41 ms·

Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

904 points by chrisdemarco 2y ago

ozarker 2y ago
I 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.
h2odragon 2y ago
from '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.
- pcardoso 2y ago
  Still have my LQ 100 in my parents attic, perhaps I could do something like this. Sadly I don't have the paper feeder (I only used A4 paper with it).
  - h2odragon 2y ago
    I pulled a couple out of my pile a few years ago to look at. The rubbers were pretty well gone on mine, belts gone, the rails had some sort of blooming corrosion. unless you've got very lucky it's probably a real refurbishment job to make one run today. Quick look suggest Epson 9pin and 24pin form feed impact printers are still being made. https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590-Impact-Printer/p/C11C558001 https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590...
jprd 2y ago
This is fantastic. I'm all in on this, here I come eBay!
Odenwaelder 2y ago
I 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.
- ortusdux 2y ago
  I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'd definitely recommend BPA free paper if you don't use it already!
ale42 2y ago
Matrix 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.
- seanw444 2y ago
  That's pretty cool actually.
- schlauerfox 2y ago
  My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    You could probably make your own multicolor ribbon.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a simple markup language. It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s. Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.
milkshakes 2y ago
> 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/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCtyaWbeaMb7iZ-TOPi5BHyUEGwnVSR9A/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  Oooh, awesome! Thanks for the heads up
canpan 2y ago
This 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?
- i5heu 2y ago
  I cannot recommend FT. I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side. That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.
  - eponeponepon 2y ago
    Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round. Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      Ah yes. Filling newspapers with petty leaflets of spam the night before and then having to get up at 6am in the cold rain to get lost cycling around an estate block smelling smells of god knows what only to be paid less than minimum wage. what fun times. At least I could then afford to buy a packet of cigs, and then upsell them to the chavs for a higher price...
SoftTalker 2y ago
My 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.
freetanga 2y ago
Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions… On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)
- FredPret 2y ago
  I miss the soundscape of old computers: - the POST beep - the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting - the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer - even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
  - awiesenhofer 2y ago
    Just today at a shop I saw a self checkout terminal crash and reboot - featuring the old AMI boot screen and a nice POST beep. Made me wonder what ancient hardware might hide behind these modern cases and UIs.
  - rockostrich 2y ago
    If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop. I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side. [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/ https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/
  - toast0 2y ago
    > even I don't miss dial-up sounds though. I do. It's like the walk-up song to talking to my friends and having a good time.
  - 10101100 2y ago
    Wi-Fi
rbanffy 2y ago
I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.
- hansonkd 2y ago
  My current project right now with my thermal printer is responding to emails via typewriter. Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner -> sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer. PoC worked well. Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic to do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify that the final content of the email after OCR. So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to day. More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess you would call them word processors) could be a better way... But I like the click clack of each key stroke.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    That is delightfully archaic. May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?
- alchemist1e9 2y ago
  > I can't afford a proper ASR-33 If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find one? Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn’t produced anything in years.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    The one that was in the Living Computer Museum was recently sold by Christie's.
- beala 2y ago
  I did this. Wrote it up here: https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewriter https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewrit...
HPsquared 2y ago
Reminds me of the dusty stock ticker in Mr Burns' office: https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU
jollyllama 2y ago
I wonder how long before these pages fade. Could be good for archival purposes.
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  It’s physical ink on paper, I feel like as long as you store it in a cool, dry place, you can probably get decades out of it if not more.
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  From someone who hordes papers(j/k but if I don't get back to digitalizing them it might be considered more of a problem later on lol fortunately some of my reading and writing is supplanted by digital devices now)... You probably don't want to keep all of it. Most news doesn't even matter a week from when it was made. If you had to, it would be better to have an LLM or better summarize the year's end. Or maybe bury them in the backyard for future generations to potentially discover. But yeah there will be other copies of the news, and you don't have to store them these days
every 2y ago
It's been a long time since I've heard that dot matrix sound. Wide carriage OKI Data and a big pile of green bar...
aghilmort 2y ago
so pure -- easily as awesome as this lovely post, (What Hath Woz Wrought)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321 picturing room full of dot matrix printers, fax machines, & thermal printers & modems & old-school saving programs to cassette recordings all talking to each other via mic relay where each uses AI to subtly detect what character each other just printed via audio and we can read their LLM convos
joeyparsons 2y ago
til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce resource for a project like this! kudos!
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  It’s pretty expensive though! I got the smallest box I could, 1000 sheets, from Staples for $30.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  You can still buy new impact printers. https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/ https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/
- awad 2y ago
  I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    It’s great for printing on carbon copy duplicate/triplicate paper that needs to be signed one time on all copies.
  - Tor3 2y ago
    I've seen dot matrix printers used in backrooms of airlines (which I have visited for reporting lost luggage, sometimes). This would mostly be smaller airlines (as the now defunct Berlin Air)
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    I could see piping all syslog critial and above out to a .matrix printer that sits in a locked room as a cheap way to enforce a WORM log of events. With a continious sheet of paper you would only need to access it rarely, and essentially only to change the ribbon and replace the paper source.
hansonkd 2y ago
