I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.
If this is your website, as a heads up it doesn't work well on my browser. Firefox on Android, I believe I have a dark mode and the text is still black but on a very dark background.
I've had this same idea since I also own a thermal printer, but I could never get past the wastefulness of printing a piece of paper that I would then immediately throw away after reading, so I never implemented it. I still think about it periodically: there is something oddly alluring about finding a small piece of paper made specifically for me whenever I go to the kitchen in the morning. E-ink just doesn't quite feel the same.
I wanna buy a dot-matrix printer for projects like that. Still would be wasting paper but at least it won’t be toxic and the result is usually more aesthetically pleasing IMO.
Wait a sec. There's no ribbon subscription plan? And they sell you high-yield ribbons (lasting many millions of characters) for $6 a piece?
The printer even has USB, looks better on your desk than the average bulky MFP, and consumes ~ 1W on standby. Plus, not having toner particles in the air might be better for your health.
If only the print quality and noise level weren't abysmal by today's standards, this could easily have been my next printer.
Unfortunately it seems they have discontinued all their smaller models than this... Likely because nobody is buying them. I haven't seen a dot Matrix printer in person for over a decade.
On the other hand their smaller units are still in support till 2027
Well, I always read reviews by ignoring all 1-star reviews first. Most 1-star reviews are made by disgruntled customers to grab customer service attention, a practice I detest. For example, one of the 1-star reviews says that a printer does not work on Win10 and thus is a garbage that was returned. Yeah, about that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV9lemggOuw sure it works on Win10
I'm seeing that the team that owns this customer experience doesn't ensure they get enough positive reviews to break out of the noise (or fix the UX that makes installing this printer on Windows 10 difficult). Either way, it tells me this company doesn't make an effort.
I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't get myself to buy a thermal print for just this project. I'll probably settle with a "Sunday Newspaper" as a compromise on my laserjet printer.
You can often times find them for really cheap on the secondary market. Like old ones from a restaurant. I got quite a few for very cheap over the years. One was 20$ for a 80mm one.
So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?
It's not really a scold -- god knows I've wasted a lot of stuff for the sake of fun projects, this just happens to be past the threshold for me. Not entirely sure why. I think it might be because thermal paper feels kinda yucky: it has weird chemicals in it, it fades super quickly, and cannot be recycled. I would probably feel slightly better doing this on regular paper, although like somebody suggested I would maybe limit it to a Sunday thing.
I think there's a point where it's worth waste in order to enjoy life, for example writing on paper instead of typing, or eating a burger every now and then. Not using a small amount of thermal paper each day is I think a pathological over-optimisation
>Not using a small amount of thermal paper each day is I think a pathological over-optimisation
I agree, but OP is judging interest in order to produce a product from this concept.
Using a bit of thermal paper each day on a personal basis creates negligible impact, agreed -- creating a company whose primary profit motive is the sales of equipment that produces this waste? That's a different question.
Of course, it's just the symbolism of the whole thing.
I now realise that my comment had a bit too much pathos, and could easily be interpreted as looking down on the creator of this harmless concept. Companies waste such an insane amount of resources on advertising alone, that this fun little project can not be seen as morally problematic. It's just so on the nose, and together with the current bad press surrounding of thermal paper due to health concerns, it felt like satire to me.
But thank you for your "writing on paper" example, that was a useful one. It made me realise how my comment would have to be construed by someone lacking the context I had created in my head :)
Thank you, OP, for posting this, and thanks to the community for all your support!
To answer some common questions/comments/concerns:
- Totally agree with the sentiment regarding screens being a big problem in today's day and age. The main reason I wanted to make Guten was so that I could start my day off reading something on paper instead of staring at my phone. It also helps that you can't doomscroll on a receipt ;)
- I also love Little Printer - it seemed like such a cool product, but I unfortunately never had the chance to purchase one before it got discontinued. This is my attempt to bring back some of the functionalities in Little Printer that I'd find most useful in my day-to-day.
- BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
I'd be very interested in a "supply your own printer" version of this as well - either using these two color printers or thermal.
