Korean character support (requires purchasing a model with the chars preloaded). It's still under active development but it references the PHP library the author mentions. This lib is actually used in a many restaurants in Asia.
I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
(scroll to "Use alternative receipt paper": "Companies that offer phenol-free alternatives")
The problem with a production product is refilling all those little rolls of printer paper. They will always run out when no one is available to answer the phone, of course.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(if you build yourself, source non-phenol [made without BPA/BPS] thermal paper rolls)
In my case, I will probably try to use my receipt printer as a zine production line. The nature of the format inspires some great article writing ..
Impermanent art. That just bothers me.
An artist that dedicates their life to such a thing is like swimming in the fountain of youth without ever taking a drink.
Impermanent art. That just bothers me.
An artist that dedicates their life to such a thing is like swimming in the fountain of youth without ever taking a drink.
Also if you buy a pack of BPA-free paper rolls, you get a crazy amount of pictures for $20. Granted you'll have to re-roll them into smaller rolls to fit the camera.
And the issue is that, it's only fun as long as you have people using it...
I did write a StarPRNT protocol library for it, but in hindsight, I probably should have used ESC/POS instead.
There’s a basic rate limiter set up to prevent misuse, and a character limit, but beyond that I just kind of wanted to see what people would send.
It’s been surprisingly chill, and I’ve only had to handle a few nonsensical text dumps or garbage messages.
Maybe tangential, but I just added a little 3-second delay to my stats counter. I’ll find out if that worked for the specific bots I’m trying to avoid in a couple days.
I might have to do this with my printer the Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
They aren't difficult to find, but they're too expensive for a stupid project like this, which is a glorified fax machine.
the only problem i had with the site itself was actually accessing it - TikTok doesn't "do" links so i kept having to check if i'd spelt their name right!
The thing I actually want to play with is probably some kind of board game that incorporates the printer... ideally with bar/QR codes so the computer can print out money, IOUs, instructions, etc., and have this computer mediation that still gives people physical items to manipulate.
For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
I connected it to my linux server and without any drivers I can print with e.g.: `echo "Hello World!" >> /dev/usb/lp0`.
It also supports bar/QR codes.
But knowing the things that pop up on HN, something like remotely massaging someone via a receipt printer is totally believable.
I’m actually hoping someone reads this and creates a remote massaging receipt printer.
For some reason I find it really funny to potentially be getting printed out adverts for shady boner pills or singles near you.
Originally planned to use a proper teleprinter, except mine is designed to sit in the the cramped racks of missile silos, so it has a rather obnoxious fan in it. It's also fully electronic and uses a dot matrix mechanism rather than something more fun. It's only redeeming quality is the VFD for message composition.
I don’t know, I kind of like having a place for some people to anonymously vent (as more than a few have).