I did something similar with a receipt printer. a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of hooking into to control a light or something. I had it set up for emails and every morning it would print off my calendar. I think the interface works well especially if you pair it with a physical control like buttons or NFC reader. That way you can issue "commands" and get output. Like I had one NFC card to make it print my calendar, one for unread emails, etc. I have some more features I want to add to it. Its very fun way to cut down on screen time, but ironically i have spent more screen time coding with it and setting it up then it probably has saved me. lol.
- ustad 2y ago
  Whats the printer you have? I’ve been thinking of getting one and did not know about the notification and external feature you mention.
  - hansonkd 2y ago
    I have a Rongta RP331. The thing I wish it could do different is that when printing a single line, the autocutter hides it, so you have to line feed about 5 times until the line you printed is visible. If i did it different, maybe i would try to find a printer that is able to do reverse line feed so I can "peek" at a single line and then not waste paper. but i think those are about 3-4 times more expensive.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    There are a lot of cheap Chinese dot matrix printers. As an American if you search by mm size you will find those, if you search by inches you will find more reputable (and culturally sensitive) brands. I bought two Chinese printers, one burned up pretty quick when I was testing it but I might have been printing too much black. The other is fine I think but really I am not so motivated to make thermal prints when I have a good quality inkjet. (My best thermal print was a small Lusamine https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 which demonstrates how Nintendo official art is designed to render on cheap screens like the Nintendo 3DS)
exitb 2y ago
It seems like an attractive concept. I tend to fluctuate between consuming too much news and getting fed up leading to not consuming any. BTW, I like how this is literally just a daily newspaper. Something that we’ve figured out at least hundreds of years ago, but effectively lost to an infinite breaking news cycle.
hggigg 2y ago
I had something similar to this at home except it was a laser printer and it got a postscript file out of LaTeX which was parsed out from a bunch of Perl. A couple of months in, my naive Perl parser broke and I woke up to half a ream of paper with "a" printed continually down the left hand side of the page. Now I don't bother!
acomjean 2y ago
In the early 90s my daily college paper had a dot matrix printer for the AP news feed. My last year I think they discontinued the service. Editors would take the stories and type them into our system again. The agony was mitigated by the fact we didn’t run a ton of AP stories and better ways were entirely obvious back then.
Krasnol 2y ago
I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on them... ...my SO would kill me.
- dugmartin 2y ago
  Yes - the sound on the video reminded me of waiting for my homework to print out in the 80s.
- The_Blade 2y ago
  the sound is better than an hour with a high-end therapist, er, executive coach
bityard 2y ago
Neat. Reminds me of when I (briefly) worked at a radio station. I forget basically all of the details now, but I'm pretty sure it would automatically dial up some Associated Press number, fetch the latest headlines, and send them to a dot-matrix printer. This was in the late 90's and it ran MS-DOS. In case the author is reading: on most printers of the day, you could set the font via control codes and many printers even had variable-width fonts.
Lonestar1440 2y ago
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 buy it, for way more than the cost of an old printer, if it was available on the market!
- tomjen3 2y ago
  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).
  - efreak 2y ago
    > 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`
zackproser 2y ago
Very cool. Thanks for sharing
whartung 2y ago
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 Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire. As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of backward compatibility. So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"? If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today (to me anyway). (Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)
- dasfsi 2y ago
  I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't). What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason. Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.
- slsii 2y ago
  I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d <printer_name>, and find the name through lpstat -p. And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.
hiidef 2y ago
Hacker invents the newspaper
hiidef 2y ago
hacker invents the newspaper
JKCalhoun 2y ago
The most interesting part of the article for me was the Gathering the Data section. Because honestly, this would be a project better targeted for a large e-ink display. Maybe you've even seen the photo of the large wall-hanging e-ink display that in fact displays the day's news [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspaper_for_the_breakfast_table/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspape...
- fivestones 2y ago
  The photo is still there by the original post is gone. Any idea what e-ink device that is?
whall6 2y ago
Why can’t people just simply exercise self control
- bubblesnort 2y ago
  It got stuck in 1984.
- chwilson 2y ago
  There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who’s sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as neuron-activationally possible
  - whall6 2y ago
    So we should just accept our fate. Got it
    - rconti 2y ago
      No, parent was answering your question, not offering judgement nor the conclusion that you so swiftly jumped to.
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  I ask myself the same thing every day
- dudinax 2y ago
  Purposeful avoidance of temptation is self control.
krylon 2y ago
Until very recently, dot matrix printers were still common in doctors' offices in Germany (for reasons), and the sound they make always gives me huge wave of nostalgia, even bigger than hearing a fax/modem emitting its handshake sound.
- kjs3 2y ago
  I periodically run into them in places that still use multipart forms (e.g. manufacturing, shippping/logistics).
  - aschmelyun 2y ago
    I was at a tires place that still uses them as of last month.
forinti 2y ago
When I was in school, I would use an Epson LX80 to print a stencil for a Mimeograph. I would remove the tape so that it would hit the stencil harder. I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the memories...
G_o_D 2y ago
Back in time: Dont have fancy big screen monitors just echo > /dev/lp0. Like Redirect output to physical stdout
thesurlydev 2y ago
This is fantastic. I can't remember the last time I've interfaced with a dot matrix printer. It might have been in college getting a print out of Fortran programs. Thanks for sharing!
behindai 2y ago
Very environmental
donohoe 2y ago
And there you have it folks - print is back! The old monolithic newspaper execs were right after all. That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend task.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
acka 2y ago
OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.
- sanex 2y ago
  The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB adapter even though he has it called a serial one.
  - acka 2y ago
    Ah, that explains it. Thanks for pointing this out.
  - aschmelyun 2y ago
    Yep, parallel! My bad, I’ll have to make some adjustments to the article.
- mmmlinux 2y ago
  I was wondering how he plugged it in and magically there was /dev/lp0. but it makes more sense if its a parallel than a serial adapter.
- cbm-vic-20 2y ago
  I've got a DEC LA75 Companion Printer that uses serial. Still works. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Companion-Printer/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Compa...
- Tor3 2y ago
  Even though they typically came with Centronics ports, you could often add an additional interface. The Epson-compatible OKI printer I have can use an additional interface board (of which I have one) and have both a serial and parallel interface. And of course there are also those console printers which uses serial like the DEC LA printer mentioned in a sibling comment.
