Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY
Canon printer hacked to run Doom
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I've ever used a scanner since the camera became half decent on the iPhone. Even when I have 40 pages of text to scan, it's more straightforward to just snap it from my desk than to walk the 50' or so to the $8000 scanning/printer we have in the office. And, when I'm in the field - well, you get the idea. I guess if I was scanning hundreds of pages, It would probably be worthwhile to use a desktop scann…
Everyone has their own priorities and processes. For me, being able to throw half a dozen pages into a document feeder and get a small, good-quality PDF in my email a minute later is a big step up from the effort I used to put into assembling image files into multi-page online resources for my students. What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles? (Every time I've photographed pr…
> What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles?
My favorite solution: CamScanner. It's one of the apps I use most on my Android phone, and is available on iOS too. There's a free version and a Pro version for $5. I don't know the differences offhand, but I bought the Pro version without a second thought after trying the free one.
It autodetects the edges of your document and crops and deskews it, and then enhances the color/brightness/contrast for readability. It will do this automatically or you can adjust the cropping and enhancement manually.
For more intensive cleaning up of scans (either from a camera or a scanner), there's a wonderful open source app called Scan Tailor:
A few months ago I scanned an old manual for the SIMPL (Systems IMPLementation) language we developed and used at Tymshare in the '70s. It was a photocopy of an original manual with most of the pages skewed a bit one way or the other, and dark speckles all over the place.
I cut off the binding (lucky for me it was Velobind so I just cut off the back strip with a knife and had it re-bound at Kinko's when done) and ran the pages through my Brother MFC-9070cdw at 600 dpi. Scan Tailor took the page images and deskewed them, removed the speckles and generally cleaned things up. There were one or two pages where I made some manual adjustments - and also I turned off the feature where it zooms the page to fit just the text on it since I wanted the text to be the same size on all pages. Other than that I just let it do its thing and the result was pretty nice - the PDF looks much better than the original manual!
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#43Slightly OT, but what is everyone's favorite minimalist printer? Are there any? I avoid printing like the plague, but sometimes you just need to print a ticket, letter, or a photo of a document you have on your computer. I don't need a scanner, wifi, 500MB of software, or even color. I need something which is small and out of the way when I'm not using it (most of the time), cheap, and ready to go when I have to prin…
I have a Brother HL-2270DW for the rare printing that I do need to do at home. Has been great so far.
Chinese printnet! XD
EDIT:
Stupid comment... Brother Industries is actually a Japanese company. Learn something new every day.
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#44SMBC might be starting to overtake XKCD for king of referenceable (is that a word?) comics.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2158#comic
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inkjet printers squirt ink through tiny nozzles. When they're left idle in a dry environment for a long time, the ink tends to dry up and clog them, and you get white streaks. The "cleaning" basically involves moving the printhead over a receptacle with a sponge in it (it's called a spittoon, seriously) and firing all the nozzles for a short time while suction from a platen-driven vacuum pump sucks on them (that's wh…
Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more. --EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every star…
To respond to your response, while it may be sensible to offer cleaning as optional, I'm not really sure that's in anybodies interests. It's simply not fair to push this off onto the consumer, they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary. The printer is already doing the 'right thing' in that it will clean itself when necessary, and all that really needs to be done is make sure the printer is only using the necessary amount of ink when cleaning itself, and only cleans itself when it actually knows it's necessary.
For example, laundry detergent companies mark their measuring caps to measure out how detergent then you actually need, but companies found that if they didn't put any mark on the caps at all people on average assumed they needed more detergent then even the company said you should use, which was already more then you needed. People just have no reference point to guess when these types of things need to be done.
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#46I was hoping for a huge stack of Doom frames rolling out of the printer.
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#47I'd like someone to make custom firmware to stop these new canon pixma's from cleaning themselves at every start, and generally taking minutes before even starting to print. It's ludicrous.
My next printer will be a 24 pin, wide carriage dot matrix with a tractor feed. Though it seems counterproductive to use a high duty cycle device for the small amount of printing I do, truth is that the racket of an impact printer is a small tradeoff. It used to be that inkjet would print black with an empty color cartridge. Now, printing something may take hours or days until I get to the store to buy a Yellow...nev…
I second the advice to just buy a simple business laser printer. I too have had it with inkjets and the refill scam, but a typical laser cartridge is good for thousands of pages. Although I have a technician's nostalgia for dot matrix printers, I can't think of any valid reason to run one for normal home printing needs.
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more. --EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every star…
To respond to your response, while it may be sensible to offer cleaning as optional, I'm not really sure that's in anybodies interests. It's simply not fair to push this off onto the consumer, they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary. The printer is already doing the 'right thing' in that it will clean itself when necessary, and all that really needs to be done is make sure the printer is only using the…
they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary
I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've seen a lot of office workers who probably don't have any idea how printers work know to take the toner cartridge of a laser printer out and rock it a few times when the printouts start to fade.
To me the biggest annoyance with cleaning (besides the ink waste) is how long it takes, and how difficult it is to do a test pattern print - usually it's a long cycle of "push cleaning button, wait a minute or more, then go back to the computer to fiddle with the disgustingly bloated software to get the test pattern option".
What I'd prefer is a simple pushbutton that starts cleaning the moment you hold it down, and keeps cleaning as long as it's held down. Next to it could be a "print nozzle check" button. Instruct the users to use these when streaks start showing up in the output, and there will probably be far less ink wasted as a result. (There will always be the idiots who lean on the cleaning button until the cartridges empty, but that's a problem of the existing system of fixed-length cleaning cycles too.)
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
My next printer will be a 24 pin, wide carriage dot matrix with a tractor feed. Though it seems counterproductive to use a high duty cycle device for the small amount of printing I do, truth is that the racket of an impact printer is a small tradeoff. It used to be that inkjet would print black with an empty color cartridge. Now, printing something may take hours or days until I get to the store to buy a Yellow...nev…
Have you looked into laser printers? I've found that for sporadic printing they're much better than inkjets, and not too expensive as long as you don't want color.
This is what me and my wife did. She bought the same laser printer she has at work for home and it works amazing. It was cheap, and not being caught in the ink racket makes it cheaper.
There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.
Re: Canon printer hacked to run Doom
#50Slightly OT, but what is everyone's favorite minimalist printer? Are there any? I avoid printing like the plague, but sometimes you just need to print a ticket, letter, or a photo of a document you have on your computer. I don't need a scanner, wifi, 500MB of software, or even color. I need something which is small and out of the way when I'm not using it (most of the time), cheap, and ready to go when I have to prin…
This probably isn't quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I like old laser printers. You can get an HP LaserJet 4m for less than $75 just about anywhere, the toner cartridges are less than $50 and will probably outlast any basic needs you have, and if it has any problems it's easy enough to clean and replacement rubber rollers can be purchased cheaply. The service manual is even freely available and it descr…
The only thing is that the 4M and 5M probably use a large amount of power compared to their modern counterparts - anyone got any measurements?
You should be able to throw most dialects of PCL and PostScript at those printers and they'll work fine, so this fits the GP's requirements (not having 500mb of software)
Anyone know how to make Windows speak PostScript?