Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
aschmelyun.com
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
1–10 of 259 posts
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#2I love it. I’ve switched a lot of my news consumption to RSS. This feels like another step in that direction that I’d love to try.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#3from '92 to '96 one of my jobs was producing a daily news summary from usenet and a feed of the Federal Register. delivered as 40 to 100 densely printed dot matrix pages. Couple boxes of paper a month. Re-inked ribbons so often they'd wear through.
The Epson LQ printers were incredible machines. the one (an a half) I used for that job did that, plus millions of mailing labels, with hardly a burp. There were some part swaps and a couple of printheads, iirc.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#4This is fantastic. I'm all in on this, here I come eBay!
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#5I did something similar with a receipt printer, an Arduino and a PHP script in 2011. It got replaced by an iPhone very soon after, but I'm thinking of reviving it, because it forces you to filter what's important.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#6Matrix printers can actually do quite a lot... depending on the models, you can change fonts, use bold, underline, sometimes italic, double-width and double-height characters and even graphics (although often are relatively low resolutions like 90 or 180 DPI).
One funny thing I did once for a escape-room-like game, was a box with only a parallel printer connector on it. When connected to the printer, it was parasite-powered from one of the control lines of the parallel port (it was just a tiny PIC microcontroller drawing a few hundred µA) and was sending a hint to the printer.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#7> Additionally, since this is an experimental project, I wanted to remain super cheap for this data, free if at all possible.
There's also NewsCatcher which is free for open source side projects:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#8This is great! I am currently thinking about getting a weekend paper newspaper like FT weekend. Reason being: I read news on my phone too often. And the news create negative emotion without being useful. News on paper and only once per week would make me more relaxed.
His paper printer news daily would be great to bridge the gap in between!
On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any hackable open source printer like this available?
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#9My first reaction was "why print, just send it to yourself as an email" but then realized that the major motivator for this project was to cut down on screen use.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#10I did something similar with a receipt printer, an Arduino and a PHP script in 2011. It got replaced by an iPhone very soon after, but I'm thinking of reviving it, because it forces you to filter what's important.
I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'd definitely recommend BPA free paper if you don't use it already!