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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

aschmelyun.com

151–160 of 259 posts

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#151
post #35

Why can’t people just simply exercise self control

There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who’s sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as neuron-activationally possible

So we should just accept our fate. Got it

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#152
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has been available on Linux for even longer. I would be surprised if the feature was not available on Linux for your printer. Edit: added footnote 1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019

I know about CUPS. There is no real alternative on Linux, is there? But it doesn't work like on macOS. I am sure they added some of magic on top. 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…

Usually, drivers for similar printers might work. There are also generic driver sets like Gutenprint. Nonetheless, note that CUPS now discourages the use of any drivers, and support will be removed in the future.

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.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#153

So, 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…

I wish we could go back to this uncomplicated UX. I just spent literally 2 hours setting up a brand new Epson ET-2850 printer for my dad. I'm quite disgusted at how slow, bloated and disjointed the process was. The printer ships with an android app, which worked fairly well, and, on the Epson website, some Microsoft Windows software, which was one of the worst software experiences I've ever had. The Wi-Fi setup is totally disjointed on the printer, app and windows release. You enter the Wi-Fi password via the app, which should then forward it to the printer. That's fine, it's better than using the dreadful printer interface. The printer saw the right SSID right away. No confirmation was given whether it connected or not. No big deal.

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.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has been available on Linux for even longer. I would be surprised if the feature was not available on Linux for your printer. Edit: added footnote 1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019

> 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.

Safari can’t open the page “‎localhost:631/printers” because Safari can’t connect to the server “localhost”.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#155

So, 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…

Wow. That brings back a lot of memories. Those escape codes, figuring how to insert a form consistently (line it up with the mark on the left, maybe click it three times or press an insert button to suck it in a bit), then continual adjustments until things mostly fit. Good memories!

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#156
post #94

News headlines can cause just as much cognitive negative influence as news websites. Just skip the news entirely. It’s an utter waste of time. Your life will be better for it.

I was looking for this comment as I saw one of the NYT headlines manufacturing counterfactuals towards whatever end. It cites a politician looking at worker migration to small, struggling towns, "and he fueled a fire that was already smouldering".

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.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#157
post #12

I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.

Back in the early 1980s when I was maybe 15 I got one of the first Jupiter Ace computers. The Ace never sold well, so there wasn't a lot of software or hardware available, and even if there had been I didn't have the money. My school didn't offer computer science, so I arranged to cycle across town to another school that did. They had just got two Research Machines 380z's and were throwing out the ASR-33 they had previously used. Of course I scavenged it and took it home.

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.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#159
post #133

til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce resource for a project like this! kudos!

I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses

It’s great for printing on carbon copy duplicate/triplicate paper that needs to be signed one time on all copies.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#160
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who’s sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as neuron-activationally possible

So we should just accept our fate. Got it

No, parent was answering your question, not offering judgement nor the conclusion that you so swiftly jumped to.
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