PaulHoule 2y ago
For a while I’ve been printing “three-sided cards” which have an image on one side and a QR code with documentation on the other side https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029 the “third” side is the web site linked by the QR code. I got bored with photography and made up a character who goes around with a cheap lens and always keeps the aperture around f/18 or more, uses heavy processing, color grades and shoots a standard non-standard aspect ratio so it looks like he’s using some weird camera from an alternate timeline. I just started printing this series and came to the conclusion that 4x5 can be easily made by cutting down a 4x6 but instead of cutting it I’d have an inch to put in a QR code and documentation on the front: similarly I could cut down a 5x7 to a square 5x5 and fit documentation in there. I have a few boxes of glossy paper that aren’t printable on the back and I think I’m going to use the, that way. (Found out later that instagram has a 4x5 standard and that my sports photos taken with a good lens really look good in that format) One question though is what the documentation looks like and I am split between: (1) minimal changes to what I have, (2) some kind of fake dot matrix or other effect that looks like an old printer that might have been built into that fantasy camera or (3) something that makes he most of what the inkjet printer can do.
- left-struck 2y ago
  I genuinely want to understand your comment but I feel like it, or I, are missing a lot of context. Almost every paragraph seems to be completely unrelated to the last one.
technothrasher 2y ago
The headline gave me flashbacks of doing the Friday morning news slot for my college radio station back in the early 90's, and printing out the stories off our news feed that I wanted to read on the stations big noisy dot matrix printer.
waymon 2y ago
This is awesome. Well done.
guerrilla 2y ago
Leave it to a PHP programmer to immediately disregard the security system as soon as he encounters it. ;) Interesting though. Been reading sbout old teletypes the last few days, so this is quite fitting for me.
chillpenguin 2y ago
I'm surprised that old printers like that go for $80-120 USD. I'm pretty sure you can buy a new inkjet for $50. If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.
- AlfredBarnes 2y ago
  I am also in this boat. I don't want to have to buy in for ink for $50 every 3 months.
vetrom 2y ago
Nifty project, this also reminds me of m68k.news which I think was on here a few years back. (source: https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news )
throwup238 2y ago
I'd use the Wikipedia current events portal [1] to generate the headlines/news. It’s less sensationalist that news headlines and contains a lot more global news. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- aaronfc 2y ago
  Didn't know about this! Thanks :)
neilv 2y ago
I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount. It's hard to make out the dots in the photo, but I'd guess this is probably around a 24-pin, printing in near-letter-quality (NLQ) mode, and (barely) doing true descenders. Note how straight the vertical lines of the line-drawing-character box at the top. If it was alternating printing one line while moving the printhead to the right, then the next line while moving printhead left, the slight imprecision of the drive in many printers would tend to be visible when the pixels of the line don't quite line up. Or if it's doing NLQ mode, it might be printing bidirectionally on the same line, overlapping dots, and might be more forgiving. I would guess this model probably has features like italic and bold (or at least double-strike), maybe condensed, double-wide, toggle from 10cpi and 12cpi, etc. And you can usually mix those within a page, like you know that you can print twice as many characters horizontally at condensed in just a small spot of the page, and do the layout arithmetic based on that. That printer might also do bitmaps, and/or let you define characters. If you can't find the doc for a particular model, but it might be some degree of Epson-compatible, search for "epson esc/p printer" documentation, and see what codes work. And know about form-feed, for a smooth finish to your page. Or, if you you just want to treat it as an 80x66-character array, but get a little fancy within that, in a one-hour project, you can make a shell script that fetches data with Curl, generate HTML, and pipe it through something like `w3m` or `elinks` for formatting. Or use Svelte and pull in 100 packages from NPM to print to the vintage thing. For a more telegram-y aesthetic, you might be able to source yellow paper (search keywords "tractor-feed", "continuous form"), preferably unperforated. For more computer-y, search keyword "greenbar". A 9-pin or similar printer will look more vintage than the crisp one in the article, or you can try running a 24-pin in draft/fast mode.
- chihuahua 2y ago
  I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years. It seems like an admission that the quality was better than before, but still not great. Sounds a bit quaint - if printers were new in 2024, 9-pin printers would be "high quality", 2-pass printing would be "super quality", and 24-pin printing "extreme quality" In the video, you can see it's doing both of the techniques you mentioned: each line in printed in 2 passes, both in the same direction, presumably for better alignment. But the next line is printed in the opposite direction, again with 2 passes. In the 1980s, I had first a 9-pin printer (Star SG10) and then a 24-pin printer (NEC P6)
sneak 2y ago
News headlines can cause just as much cognitive negative influence as news websites. Just skip the news entirely. It’s an utter waste of time. Your life will be better for it.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  I was looking for this comment as I saw one of the NYT headlines manufacturing counterfactuals towards whatever end. It cites a politician looking at worker migration to small, struggling towns, "and he fueled a fire that was already smouldering". My understanding of THAT story is that the town is very protective of the black workers who moved there to work, and that it wasn't the politician but his subordinate who 'turned his sights' there, and did so to say horrible things about those people with no evidence. That's my understanding of what that story is. To claim 'he fueled a fire that was already smouldering' seems a wildly irresponsible thing to say as a headline. Maybe try pulling from the Associated Press? I'm a bit at a loss. You can at least avoid bad faith headlines.
- yhager 2y ago
  Obligatory link: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
CSMastermind 2y ago
There were startups back in the dot com boom days that were doing this when the internet first came out. "No need for newspaper delivery! You'll get it printed right at your house." Today it probably seems nearly unimaginable to teens that we used to have to get newspapers delivered and before you got the paper you just didn't know what had happened.
bobek 2y ago
Perfect, I do the same thing for daily quote.
codazoda 2y ago
I’m fascinated with printing calculators. Does anyone know of a printer that will print on calculator paper roles and print A-Z numbers and some symbols, like demonstrated here? Edit: Looks like I just need a receipt printer, which comes in dot matrix or thermal. Whoa, I need one.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  Like a thermal printer in general or specifically attached to a calculator?
  - codazoda 2y ago
    There’s just something about the paper rolls. I was thinking dot matrix. I suppose either would work. I might buy one and do something like op did.
- Tor3 2y ago
  I have a Seiko thermal printer, from years back. With at least one roll of paper. I think they still make them, or something which looks very similar.
wgrover 2y ago
Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer: https://github.com/wgrover/jamie https://github.com/wgrover/jamie The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries. The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.