I suspect there isnt a ton of money to be made in selling printers, but rather the aggregation services needed to drive it. Let people buy a commodity printers, or a variety of them - if you use CUPS as an abstraction layer, you can basically run anything, and the CUPS turns the actual output device into an abstraction.
You can get used impact printers fairly cheaply off eBay. They still have a use case in restaurant kitchens - where heat doesn't play nicely with thermal paper, and the noise alerts you to a new order. In Europe where fiscal printers are becoming the norm, it's usually cheaper to buy a new printer than repair and recertify it, if it breaks.
Most receipt printers support the ESC/POS protocol, so an abstraction isn't really needed.
I fondly remember a dot matrix printer that looked a bit like a single slot toaster from many decades ago, long before the internet and doomscrolling. You sat it above a stack of fan fold paper. My memory claims it was called Tiger, but what brand it was I have no idea. It was incredibly loud but also very fast.
French company Exacompta makes a line of BPA-free and sustainable thermal receipt paper:
https://www.exacompta.com/en/recherche?search=Thermal
The EU banned BPA in receipt paper since 2020, so any European supplier should work.
> In January 2020, BPA was restricted from use in thermal paper, including tickets and receipts, across the EU (3). As a result, another bisphenol, Bisphenol-S (BPS), began to take its place. In fact, an ECHA survey estimated that 61% of all thermal paper would contain BPS as a substitute for BPA, despite concerns of BPS being equally as harmful (6). Fast forward three years and BPS is now recognised as “toxic to reproduction” and a hormone disruptor, and has been added to the EU’s candidate list for Substance of Very High Concern (SVHCs), a common first step on the road to restriction (7).
The mentioned company above (Exacompta) also make some without BPS (they say "sans phenol"). No idea what they use instead, for all I know it could be worse ^^ but I think the made in France is encouraging, we tend to have safer norms than EU which itself tends to have safer norms than the world.
>BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
Cheers to that. A note about buying BPA-free thermal paper on the site might be nice, especially for those who plan to have children interact with your project.
Depends what you mean by worse: ink is a big problem for recycling paper (along polymer-filmed "papers"). Thermal ink isn’t an exception and contrary to other printer types, it need to cover the whole page for the printer to work.
I don’t think it’s a major health problem if you don’t consume your daily newspaper after reading.
Not necessarily, if you choose a friendly alternative. In Germany, we have https://www.oekobon.de/ , I guess there a similar offers for other markets. As always, there are downsides. In this case, the eco version comes with a blue base color.
My daily supermarket uses these and I keep old receipts for personal finance evaluation, they definitely do not hold up as well as the website advertises. As soon as they get a few crinkles, they darken and get really hard to read.
Ideally, we’d all get to online-only receipts and stop the paper madness already, but that said, it’s still miles ahead of ordinary thermopaper.
This thing came out right on the cusp of IOT as a concept, They put a lot of nice effort into design. You could configure it for some predefined blocks of content and also some support for rss. Was nice to have a little actual pen and paper sodoku every morning on the bus.
Yeah, Little Printer may also serve as a warning that turning this kind of thing into a commercial endeavor is a very challenging road!
You should be OK if you do the Kickstarter style of thing, take pre-orders etc - but I would be wary about raising investment for this kind of project.
At least for plastic containers that are BPA free, it would seem the alternatives are just as toxic but we pretend it’s not because we have no alternatives.
What's the deal with the thermal paper though? I guess it's negligible exposure since you would only be using it once a day. There is an alternative thermal paper that uses vitamin c. It's slightly more expensive but I feel like that wouldn't matter for something like this since it's not using nearly as much as would be used for retail printing. I wonder if it's worth using the vitamin c kind instead.
I'm using a [Gprinter GP-1324D](https://www.ebay.com/itm/365264659480) in everyday work, printing task tracking stickers, various labels, etc. It's designed to print shipping labels / recipients in business scenarios so it's fairly robust. The only con I can think of is its physical size. I'm not familiar with eBay, but on Xianyu(Chinese second hand market app), yes you can buy one using only $20, shipping included.
