Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
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Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#2Super fun read.
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#3Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#4Super fun read.
Can confirm.
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#5You're much better off getting an older TZ/TZe P-touch with a USB port from before the more recent enshittification. CUPS supports them well and there are utilities that can print images direct to them.
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#6You're much better off getting an older TZ/TZe P-touch with a USB port from before the more recent enshittification. CUPS supports them well and there are utilities that can print images direct to them.
I was about to buy a D610BT or P710BT (to use on Mac) ... what enshittification should I know about?
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#7You're much better off getting an older TZ/TZe P-touch with a USB port from before the more recent enshittification. CUPS supports them well and there are utilities that can print images direct to them.
If you are serious about printing labels and can program you should get yourself a Zebra label printer or Intermec/Honeywell one that has ZPL emulation (these tend to be cheaper than Zebra, so near the pricing of Brother consumer stuff, but more fiddly with media alignment). ZPL is this super weird language, but after few hours you will be printing any labels you want without dealing with CUPS or its filter chains. Totally indispensable tool when you do that is https://labelary.com/viewer.html (the fonts there are somewhat off from what the real hardware does, but the sizing more or less matches)
Edit: another thing that you get with Zebra/Honeywell is that these printers do not use proprietary media and transfer ribbons (if you go with TTR model, which I would recommend) and you can source the consumables anywhere you want as long as it will mechanically fit. We even use Zebra printer with Epson-branded continuous DT uncut label media to print a beer tap-list. Along that path we even found what can be hardware bug in the printer: apparently you cannot get the print head to overheat, as the power supply will go into thermal shutdown well before that, but in all fairness the thing was not designed to print half a meter long mostly black “labels”.
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#8[deleted]
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#9Fun read and great debugging but I'm honestly really sick of this kind of attitude since it's essentially arguing for more churn and for more e-waste:
> There's a CUPS version that's 10+ years old, Linux kernel almost old enough to drink, all of that r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ crawling on an ARMv5.
> but it seems that they have one specific design and they're happy to milk it for as long and as cheap as possible
Like who fucking cares how old the CPU in a label printer is?
Re: Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
#10Fun read and great debugging but I'm honestly really sick of this kind of attitude since it's essentially arguing for more churn and for more e-waste: > There's a CUPS version that's 10+ years old, Linux kernel almost old enough to drink, all of that r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ crawling on an ARMv5. > but it seems that they have one specific design and they're happy to milk it for as long and as cheap as possible Like who fucking…
How is saying "stop manufacturing new stuff that's obsolete from day 1" advocating for e-waste?