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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

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Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#171

Post by z2 »

autoexec wrote: post #92
hansonkd wrote: post #21

I did something similar with a receipt printer. a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of…

Receipt printers are fun but take care not to buy toxic paper https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...

The most mainstream phenol free thermal paper out there is one made from a branded chemical "pergafast" which is supposedly based off of urea. This is increasingly the type used by big brand stores where the paper is advertised as BPA and BPS free. It appears safe in studies so far in terms of not being absorbed through the skin nor endocrine disrupting, but is also known to be highly toxic to aquatic life. There's another chemical related to vitamin c branded "Alpha Free" but it's harder to find.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02732...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#172

Post by doublerabbit »

eponeponepon wrote: post #95
i5heu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot recommend FT. I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side. That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.

Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round. Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.

Ah yes. Filling newspapers with petty leaflets of spam the night before and then having to get up at 6am in the cold rain to get lost cycling around an estate block smelling smells of god knows what only to be paid less than minimum wage. what fun times.

At least I could then afford to buy a packet of cigs, and then upsell them to the chavs for a higher price...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#173

Post by TacticalCoder »

whartung wrote: post #29

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…

> So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

Many commented that it still works... This brought back good memories of sending native PostScript files to an HP LaserJet 4M+'s IP address, over the LAN, using netcat. Amazing stuff.

The gotcha of course is when the shit hits the fan: it can quickly degenerate into pages upon pages of garbage getting printed.

On the plus side back when things were, and still are, simple like that, typically just turning the printer of and terminating the command and you'd be good to go. As opposed to, say, weird spoolers/cache sometimes relaunching print jobs people thoughts were long gone.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#174

Post by TacticalCoder »

chihuahua wrote: post #146
neilv wrote: post #93

I 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…

> I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years.

At the same 30 years ago there were already printers doing 1200 DPI (HP had them by early 1996 for sure: I was there). This beats the shit out of retina displays. And yet they're called "retina displays". That one makes me chuckle much more!

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#175

Post by TacticalCoder »

I had a dot matrix printer back in the days hooked to my Commodore Amiga. I don't know how but I remember that I was somehow managing to print graphs with XY axis and plots for my math lessons (teacher was very enthusiastic about it btw). IIRC I coded this myself back then: didn't use anyone else's software.

But mostly that dot-matrix printing was printing D&D characters templates: after one too many eraser/pencil these D&D cheats were all dirty, so we'd print new ones and re-copy our character's stats/inventory. I don't remember the name of the DTP program I was using but it was a blast discovering DTP as a teenager!

Now... I miss that noise and TFA certainly doesn't help.

I've got two itches I want to scratch with a dot-matrix printer (well, with two printers really, I wouldn't want to mix the two usecases), since a very long time:

    - have it print one line everytime a user account logs in through SSH (yeah, a paper trail *and* a sound notification seen how noisy the thing is)

    - have it print a summary each time an option expires:

    SLV241004C0030000 expired OTM, premium collected: $x.xx
A dot-matrix printer is so oldschool it's cool.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#176

Post by SllX »

MollyRealized wrote: post #158
SllX wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whelmed.

whelmed = overwhelmed https://www.ragan.com/comms-etymology-can-you-just-be-whelme...

Perhaps. But:

"You're overwhelmed, Freeze was underwhelmed. Why isn't anyone ever just whelmed?" https://youtu.be/UdBcnRFN4Vg

Also: https://youtu.be/4u63ciF_r0g

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#177

Post by SoftTalker »

mrighele wrote: post #148
jolmg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/printing…

OpenBSD does as well. The advantage is you don’t need CUPS.
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