I’ve wanted to make something like this for a while! Though with sudoku puzzles instead of news. My mum goes thru tons of those sudoku books, and doesn’t want to use her phone for it. Just a button to get 1 puzzle, or hold for a roll of 10 or something seems like an easy thing to set up.
adafruit used to sell a little pi powered thermal printer[1] but I always found the case a little fiddly and fragile. And my office mate didn’t care for the thing coming on at random times. (Not as bad as the text only 40 col commercial receipt printer that used actual ink and was as loud as a full size Epson MX-80.
Free idea: Uber for printers. Need to print something? Car drives up with a printer in the boot, you print whatever (umbrella as appropriate) and the driver is responsible for ink and paper.
Before I bought a printer for home, I'd go print things at my local library. Pretty convenient, and it was free for 10 b/w pages a week! But getting my own used Brother printer was a real step up.
I cant imagine how much it would cost per print. I doubt anyone would be willing to pay 5–10$ for the first page. It’s cheaper to drive to a print shop or send your pdf to a printing service and receive hard copies by mail.
I’m not driving and just walk or ride my bike to the next print shop (150m) or the further one (300m). I’m blessed to live in an affordable, living suburb.
There’s many Uber (and competitors) cars parked in my neighborhood but I don’t see them often in the road. They probably roam around more pricy neighborhoods for work.
This is great for the environment. Millions of people could balance the strain they put on the planet by reading the news from their lithium powered Gadgets on good old paper. Win win
After my PET 2001 I had purchased in 1977/78, I bought a Commodore Vic-20. Using the book, "Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator", I wrote a program in Vic BASIC which was the same as the PET's to identify the four most prominent moons of Jupiter based on their elliptical plane being on edge when viewed from Earth. I wanted a way of going on my roof in Brooklyn with my small refractor to identify them, so I bought a thermal printer and printed out the primitive graphics on a line for a given time for the next few hours or so of stargazing. I can't remember the printer brand, but it wasn't one of the Apple, Atari, or ZX offerings. Good fun. I have to say, I would use my phone nowadays or my e-ink tablet instead. Not from being 'sucked in' but merely because it would be quick and more accurate and have other uses for the same task like Stellarium!
Hey, I made something like this last year. It wasn't a self-contained unit, it was just a receipt printer with a script that would run every morning at 8am, getting the forecast, word of the day, and quote of the day. The idea was that if something important happened that day, I could hold onto that day's slip of paper and maybe write a note on it? I dunno, I stopped using after a month or so.
I've wanted something like this since the days of TinyPrinter, but I just can't justify thermal printing. I'd love to have either impact or laser, however.
I mostly want it for lists and recipes, but some other goodies would be fun, too.
This is cool. Please make it so its not just for news and developer friendly so it can print any content on demand using api. Tried to use a "memobird" printer for similar purpose but couldn't get any support for their API.
You can write your own script to do this. It's a few lines of scripting to query whatever APIs you want, and then output to /dev/usb0 or wherever the printer is hooked up. Seems a bit unnecessary to add an extra API wrapper just to do that
You can test this right now by running `echo "Hello, world!" > /dev/usb0`, assuming a printer is connected to that USB port of your Unix-based device.
Interesting.i have always known usb0 exists but didnt think this would work. Now i am wondering what the equivalent command to print using bluetooth printers is.
This is great! I wonder how hard it would be to use a pen plotter instead of a thermal printer. You could even use a procedurally generated handwriting font and Claude to make it feel like a handwritten letter.
I'd like to have a program to prepare and typeset PDFs for newspapers to be printed out of a gazillion of news sources is like to read, very few of which have an rss.
I have a TidByt in my office and this feels like the printed version of that. The ability to choose and order the sections of your daily newspaper from a library/app would be slick.
theres definitely something nice about how analog this is, but as an anti-screen solution it doesnt make much sense since you would have to spend more time using a screen to make sure your tasks are filled out the night before. for me anyway there are certain tasks i just remember so i mainly only make a note of the things i would forget, but with this i would have to write down everything
Disclaimer: I was one of the founders of the business, but left a long time ago. It’s still a great service! We print a newspaper for our friends and family each year.
