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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

#231

Post by Rocka24 »

freetanga wrote: post #117
sangnoir wrote: post #50

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 used this (CUPS) to add my Remarkable 1 as a Printer in MacOS. Worked like a charm, nothing to install on the laptop…

What would be the use case of this? I have a remarkable 2 and there's the official Read on Remarkable extension that automatically sends a pdf of the page you're on or the book or whatever to your Remarkable. I'm not sure if it works on Remarkable 1 but there isn't any documentation on it being unsupported.

extension link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/Read%20on%20reMarka...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#232

Post by jorvi »

nextos wrote: post #230
jorvi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is wrong. CUPS recommends using the IPP protocol , but the IPP driver (called “IPP Everywhere”) is only available on relatively modern printers. Everything else still has to use drivers, mostly PPD.

Any CUPS daemon will raise the following warning on startup. I just copied this from my Systemd log: cupsd[873]: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS. See https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/103 Not saying this is the correct decision, but IPP Everywhere is available on most printers that are < 10 years old. Obviously, that rules out older printers, which are fairly…

I have a Brother printer from 2019 (HL 2340) that does not support IPP Everywhere. A lot of other printers from before ~2020 don’t either.

You are (like so many other people) confusing IPP the protocol with IPP the driver, which is honestly not your fault and a terrible naming mistake.

And like you mentioned, people have way older printers because if all you do is print monochrome and mostly text, a printer from 2004 doesn’t lack much aside from AirPrint / Mopria. Which is why I suspect CUPS will not deprecate at least PPD drivers.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#233

Post by efreak »

tomjen3 wrote: post #197
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #27

Legitimately 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).

> assuming you want to run this on Linux

If you're in DOS (not NT/XP+, not sure about 9x), you can use the debug command to write to the serial and parallel ports. You can also use `ECHO > COM1` for serial, or for the parallel port `ECHO > LPT1`

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#234

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #199
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"? 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 somethin…

[deleted]

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#235

Post by jolmg »

SoftTalker wrote: post #177
mrighele wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But you do still need to register the printer prior to using, or at least have a basic registration set up that works with it.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#236

Post by desdenova »

kragen wrote: post #224
noja wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not "toxic" by the usual definitions iirc if you have wet hands you absorb way more and it is toxic

I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever died from bisphenol-A poisoning. Searching the medical literature finds no case studies of emergency-room visits or dying epoxy painters. Rat studies like https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236345183_Pathologi... come up with acutely lethal oral doses around 2000–3000 milligrams per kilogram, by wh…

> My best guess is that we'll find out that a few food additives that became popular 50 years ago upset the intestinal microbiome in a way that promotes obesity.

People can get drunk enough to fail a breath test, just from eating industrialized bread.

There's so much chemical crap added to industrialized food we're not even aware of, unless we send each item to a lab for testing before we eat.

But yeah, people sure must be getting fat because the McDonald's cashier gave them a receipt made of bad paper...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#237

Post by desdenova »

gzalo wrote: post #164
autoexec wrote: post #92

Earlier 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-...

I wonder if it's feasible to make diy Thermal paper using lemon juice, like the old "invisible ink experiment"

Should be easy enough to test if you have a thermal printer.

Just spread lemon juice on paper, wait for it to dry, and try printing on it.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#238

Post by kragen »

desdenova wrote: post #236
kragen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever died from bisphenol-A poisoning. Searching the medical literature finds no case studies of emergency-room visits or dying epoxy painters. Rat studies like https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236345183_Pathologi... come up with acutely lethal oral doses around 2000–3000 milligrams per kilogram, by wh…

> My best guess is that we'll find out that a few food additives that became popular 50 years ago upset the intestinal microbiome in a way that promotes obesity. People can get drunk enough to fail a breath test, just from eating industrialized bread. There's so much chemical crap added to industrialized food we're not even aware of, unless we send each item to a lab for testing before we eat. But yeah, people sure m…

> People can get drunk enough to fail a breath test, just from eating industrialized bread.

I don't think this is unique to industrialized bread; in cases like this, what the yeast are fermenting is starch in the bread, which has been the main component of bread as long as there has been bread. They aren't fermenting the xanthan gum, guar gum, calcium propionate, titanium dioxide, etc. In fact, if anything, I'd think the anti-fungal preservatives like propionate would tend to make industrialized bread harder for yeast to ferment.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#239

Post by gpvos »

userbinator wrote: post #200
gpvos wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. Adding a formfeed resulted in an empty page, so there are clearly possibilities but since I can't find a quick PCL example[0] and lpr suits me fine I'm not going to investigate further.

[0] I'm assuming PCL is most likely supported, and I remember having worked with an EPSON dot-matrix printer (i.e. probably using ESC/P) in 8-bit days and that it didn't require special commands to print basic text.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#240

Post by CapstanRoller »

kragen wrote: post #224
noja wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not "toxic" by the usual definitions iirc if you have wet hands you absorb way more and it is toxic

I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever died from bisphenol-A poisoning. Searching the medical literature finds no case studies of emergency-room visits or dying epoxy painters. Rat studies like https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236345183_Pathologi... come up with acutely lethal oral doses around 2000–3000 milligrams per kilogram, by wh…

>I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever died from bisphenol-A poisoning.

That's like talking about cigarettes and claiming people don't die from nicotine, therefore smoking isn't a problem. Missing the point terribly.

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