chaps 2y ago
Many years ago I worked at a company that had to print out every transaction with a dot-matrix printer every evening. It was my group's job to do very minimal maintenance on it like adding toner/paper and such. When filling the toner though, you had to screw the toner container onto a special.... gyrating.... setup just to make sure all toner came out. A thing that struck me about it was how uncannily, uh, sexual, it was in its gyrations. Does anybody have any idea what model of printer this might have been? I'd love to see a video of it again.
10xalphadev 2y ago
[dead]
Animats 2y ago
I had this machine connected to a news feed for years.[1] It's the mechanism from a Model 14 Teletype tape printer. It's still in my living room, and the tape feeds out into a wire basket. It's driven by a Python program running on an old EeePC subnotebook. [1] https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html
- sixothree 2y ago
  Beautiful machine.
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  That is absolutely fantastic. I've always wanted to get my hands on one to mimic a ticker-tape with updating stock/crypto prices. One day! Also, EeePC is something I haven't heard about in so long. That took me back!
snickmy 2y ago
Glass onion's vibes
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  And in the movie this was being use as a parody, to emphasize how much of a cargo culter the enterpreneur was...
0x0 2y ago
A large chunk of that php code could probably be replaced with a call to https://www.php.net/wordwrap https://www.php.net/wordwrap
capitainenemo 2y ago
A long time ago we used to output certain key server logs summarised to a dot matrix printer. It was a neat place to see the history at a glance, but the idea was also that it was an unhackable audit. Probably done more efficiently with WORM drives nowdays, but without that immediate tactile presence.
yalok 2y ago
I remember printing the whole K & R "The C programming language" book on my dot-matrix printer, with some roll-paper, and then drilling the pages through to staple it with some thick paper clips wires. Legendary devices.
- hinkley 2y ago
  80 trips through a hole punch will also do it.
fdfgyu 2y ago
I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting data. Everything about dot matrix printers suck for data, except the roll of paper that can print arbitrarily long logs. To the community, other than a dot matrix, what other roll paper based printers can I use for this?
- gaudystead 2y ago
  Receipt printer, maybe? Depends how wide you need it to be though.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I kinda want a ticker tape printer.
keroton 2y ago
This is the most Hacker News post ever made
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Only if the project was implemented in Erlang.
mesh 2y ago
This brings back so many memories. When I was in graduate school in the mid 90s (economics and European politics), it was difficult to get detailed, daily news in English on Eastern Europe. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was one of the best resources, with a daily email with an overview of news from the region. I would print this out every single day on an old dot matrix printer so I could then take it to the library where I would read it with everything else. Can find the archives (in a not very user friendly format) here: https://www.rferl.org/Newsline https://www.rferl.org/Newsline btw, second best source of daily news in English in Eastern Europe was shortwave.
ketanmaheshwari 2y ago
Somewhat relevant, I use this little script to open front page of NYTimes daily morning on my macbook: d=$(date +%d) m=$(date +%m) y=$(date +%Y) wget -q https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.p... && open ./scan.pdf
- mawise 2y ago
  I made an RSS feed of these front-page images a while ago if anyone wants to use them: https://nytonline.net/rss https://nytonline.net/rss
  - collinmanderson 2y ago
    See also https://www.frontpages.com/ https://www.frontpages.com/ https://www.frontpages.com/us-newspapers/ https://www.frontpages.com/us-newspapers/
- xorcist 2y ago
  dmy=$(date +%d/%m/%Y)
- oveja 2y ago
  That's neat! I turned it into a one liner `rm todays_nyt.pdf; wget -q "https://static01.nyt.com/images/$(date https://static01.nyt.com/images/$(date +%Y/%m/%d)/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf" -O todays_nyt.pdf && open todays_nyt.pdf `
TacticalCoder 2y ago
I had a dot matrix printer back in the days hooked to my Commodore Amiga. I don't know how but I remember that I was somehow managing to print graphs with XY axis and plots for my math lessons (teacher was very enthusiastic about it btw). IIRC I coded this myself back then: didn't use anyone else's software. But mostly that dot-matrix printing was printing D&D characters templates: after one too many eraser/pencil these D&D cheats were all dirty, so we'd print new ones and re-copy our character's stats/inventory. I don't remember the name of the DTP program I was using but it was a blast discovering DTP as a teenager! Now... I miss that noise and TFA certainly doesn't help. I've got two itches I want to scratch with a dot-matrix printer (well, with two printers really, I wouldn't want to mix the two usecases), since a very long time: - have it print one line everytime a user account logs in through SSH (yeah, a paper trail *and* a sound notification seen how noisy the thing is) - have it print a summary each time an option expires: SLV241004C0030000 expired OTM, premium collected: $x.xx A dot-matrix printer is so oldschool it's cool.
jollyjerry 2y ago
I enjoy reading the daily news fetched from calibre and synced to my kindle e-reader. Love the e-ink display, and the ux for reading and navigating sections is great.
- ct0 2y ago
  Can you speak more about how the daily news is scraped and imported into calibre? Sounds like a fun process. Did you set it up yourself?
  - zie 2y ago
    Calibre does it all for you: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html
- 10101100 2y ago
  Led
hk1337 2y ago
This is like that seen from Good Morning Vietnam where he gets his news printouts before going on the air.
op00to 2y ago
The fmt command can format text files so long lines are broken to the width of the printed page without breaking in the middle of words. It’s been around since the 70s.
mohitrathod 2y ago
Any thoughts with eink display
WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
The question is where to find good news and not how to consume them. I'm curious what source you guys are using for tech (besides this site, obviously) and politics.
- kqr 2y ago
  I have found the Economist hard to beat.
habosa 2y ago
Very cool! My only online news source these days is text.npr.org which might as well be a dot matrix printer.
foreverobama 2y ago
[dead]
fefferkorn 2y ago
Ahwe used them a lot, when lasers were expensive.They also could be used with special endless carbon paper (Durchschlagpapier) to get immediate copies (even 4), one for you, one for the customer and one for the archive as backup and so on. Cleaning those heads and exchanging the tapes everyday while having a chat with the people in the office, was a fun thing. They were quite robust. Some of them also could print 2d barcodes (for archiving or using with scanners which emulated key presses to feed order id's and stuff fast to the erp)
gheugiehge 2y ago
Hiejhe Hieijehjvjejheb
eniwnenahg 2y ago
nice! now print some news on top of my morning cappuccino, on my toast, and in my alphabits breakfast cereal..
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
I like it - kinda like how POTUS gets their daily intelligence briefings! What you need now is a line printer to spit it out faster!
serveradminblog 2y ago
> There might be a better way to handle that.. Yes... Just add lp group to your account (since /dev/usb/lpX are root:lp)
mihaigalos 2y ago
I self-host paper-hn in a k3s cluster. Homepage here: https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper-hn https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper-hn
yyyk 2y ago
It would have been more neat if he could set it up as a TTY device and print that way.

