Canon printer hacked to run Doom(bbc.co.uk) |
Canon printer hacked to run Doom(bbc.co.uk) |
http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixm...
What I especially liked is that this was literally one of the challenges from the Matasano crypto challenges:
http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/6/
It's fun when theory meets practice.
I'm not so sure about that - it's sure to help get the point across to the technically less savvy. Also, it got the BBC to devote an article to the subject that it otherwise probably wouldn't have.
There are lots of video games that are now more widely known than Doom. People who have never played an FPS have had Flappy Bird on their phone.
Doom was unnecessarily ambitious. Awesome, but unnecessary.
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...nevermind if I order from Amazon. An impact printer just prints lighter as ink is depleted.
Printing should just work. It doesn't any more. I miss my Star Micronics NX80.
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 why the feed rollers spin when it's doing this.) It uses a ridiculously large amount of ink in the process too - Google "waste ink container" for some further reading.
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 print something.
I kinda miss dot-matrix printers, to be honest.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2158#comic
EDIT:
Stupid comment... Brother Industries is actually a Japanese company. Learn something new every day.
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?
However I've lost count of the number of times the scanner/copier has been useful even though I didn't want that bit to start with and the WiFi actually makes it easier to use. No more finding that USB cable.
It's the peak of value to be honest and a worthy trade off.
I guess if I was scanning hundreds of pages, It would probably be worthwhile to use a desktop scanner, but for 40 pages or less - smart phone camera wins every time.
Got it on eBay for 1 Euro. Eats standard HP LaserJet cartridges that you can find on eBay for just a few bucks.
Pros: fast, reliable, inexpensive to operate (I've had it for 4 years and have yet to need to buy a new toner cartridge), speaks PCL & PostScript out of the box so it works fine on Linux without any vendor-specific software, includes an Ethernet port so I can plug it into my home network, supports duplex printing (printing on front and back of a sheet of paper).
Cons: can't print in color. Really, that's about it.
I don't think this particular model is still for sale, but this $199 model from their current lineup looks like the modern equivalent: http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/printers/SL-M3320ND/XAA
e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers
Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver:
There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.
The total cost has only been about $150 or $200.
Anyway, I'm tired of pitching printers. Wide carriage allows printing US B size drawings. Tractor feed means not running out of paper in the middle of a job. And impact technology means not thinking about running out of Magenta every time I print something.
I don't want to wait for nozzles to.clean or fusers to heat up. I just want the damn thing printed quick enough that I don't have time to browse HN. It's about flow.
What do you do to minimize irritants like uneven margins and wonky viewing angles? (Every time I've photographed printed pages, I've wound up feeling stuck with a bunch of work to make the output actually look reasonable.)
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!
I also bought a dedicated semi-pro photo printer last year. A full load of ink costs me $120 for 8 itty bitty tanks.
--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 startup.
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.
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.)
Well, progress would be already an excessively optimistic concept. There's no need to imagine conspiracies - one just need to observe how cartridges stop working before being fully depleted, or how ink is sold at ridiculously inflated prices.
And yes, given the price per oz of ink the process is quite expensive (I've heard that it is as high as 0.25/cleaning). And in the least expensive Canon printers the "waste ink" sponge is irreplacable leading to a planned obsolescence of the printer itself. Most of the 'key' ink jet patents have expired so it may be possible for someone to build a printer that is more economical but so far no one has. I suspect if they externalized the true cost of the printer and avoided the ink subsidy that they would not sell enough printers to stay in business.
I chuckled at the idea of using an old 24 pin dot matrix (or why not go seriously old school and use a line printer) printer, it is informative to note that people used inkjet printers that broke down a lot rather than use the older dot matrix printers. Granted the Canon system sucks, the Epson system is a bit better but not by much, HP, well HP can't really afford to lose any margins in their printer business.
So perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new printer from a new company.
How much "letter quality" printing do I need in an age of emailed PDF's?
Is futzing with consumables at the expense of flow better than noise? For me, I don't think so. I'm looking anew at printing like I came to recently look anew at the command line. There are tradeoffs, and for me one of those with home lasers and inkjets is loss of flow.
If I wanted old-school misery, we'd be talking pen plotters.