Glass onion's vibes
And in the movie this was being use as a parody, to emphasize how much of a cargo culter the enterpreneur was...
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
141–150 of 259 posts
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#142I remember printing the whole K & R "The C programming language" book on my dot-matrix printer, with some roll-paper, and then drilling the pages through to staple it with some thick paper clips wires. Legendary devices.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#143I had this machine connected to a news feed for years.[1] It's the mechanism from a Model 14 Teletype tape printer. It's still in my living room, and the tape feeds out into a wire basket. It's driven by a Python program running on an old EeePC subnotebook. [1] https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html
Beautiful machine.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#144I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting data.
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?
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#145I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting data. 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?
Receipt printer, maybe? Depends how wide you need it to be though.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#146I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount. 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-chara…
I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years. It seems like an admission that the quality was better than before, but still not great. Sounds a bit quaint - if printers were new in 2024, 9-pin printers would be "high quality", 2-pass printing would be "super quality", and 24-pin printing "extreme quality"
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)
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which is/was available on MacOS for network printing Very much IS there in the background. See http://localhost:631/printers on your OS X machine.
I thought the default was disabled at some point. On my macOS laptop, I get: > 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.
> 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.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#148So, curiosity today. 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…
> One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0. > 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 This is on a Brother laser printer. Its programming guide is linked next to its manual online. The language is PCL, but…
> Using the `lp`/`lpr` executable like in other comments requires the printer to be registered with CUPS first.
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.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#149This is the most Hacker News post ever made
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#150This brings back so many memories. When I was in graduate school in the mid 90s (economics and European politics), it was difficult to get detailed, daily news in English on Eastern Europe. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was one of the best resources, with a daily email with an overview of news from the region.
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.