The question is where to find good news and not how to consume them. I'm curious what source you guys are using for tech (besides this site, obviously) and politics.
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
191–200 of 259 posts
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#192Very cool!
My only online news source these days is text.npr.org which might as well be a dot matrix printer.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#193The question is where to find good news and not how to consume them. I'm curious what source you guys are using for tech (besides this site, obviously) and politics.
I have found the Economist hard to beat.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Receipt printers are fun but take care not to buy toxic paper https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...
Does this warning also hold for thermal label printers? I have this one: https://www.creativebloq.com/reviews-niimbot-d110
Yes, but it looks like you can get tape for it that is BPA/BPS free.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#195I enjoy reading the daily news fetched from calibre and synced to my kindle e-reader. Love the e-ink display, and the ux for reading and navigating sections is great.
Led
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#196Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions… On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)
I miss the soundscape of old computers: - the POST beep - the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting - the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer - even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
Wi-Fi
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#197Legitimately great product idea, I think? Just the idea of a personalized (truly! by you! Not by MSN or whomever), off-screen news feed every morning is cool. The idea that I could *also replace my alarm clock with a dot matrix printer* is even cooler. I could easily customize the php to hit my own news sources, but wouldn't know where to begin doing the hardware side on my own. Probably many others in this spot. I'd…
As someone who did something similar back in the day - it is actually pretty easy since you literally have to connect the printer (hardest part, as you will need adaptor cables) and then write to a dev output, which is just a file (assuming you want to run this on Linux).
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#198[dead]
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#199So, 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"?
For those who want to look into the horse's mouth, USB printing device class:
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbprint11a021811.pd...
"Printers have two different types of commands: those that transfer data, and those that control the USB interface or printer interface. The host prints something on a printer by delivering data on the Bulk OUT endpoint. This data may take the form of PostScript, HP PCL, or any other PDL. This data may also be encapsulated in a PCP, such as IEEE 1284.1, or something that is vendor-specific. In addition, the data may also be simple text, or it may be a proprietary PDL."
The rest of the spec makes it very clear that this is intended to work exactly like a standard parallel port at the "application layer". Use the bulk OUT endpoint to write data to the printer, and the bulk IN to read data from it. There is a status request that returns the same signals (out of paper, etc.) that a parallel port has.
If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work?
ESC/P and ESC/P2 which followed are backwards-compatible and based on the MX, so likely yes.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#200So, 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…
Well, that's easy to check out as long as you have a printer connected. It's going to depend on the printer. Doesn't work on my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0 . Piping it to lpr works of course, as long as you have a default printer selected. Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can expect that the printer's escape codes will work.
Doesn't work on my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0
It's probably expecting ESC/P or PCL. Laser printers also usually wait for a formfeed before they will process a page.