904 points by chrisdemarco 2y ago

I 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.

h2odragon 2y ago

from '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.

pcardoso 2y ago
Still have my LQ 100 in my parents attic, perhaps I could do something like this. Sadly I don't have the paper feeder (I only used A4 paper with it).
- h2odragon 2y ago
  I pulled a couple out of my pile a few years ago to look at. The rubbers were pretty well gone on mine, belts gone, the rails had some sort of blooming corrosion. unless you've got very lucky it's probably a real refurbishment job to make one run today. Quick look suggest Epson 9pin and 24pin form feed impact printers are still being made. https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590-Impact-Printer/p/C11C558001 https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590...

jprd 2y ago

This is fantastic. I'm all in on this, here I come eBay!

Odenwaelder 2y ago

I 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.

ortusdux 2y ago
I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'd definitely recommend BPA free paper if you don't use it already!

ale42 2y ago

Matrix 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.

seanw444 2y ago
That's pretty cool actually.
schlauerfox 2y ago
My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.
- sitkack 2y ago
  You could probably make your own multicolor ribbon.
bitwize 2y ago
Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a simple markup language. It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s. Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.

milkshakes 2y ago

> 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/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCtyaWbeaMb7iZ-TOPi5BHyUEGwnVSR9A/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...

aschmelyun 2y ago
Oooh, awesome! Thanks for the heads up

canpan 2y ago

This 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?

i5heu 2y ago
I cannot recommend FT. I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side. That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.
- eponeponepon 2y ago
  Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round. Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    Ah yes. Filling newspapers with petty leaflets of spam the night before and then having to get up at 6am in the cold rain to get lost cycling around an estate block smelling smells of god knows what only to be paid less than minimum wage. what fun times. At least I could then afford to buy a packet of cigs, and then upsell them to the chavs for a higher price...

SoftTalker 2y ago

My 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.

freetanga 2y ago

Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions… On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)

FredPret 2y ago
I miss the soundscape of old computers: - the POST beep - the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting - the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer - even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
- awiesenhofer 2y ago
  Just today at a shop I saw a self checkout terminal crash and reboot - featuring the old AMI boot screen and a nice POST beep. Made me wonder what ancient hardware might hide behind these modern cases and UIs.
- rockostrich 2y ago
  If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop. I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side. [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/ https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/
- toast0 2y ago
  > even I don't miss dial-up sounds though. I do. It's like the walk-up song to talking to my friends and having a good time.
- 10101100 2y ago
  Wi-Fi

rbanffy 2y ago

I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.

hansonkd 2y ago
My current project right now with my thermal printer is responding to emails via typewriter. Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner -> sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer. PoC worked well. Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic to do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify that the final content of the email after OCR. So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to day. More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess you would call them word processors) could be a better way... But I like the click clack of each key stroke.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  That is delightfully archaic. May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?
alchemist1e9 2y ago
> I can't afford a proper ASR-33 If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find one? Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn’t produced anything in years.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  The one that was in the Living Computer Museum was recently sold by Christie's.
beala 2y ago
I did this. Wrote it up here: https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewriter https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewrit...

HPsquared 2y ago

Reminds me of the dusty stock ticker in Mr Burns' office: https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU

jollyllama 2y ago

I wonder how long before these pages fade. Could be good for archival purposes.

aschmelyun 2y ago
It’s physical ink on paper, I feel like as long as you store it in a cool, dry place, you can probably get decades out of it if not more.
r2_pilot 2y ago
From someone who hordes papers(j/k but if I don't get back to digitalizing them it might be considered more of a problem later on lol fortunately some of my reading and writing is supplanted by digital devices now)... You probably don't want to keep all of it. Most news doesn't even matter a week from when it was made. If you had to, it would be better to have an LLM or better summarize the year's end. Or maybe bury them in the backyard for future generations to potentially discover. But yeah there will be other copies of the news, and you don't have to store them these days

every 2y ago

It's been a long time since I've heard that dot matrix sound. Wide carriage OKI Data and a big pile of green bar...

aghilmort 2y ago

so pure -- easily as awesome as this lovely post, (What Hath Woz Wrought)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321 picturing room full of dot matrix printers, fax machines, & thermal printers & modems & old-school saving programs to cassette recordings all talking to each other via mic relay where each uses AI to subtly detect what character each other just printed via audio and we can read their LLM convos

joeyparsons 2y ago

til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce resource for a project like this! kudos!

aschmelyun 2y ago
It’s pretty expensive though! I got the smallest box I could, 1000 sheets, from Staples for $30.
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
You can still buy new impact printers. https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/ https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/
awad 2y ago
I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  It’s great for printing on carbon copy duplicate/triplicate paper that needs to be signed one time on all copies.
- Tor3 2y ago
  I've seen dot matrix printers used in backrooms of airlines (which I have visited for reporting lost luggage, sometimes). This would mostly be smaller airlines (as the now defunct Berlin Air)
- tomjen3 2y ago
  I could see piping all syslog critial and above out to a .matrix printer that sits in a locked room as a cheap way to enforce a WORM log of events. With a continious sheet of paper you would only need to access it rarely, and essentially only to change the ribbon and replace the paper source.

hansonkd 2y ago

I did something similar with a receipt printer. a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of hooking into to control a light or something. I had it set up for emails and every morning it would print off my calendar. I think the interface works well especially if you pair it with a physical control like buttons or NFC reader. That way you can issue "commands" and get output. Like I had one NFC card to make it print my calendar, one for unread emails, etc. I have some more features I want to add to it. Its very fun way to cut down on screen time, but ironically i have spent more screen time coding with it and setting it up then it probably has saved me. lol.

