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Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

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Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#321
post #246
post #187

I can also recommend drawing it instead of printing if you hate printers with the same passion as me. Record to beat for drawing a working QR code is 3 tries and I think about three hours (for an SSID of 13 bytes (5 unicode characters) and 19-character password). I did it mostly out of curiosity how hard it would actually be (spoiler: medium difficulty).

I'm more curious about why you hate printers.

Others said most of what there is to say but to give an answer from 'OP': them working reliably is the exception.

Out of yellow -> refuses to print black. DRM cartridges that you can't have refilled. Black ink being more expensive than blood. Driver problems. Network issues. Paper jams. Out of paper error when there is paper. Trying to draw from the wrong paper tray. It doing five minutes of warmup exercises when you really want to get going but forgot to print this signed form to hand in. A new printer being literally free if you just buy the ink with it (my grandma has one of those). And so on.

It's insanity more often than not.

Ironically, Linux drivers are (as of ~2013 I've noticed this) more reliably than Windows ones. For scanners also. My dad had to re-add the printer (which works fine on Linux) every time on Windows in the configuration panel. It would say 'offline' but could be discovered and then printed with just fine. But only until it goes into standby mode, the next day it's the same story. Now he got an expensive scanner (the kind where you get business support), same story: it just doesn't see the device half the time. This time it's clearly a device issue though: it also only responds to ping when the computer can work with it (i.e. the device is just unreachable when the computer says it's unreachable; not a driver issue for once). And you pay a few hundred bucks for that.

The big ones at school or in bigger companies, those seem to work reliably most of the time these days, and if one is out of order you can go a floor up and use the next one. I also remember my old boss (RIP) had a printer that never had a single issue -- of course the model went out of production by the time it gained the track record (all I remember is that it was a Brother laser printer, no colors, only one paper tray, no scanning... all that probably helped). Perhaps you, too, had one of these lucky models and were spared these printer problems.

But so yeah that sparked a whole category of jokes on the internet, most people having this experience (at least until a few years ago, perhaps it has gotten better? People also just don't print as much).

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, anyone on Android 10 and up already has sharing of wifi via we built in. As should any of the new routers.

My new router came with the QR code stuck on. ios and apparently android have wifi sharing but its still going to be problem when an android user visits an ios user.

Fortunately, the two rarely comingle.

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#323
post #187

I can also recommend drawing it instead of printing if you hate printers with the same passion as me. Record to beat for drawing a working QR code is 3 tries and I think about three hours (for an SSID of 13 bytes (5 unicode characters) and 19-character password). I did it mostly out of curiosity how hard it would actually be (spoiler: medium difficulty).

> hate printers with the same passion as me A remedy exists, it costs around 100€, is sold by Brother and is called "wifi-enabled laser printer". Your life will be free off printing woes onwards.

Second. The "Brother Print&Scan" app is completely usable for printing from iPhone. Third-party replacement toner is cheap.

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hate printers with the same passion as me A remedy exists, it costs around 100€, is sold by Brother and is called "wifi-enabled laser printer". Your life will be free off printing woes onwards.

Second. The "Brother Print&Scan" app is completely usable for printing from iPhone. Third-party replacement toner is cheap.

I've had good success with the Android variant of that app as well.

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#325
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about after load, that tab automatically goes completely offline. Users can manually do this in Chrome on a tab by tab basis by using developer console and setting Throttling to "Offline"

That sounds more promising. The site might be able to store data and then send it the next time the page is loaded. I think at the end of the day, a malicious dev could probably find a workaround to most implementations. Might just be better to vet out sites and use reputation to state they are truly offline.

I hear what you're saying, but I also believe this to be a solvable problem

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>get around NAT at the ISP level genuinely interested in the benefits of this. care to share?

My ISP puts everyone behind some sort of NAT, which means I can't reach my home network from elsewhere since I can't open ports. They'd let me buy my own IP address for a monthly fee, but I've found that an old Pi I already had, an autossh-ed reverse shell, SSH forwarding and a cheap cloud instance work just fine for checking sensors and the like, cost less and the cloud instance has other uses, too.

I see, so NAT traversal over SSH as opposed to VPN/DDNS

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#327
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t trim whitespace, I ended up on a network recently which had a space on the end of the SSID

I hope you told them to fix their shit.

I've met tons of people who will argue with you that it's not broken because "A trailing space is no big deal. You can't even see it." I try to explain to them that you may not see it, but the computer does. They just look at me with that blank stare as if I'm crazy and they're right. At that point I tend to drop it and take a mental note to never help that person with computer issues of any sort.

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#328

> Your WiFi information is never sent to the server. This makes me think that we could use some flag that identifies purely static websites. Like next to the green https lock there is a sign that this website can not send data to any server

What if it didn't send anything to the server. Today. But stored it in local storage. And sends it next week when you come back.

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#329
post #187

I can also recommend drawing it instead of printing if you hate printers with the same passion as me. Record to beat for drawing a working QR code is 3 tries and I think about three hours (for an SSID of 13 bytes (5 unicode characters) and 19-character password). I did it mostly out of curiosity how hard it would actually be (spoiler: medium difficulty).

> hate printers with the same passion as me A remedy exists, it costs around 100€, is sold by Brother and is called "wifi-enabled laser printer". Your life will be free off printing woes onwards.

How do I connect the printer to wifi, without the printed wifi card?

Re: Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card

#330
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answering as the author who also understands the fundamentals of all of the technologies involved and questions much of what goes on in the minds of today's web developers and designers-- I use Make as the standard way to interact with every repo I own. This allows me to type `make build` instead of `$some-language-specific-command-I-forget-in-2-weeks`. I use Docker for distributing every app I build. If the app is a…

But now you’re paying for keeping a server online, whereas a GitHub page could’ve hosted this static website for free.

Free as in beer, yes
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