You could even 3d print it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spvYDhja1mo (or try finding used etching presses). Though there is also the question of ink price, and ultimately an industrial printer may work better at small scale.
As cool as thermal printers are, if you want to have printed news from the nyt in the morning, it might be simpler to just, you know, subscribe to the newspaper.
those cheap-as-chips thermals are nice, esp some old ones , they come with a parallel port - very retro! I used an 80mm one to print short todo/lists, they fit well into my 'ancient' pocket filofax (4-ring), alas this kind of paper is not echo friendly.
Very inconvenient that people are still using Twitter. A presence on a more open network that would at least be cross-posted to, would be much appreciated.
Made something similar that is probably my proudest work: https://figbert.com/projects/roll-call/
I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.
Excited to see where things go from here.
If this is your website, as a heads up it doesn't work well on my browser. Firefox on Android, I believe I have a dark mode and the text is still black but on a very dark background.
Apropos.
Nice! I got an Epson TM-m30II PoS printer on a whim, and haven’t really found a use for it yet, I’ll definitely try your script.
I've had this same idea since I also own a thermal printer, but I could never get past the wastefulness of printing a piece of paper that I would then immediately throw away after reading, so I never implemented it. I still think about it periodically: there is something oddly alluring about finding a small piece of paper made specifically for me whenever I go to the kitchen in the morning. E-ink just doesn't quite feel the same.
I wanna buy a dot-matrix printer for projects like that. Still would be wasting paper but at least it won’t be toxic and the result is usually more aesthetically pleasing IMO.
Like this?? https://aschmelyun.com/blog/getting-my-daily-news-from-a-dot...
Epson still makes new ones: https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LX-350...
Wait a sec. There's no ribbon subscription plan? And they sell you high-yield ribbons (lasting many millions of characters) for $6 a piece?
The printer even has USB, looks better on your desk than the average bulky MFP, and consumes ~ 1W on standby. Plus, not having toner particles in the air might be better for your health.
If only the print quality and noise level weren't abysmal by today's standards, this could easily have been my next printer.
> There's no ribbon subscription plan?
Keep it quiet! Don't give them any funny ideas :D
OKI too
https://www.oki.com/me/printing/products/lineprinters/index....
Nice, although looks like the ca. 4500 EUR price for the cheapest model is gonna burn a hole in my pocket :)
Unfortunately it seems they have discontinued all their smaller models than this... Likely because nobody is buying them. I haven't seen a dot Matrix printer in person for over a decade.
On the other hand their smaller units are still in support till 2027
Oof, barely 2/5 stars on their own website's reviews.
Well, I always read reviews by ignoring all 1-star reviews first. Most 1-star reviews are made by disgruntled customers to grab customer service attention, a practice I detest. For example, one of the 1-star reviews says that a printer does not work on Win10 and thus is a garbage that was returned. Yeah, about that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV9lemggOuw sure it works on Win10
Certainly - I agree with you!
I'm seeing that the team that owns this customer experience doesn't ensure they get enough positive reviews to break out of the noise (or fix the UX that makes installing this printer on Windows 10 difficult). Either way, it tells me this company doesn't make an effort.
inks and dyes aren't generally that friendly either.
I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't get myself to buy a thermal print for just this project. I'll probably settle with a "Sunday Newspaper" as a compromise on my laserjet printer.
You can often times find them for really cheap on the secondary market. Like old ones from a restaurant. I got quite a few for very cheap over the years. One was 20$ for a 80mm one.
So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?
Feels like the vibe from tech scolds in general has shifted towards "fun is wasteful". Oh well.
It's not really a scold -- god knows I've wasted a lot of stuff for the sake of fun projects, this just happens to be past the threshold for me. Not entirely sure why. I think it might be because thermal paper feels kinda yucky: it has weird chemicals in it, it fades super quickly, and cannot be recycled. I would probably feel slightly better doing this on regular paper, although like somebody suggested I would maybe limit it to a Sunday thing.
we should have miniaturized 80s electrostatic screen for that
Yeah, I kind of expected this to be an art project decrying the wastefulness of our times, not an actual project.