ustad 2y ago
Whats the printer you have? I’ve been thinking of getting one and did not know about the notification and external feature you mention.
- hansonkd 2y ago
  I have a Rongta RP331. The thing I wish it could do different is that when printing a single line, the autocutter hides it, so you have to line feed about 5 times until the line you printed is visible. If i did it different, maybe i would try to find a printer that is able to do reverse line feed so I can "peek" at a single line and then not waste paper. but i think those are about 3-4 times more expensive.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  There are a lot of cheap Chinese dot matrix printers. As an American if you search by mm size you will find those, if you search by inches you will find more reputable (and culturally sensitive) brands. I bought two Chinese printers, one burned up pretty quick when I was testing it but I might have been printing too much black. The other is fine I think but really I am not so motivated to make thermal prints when I have a good quality inkjet. (My best thermal print was a small Lusamine https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741 which demonstrates how Nintendo official art is designed to render on cheap screens like the Nintendo 3DS)

exitb 2y ago

It seems like an attractive concept. I tend to fluctuate between consuming too much news and getting fed up leading to not consuming any. BTW, I like how this is literally just a daily newspaper. Something that we’ve figured out at least hundreds of years ago, but effectively lost to an infinite breaking news cycle.

hggigg 2y ago

I had something similar to this at home except it was a laser printer and it got a postscript file out of LaTeX which was parsed out from a bunch of Perl. A couple of months in, my naive Perl parser broke and I woke up to half a ream of paper with "a" printed continually down the left hand side of the page. Now I don't bother!

acomjean 2y ago

In the early 90s my daily college paper had a dot matrix printer for the AP news feed. My last year I think they discontinued the service. Editors would take the stories and type them into our system again. The agony was mitigated by the fact we didn’t run a ton of AP stories and better ways were entirely obvious back then.

Krasnol 2y ago

I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on them... ...my SO would kill me.

dugmartin 2y ago
Yes - the sound on the video reminded me of waiting for my homework to print out in the 80s.
The_Blade 2y ago
the sound is better than an hour with a high-end therapist, er, executive coach

bityard 2y ago

Neat. Reminds me of when I (briefly) worked at a radio station. I forget basically all of the details now, but I'm pretty sure it would automatically dial up some Associated Press number, fetch the latest headlines, and send them to a dot-matrix printer. This was in the late 90's and it ran MS-DOS. In case the author is reading: on most printers of the day, you could set the font via control codes and many printers even had variable-width fonts.

Lonestar1440 2y ago

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 buy it, for way more than the cost of an old printer, if it was available on the market!

tomjen3 2y ago
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).
- efreak 2y ago
  > 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`

zackproser 2y ago

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

whartung 2y ago

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 Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire. As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of backward compatibility. So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"? If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today (to me anyway). (Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)

dasfsi 2y ago
I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't). What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason. Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.
slsii 2y ago
I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d <printer_name>, and find the name through lpstat -p. And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.

hiidef 2y ago

Hacker invents the newspaper

hiidef 2y ago

hacker invents the newspaper

JKCalhoun 2y ago

The most interesting part of the article for me was the Gathering the Data section. Because honestly, this would be a project better targeted for a large e-ink display. Maybe you've even seen the photo of the large wall-hanging e-ink display that in fact displays the day's news [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspaper_for_the_breakfast_table/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspape...

fivestones 2y ago
The photo is still there by the original post is gone. Any idea what e-ink device that is?

whall6 2y ago

Why can’t people just simply exercise self control

bubblesnort 2y ago
It got stuck in 1984.
chwilson 2y ago
There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who’s sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as neuron-activationally possible
- whall6 2y ago
  So we should just accept our fate. Got it
  - rconti 2y ago
    No, parent was answering your question, not offering judgement nor the conclusion that you so swiftly jumped to.
aschmelyun 2y ago
I ask myself the same thing every day
dudinax 2y ago
Purposeful avoidance of temptation is self control.

krylon 2y ago

Until very recently, dot matrix printers were still common in doctors' offices in Germany (for reasons), and the sound they make always gives me huge wave of nostalgia, even bigger than hearing a fax/modem emitting its handshake sound.

kjs3 2y ago
I periodically run into them in places that still use multipart forms (e.g. manufacturing, shippping/logistics).
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  I was at a tires place that still uses them as of last month.

forinti 2y ago

When I was in school, I would use an Epson LX80 to print a stencil for a Mimeograph. I would remove the tape so that it would hit the stencil harder. I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the memories...

G_o_D 2y ago

Back in time: Dont have fancy big screen monitors just echo > /dev/lp0. Like Redirect output to physical stdout

thesurlydev 2y ago

This is fantastic. I can't remember the last time I've interfaced with a dot matrix printer. It might have been in college getting a print out of Fortran programs. Thanks for sharing!

behindai 2y ago

Very environmental

donohoe 2y ago

And there you have it folks - print is back! The old monolithic newspaper execs were right after all. That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend task.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

acka 2y ago

OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.

sanex 2y ago
The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB adapter even though he has it called a serial one.
- acka 2y ago
  Ah, that explains it. Thanks for pointing this out.
- aschmelyun 2y ago
  Yep, parallel! My bad, I’ll have to make some adjustments to the article.
mmmlinux 2y ago
I was wondering how he plugged it in and magically there was /dev/lp0. but it makes more sense if its a parallel than a serial adapter.
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
I've got a DEC LA75 Companion Printer that uses serial. Still works. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Companion-Printer/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Compa...
Tor3 2y ago
Even though they typically came with Centronics ports, you could often add an additional interface. The Epson-compatible OKI printer I have can use an additional interface board (of which I have one) and have both a serial and parallel interface. And of course there are also those console printers which uses serial like the DEC LA printer mentioned in a sibling comment.

PaulHoule 2y ago

For a while I’ve been printing “three-sided cards” which have an image on one side and a QR code with documentation on the other side https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029 the “third” side is the web site linked by the QR code. I got bored with photography and made up a character who goes around with a cheap lens and always keeps the aperture around f/18 or more, uses heavy processing, color grades and shoots a standard non-standard aspect ratio so it looks like he’s using some weird camera from an alternate timeline. I just started printing this series and came to the conclusion that 4x5 can be easily made by cutting down a 4x6 but instead of cutting it I’d have an inch to put in a QR code and documentation on the front: similarly I could cut down a 5x7 to a square 5x5 and fit documentation in there. I have a few boxes of glossy paper that aren’t printable on the back and I think I’m going to use the, that way. (Found out later that instagram has a 4x5 standard and that my sports photos taken with a good lens really look good in that format) One question though is what the documentation looks like and I am split between: (1) minimal changes to what I have, (2) some kind of fake dot matrix or other effect that looks like an old printer that might have been built into that fantasy camera or (3) something that makes he most of what the inkjet printer can do.

left-struck 2y ago
I genuinely want to understand your comment but I feel like it, or I, are missing a lot of context. Almost every paragraph seems to be completely unrelated to the last one.

technothrasher 2y ago

The headline gave me flashbacks of doing the Friday morning news slot for my college radio station back in the early 90's, and printing out the stories off our news feed that I wanted to read on the stations big noisy dot matrix printer.

waymon 2y ago

This is awesome. Well done.

guerrilla 2y ago

Leave it to a PHP programmer to immediately disregard the security system as soon as he encounters it. ;) Interesting though. Been reading sbout old teletypes the last few days, so this is quite fitting for me.

chillpenguin 2y ago

I'm surprised that old printers like that go for $80-120 USD. I'm pretty sure you can buy a new inkjet for $50. If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.

