Wasn't there someone who had printers connected to the internet and a live video stream of the printers printing the messages?
I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
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Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#22There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc. And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here]( https://no…
I remember wanting the Berg printer but it was crazy expensive
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#23receipt printers are a blast. at one point i was livestreaming chatgpt talking to humans via a printer: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr04ofLsxtl/
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#24Wasn't there someone who had printers connected to the internet and a live video stream of the printers printing the messages?
Good Enough did something similar: https://guestbook.goodenough.us/
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#25If you do this be sure to buy BPA free receipt paper
Handling receipt paper is what turned out to be the cause of the high BPA numbers when boba tea was tested https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1899641377002025252
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#26I did that once. Spammers found it within 15 minutes.
Were you getting random text? Or actual targeted spam?
For some reason I find it really funny to potentially be getting printed out adverts for shady boner pills or singles near you.
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#27I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#28Somebody did that back in the 1980s. They put a small printer into a phone that had the same form factor as a Western Electric model 500.[1]
This connected to a PBX and printed "While you were out" slips.
It was a real product, but did not catch on. Anyone remember that thing? I saw ads, but never one in person.
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#29Somebody did that back in the 1980s. They put a small printer into a phone that had the same form factor as a Western Electric model 500.[1] This connected to a PBX and printed "While you were out" slips. It was a real product, but did not catch on. Anyone remember that thing? I saw ads, but never one in person. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone
I have a rotary phone, a voip adapter, and have been writing a local SIP server for another experiment. I am insanely tempted to replicate this.
Re: I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
#30I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.
Hey it’s me, the author! That was intentional as I honestly enjoy the trolling.
There’s a basic rate limiter set up to prevent misuse, and a character limit, but beyond that I just kind of wanted to see what people would send.
It’s been surprisingly chill, and I’ve only had to handle a few nonsensical text dumps or garbage messages.