AlfredBarnes 2y ago
I am also in this boat. I don't want to have to buy in for ink for $50 every 3 months.

vetrom 2y ago

Nifty project, this also reminds me of m68k.news which I think was on here a few years back. (source: https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news )

throwup238 2y ago

I'd use the Wikipedia current events portal [1] to generate the headlines/news. It’s less sensationalist that news headlines and contains a lot more global news. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

aaronfc 2y ago
Didn't know about this! Thanks :)

neilv 2y ago

I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount. It's hard to make out the dots in the photo, but I'd guess this is probably around a 24-pin, printing in near-letter-quality (NLQ) mode, and (barely) doing true descenders. Note how straight the vertical lines of the line-drawing-character box at the top. If it was alternating printing one line while moving the printhead to the right, then the next line while moving printhead left, the slight imprecision of the drive in many printers would tend to be visible when the pixels of the line don't quite line up. Or if it's doing NLQ mode, it might be printing bidirectionally on the same line, overlapping dots, and might be more forgiving. I would guess this model probably has features like italic and bold (or at least double-strike), maybe condensed, double-wide, toggle from 10cpi and 12cpi, etc. And you can usually mix those within a page, like you know that you can print twice as many characters horizontally at condensed in just a small spot of the page, and do the layout arithmetic based on that. That printer might also do bitmaps, and/or let you define characters. If you can't find the doc for a particular model, but it might be some degree of Epson-compatible, search for "epson esc/p printer" documentation, and see what codes work. And know about form-feed, for a smooth finish to your page. Or, if you you just want to treat it as an 80x66-character array, but get a little fancy within that, in a one-hour project, you can make a shell script that fetches data with Curl, generate HTML, and pipe it through something like `w3m` or `elinks` for formatting. Or use Svelte and pull in 100 packages from NPM to print to the vintage thing. For a more telegram-y aesthetic, you might be able to source yellow paper (search keywords "tractor-feed", "continuous form"), preferably unperforated. For more computer-y, search keyword "greenbar". A 9-pin or similar printer will look more vintage than the crisp one in the article, or you can try running a 24-pin in draft/fast mode.

chihuahua 2y ago
I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years. It seems like an admission that the quality was better than before, but still not great. Sounds a bit quaint - if printers were new in 2024, 9-pin printers would be "high quality", 2-pass printing would be "super quality", and 24-pin printing "extreme quality" In the video, you can see it's doing both of the techniques you mentioned: each line in printed in 2 passes, both in the same direction, presumably for better alignment. But the next line is printed in the opposite direction, again with 2 passes. In the 1980s, I had first a 9-pin printer (Star SG10) and then a 24-pin printer (NEC P6)

sneak 2y ago

News headlines can cause just as much cognitive negative influence as news websites. Just skip the news entirely. It’s an utter waste of time. Your life will be better for it.

Applejinx 2y ago
I was looking for this comment as I saw one of the NYT headlines manufacturing counterfactuals towards whatever end. It cites a politician looking at worker migration to small, struggling towns, "and he fueled a fire that was already smouldering". My understanding of THAT story is that the town is very protective of the black workers who moved there to work, and that it wasn't the politician but his subordinate who 'turned his sights' there, and did so to say horrible things about those people with no evidence. That's my understanding of what that story is. To claim 'he fueled a fire that was already smouldering' seems a wildly irresponsible thing to say as a headline. Maybe try pulling from the Associated Press? I'm a bit at a loss. You can at least avoid bad faith headlines.
yhager 2y ago
Obligatory link: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

CSMastermind 2y ago

There were startups back in the dot com boom days that were doing this when the internet first came out. "No need for newspaper delivery! You'll get it printed right at your house." Today it probably seems nearly unimaginable to teens that we used to have to get newspapers delivered and before you got the paper you just didn't know what had happened.

bobek 2y ago

Perfect, I do the same thing for daily quote.

codazoda 2y ago

I’m fascinated with printing calculators. Does anyone know of a printer that will print on calculator paper roles and print A-Z numbers and some symbols, like demonstrated here? Edit: Looks like I just need a receipt printer, which comes in dot matrix or thermal. Whoa, I need one.

aaronblohowiak 2y ago
Like a thermal printer in general or specifically attached to a calculator?
- codazoda 2y ago
  There’s just something about the paper rolls. I was thinking dot matrix. I suppose either would work. I might buy one and do something like op did.
Tor3 2y ago
I have a Seiko thermal printer, from years back. With at least one roll of paper. I think they still make them, or something which looks very similar.

wgrover 2y ago

Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer: https://github.com/wgrover/jamie https://github.com/wgrover/jamie The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries. The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.

chaps 2y ago

Many years ago I worked at a company that had to print out every transaction with a dot-matrix printer every evening. It was my group's job to do very minimal maintenance on it like adding toner/paper and such. When filling the toner though, you had to screw the toner container onto a special.... gyrating.... setup just to make sure all toner came out. A thing that struck me about it was how uncannily, uh, sexual, it was in its gyrations. Does anybody have any idea what model of printer this might have been? I'd love to see a video of it again.

10xalphadev 2y ago

[dead]

Animats 2y ago

I had this machine connected to a news feed for years.[1] It's the mechanism from a Model 14 Teletype tape printer. It's still in my living room, and the tape feeds out into a wire basket. It's driven by a Python program running on an old EeePC subnotebook. [1] https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html

sixothree 2y ago
Beautiful machine.
aschmelyun 2y ago
That is absolutely fantastic. I've always wanted to get my hands on one to mimic a ticker-tape with updating stock/crypto prices. One day! Also, EeePC is something I haven't heard about in so long. That took me back!

snickmy 2y ago

Glass onion's vibes

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
And in the movie this was being use as a parody, to emphasize how much of a cargo culter the enterpreneur was...

0x0 2y ago

A large chunk of that php code could probably be replaced with a call to https://www.php.net/wordwrap https://www.php.net/wordwrap

capitainenemo 2y ago

A long time ago we used to output certain key server logs summarised to a dot matrix printer. It was a neat place to see the history at a glance, but the idea was also that it was an unhackable audit. Probably done more efficiently with WORM drives nowdays, but without that immediate tactile presence.

yalok 2y ago

I remember printing the whole K & R "The C programming language" book on my dot-matrix printer, with some roll-paper, and then drilling the pages through to staple it with some thick paper clips wires. Legendary devices.

hinkley 2y ago
80 trips through a hole punch will also do it.

fdfgyu 2y ago

I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting data. Everything about dot matrix printers suck for data, except the roll of paper that can print arbitrarily long logs. To the community, other than a dot matrix, what other roll paper based printers can I use for this?

gaudystead 2y ago
Receipt printer, maybe? Depends how wide you need it to be though.
hinkley 2y ago
I kinda want a ticker tape printer.

keroton 2y ago

This is the most Hacker News post ever made

tomjen3 2y ago
Only if the project was implemented in Erlang.

mesh 2y ago

This brings back so many memories. When I was in graduate school in the mid 90s (economics and European politics), it was difficult to get detailed, daily news in English on Eastern Europe. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was one of the best resources, with a daily email with an overview of news from the region. I would print this out every single day on an old dot matrix printer so I could then take it to the library where I would read it with everything else. Can find the archives (in a not very user friendly format) here: https://www.rferl.org/Newsline https://www.rferl.org/Newsline btw, second best source of daily news in English in Eastern Europe was shortwave.

ketanmaheshwari 2y ago

Somewhat relevant, I use this little script to open front page of NYTimes daily morning on my macbook: d=$(date +%d) m=$(date +%m) y=$(date +%Y) wget -q https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.p... && open ./scan.pdf

mawise 2y ago
I made an RSS feed of these front-page images a while ago if anyone wants to use them: https://nytonline.net/rss https://nytonline.net/rss
- collinmanderson 2y ago
  See also https://www.frontpages.com/ https://www.frontpages.com/ https://www.frontpages.com/us-newspapers/ https://www.frontpages.com/us-newspapers/
xorcist 2y ago
dmy=$(date +%d/%m/%Y)
oveja 2y ago
That's neat! I turned it into a one liner `rm todays_nyt.pdf; wget -q "https://static01.nyt.com/images/$(date https://static01.nyt.com/images/$(date +%Y/%m/%d)/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf" -O todays_nyt.pdf && open todays_nyt.pdf `

TacticalCoder 2y ago

I had a dot matrix printer back in the days hooked to my Commodore Amiga. I don't know how but I remember that I was somehow managing to print graphs with XY axis and plots for my math lessons (teacher was very enthusiastic about it btw). IIRC I coded this myself back then: didn't use anyone else's software. But mostly that dot-matrix printing was printing D&D characters templates: after one too many eraser/pencil these D&D cheats were all dirty, so we'd print new ones and re-copy our character's stats/inventory. I don't remember the name of the DTP program I was using but it was a blast discovering DTP as a teenager! Now... I miss that noise and TFA certainly doesn't help. I've got two itches I want to scratch with a dot-matrix printer (well, with two printers really, I wouldn't want to mix the two usecases), since a very long time: - have it print one line everytime a user account logs in through SSH (yeah, a paper trail *and* a sound notification seen how noisy the thing is) - have it print a summary each time an option expires: SLV241004C0030000 expired OTM, premium collected: $x.xx A dot-matrix printer is so oldschool it's cool.

jollyjerry 2y ago

I enjoy reading the daily news fetched from calibre and synced to my kindle e-reader. Love the e-ink display, and the ux for reading and navigating sections is great.

ct0 2y ago
Can you speak more about how the daily news is scraped and imported into calibre? Sounds like a fun process. Did you set it up yourself?
- zie 2y ago
  Calibre does it all for you: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html
10101100 2y ago
Led

hk1337 2y ago

This is like that seen from Good Morning Vietnam where he gets his news printouts before going on the air.

op00to 2y ago

The fmt command can format text files so long lines are broken to the width of the printed page without breaking in the middle of words. It’s been around since the 70s.

mohitrathod 2y ago

Any thoughts with eink display

WuxiFingerHold 2y ago

The question is where to find good news and not how to consume them. I'm curious what source you guys are using for tech (besides this site, obviously) and politics.

kqr 2y ago
I have found the Economist hard to beat.

habosa 2y ago

Very cool! My only online news source these days is text.npr.org which might as well be a dot matrix printer.

foreverobama 2y ago

[dead]

fefferkorn 2y ago

Ahwe used them a lot, when lasers were expensive.They also could be used with special endless carbon paper (Durchschlagpapier) to get immediate copies (even 4), one for you, one for the customer and one for the archive as backup and so on. Cleaning those heads and exchanging the tapes everyday while having a chat with the people in the office, was a fun thing. They were quite robust. Some of them also could print 2d barcodes (for archiving or using with scanners which emulated key presses to feed order id's and stuff fast to the erp)

gheugiehge 2y ago

Hiejhe Hieijehjvjejheb

eniwnenahg 2y ago

nice! now print some news on top of my morning cappuccino, on my toast, and in my alphabits breakfast cereal..

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

I like it - kinda like how POTUS gets their daily intelligence briefings! What you need now is a line printer to spit it out faster!

serveradminblog 2y ago

> There might be a better way to handle that.. Yes... Just add lp group to your account (since /dev/usb/lpX are root:lp)

mihaigalos 2y ago

I self-host paper-hn in a k3s cluster. Homepage here: https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper-hn https://github.com/wolfgang42/paper-hn

yyyk 2y ago

It would have been more neat if he could set it up as a TTY device and print that way.