I think there's a point where it's worth waste in order to enjoy life, for example writing on paper instead of typing, or eating a burger every now and then. Not using a small amount of thermal paper each day is I think a pathological over-optimisation
>Not using a small amount of thermal paper each day is I think a pathological over-optimisation
I agree, but OP is judging interest in order to produce a product from this concept.
Using a bit of thermal paper each day on a personal basis creates negligible impact, agreed -- creating a company whose primary profit motive is the sales of equipment that produces this waste? That's a different question.
Of course, it's just the symbolism of the whole thing. I now realise that my comment had a bit too much pathos, and could easily be interpreted as looking down on the creator of this harmless concept. Companies waste such an insane amount of resources on advertising alone, that this fun little project can not be seen as morally problematic. It's just so on the nose, and together with the current bad press surrounding of thermal paper due to health concerns, it felt like satire to me.
But thank you for your "writing on paper" example, that was a useful one. It made me realise how my comment would have to be construed by someone lacking the context I had created in my head :)
Hey, I'm the creator of Guten!
Thank you, OP, for posting this, and thanks to the community for all your support!
To answer some common questions/comments/concerns:
- Totally agree with the sentiment regarding screens being a big problem in today's day and age. The main reason I wanted to make Guten was so that I could start my day off reading something on paper instead of staring at my phone. It also helps that you can't doomscroll on a receipt ;)
- I also love Little Printer - it seemed like such a cool product, but I unfortunately never had the chance to purchase one before it got discontinued. This is my attempt to bring back some of the functionalities in Little Printer that I'd find most useful in my day-to-day.
- BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
Epson still makes a two color impact printer as well in this form factor.
https://epson.com/For-Work/POS-System-Devices/POS-Printers/T...
I'd be very interested in a "supply your own printer" version of this as well - either using these two color printers or thermal.
I suspect there isnt a ton of money to be made in selling printers, but rather the aggregation services needed to drive it. Let people buy a commodity printers, or a variety of them - if you use CUPS as an abstraction layer, you can basically run anything, and the CUPS turns the actual output device into an abstraction.
You can get used impact printers fairly cheaply off eBay. They still have a use case in restaurant kitchens - where heat doesn't play nicely with thermal paper, and the noise alerts you to a new order. In Europe where fiscal printers are becoming the norm, it's usually cheaper to buy a new printer than repair and recertify it, if it breaks.
Most receipt printers support the ESC/POS protocol, so an abstraction isn't really needed.
A dot matrix at 7am would also solve another problem I have.
I fondly remember a dot matrix printer that looked a bit like a single slot toaster from many decades ago, long before the internet and doomscrolling. You sat it above a stack of fan fold paper. My memory claims it was called Tiger, but what brand it was I have no idea. It was incredibly loud but also very fast.
This Tiger? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg
French company Exacompta makes a line of BPA-free and sustainable thermal receipt paper: https://www.exacompta.com/en/recherche?search=Thermal The EU banned BPA in receipt paper since 2020, so any European supplier should work.
What? That's fantastic news! I've been uncomfortable handling receipts ever since (a long time ago) I learned about BPAs in them.
Unfortunately it seems it's largely been replaced by (equally?) toxic BPS https://www.fidra.org.uk/bisphenols/bps-joins-eu-candidate-l...
Thanks for sharing, interesting read.
> In January 2020, BPA was restricted from use in thermal paper, including tickets and receipts, across the EU (3). As a result, another bisphenol, Bisphenol-S (BPS), began to take its place. In fact, an ECHA survey estimated that 61% of all thermal paper would contain BPS as a substitute for BPA, despite concerns of BPS being equally as harmful (6). Fast forward three years and BPS is now recognised as “toxic to reproduction” and a hormone disruptor, and has been added to the EU’s candidate list for Substance of Very High Concern (SVHCs), a common first step on the road to restriction (7).
The mentioned company above (Exacompta) also make some without BPS (they say "sans phenol"). No idea what they use instead, for all I know it could be worse ^^ but I think the made in France is encouraging, we tend to have safer norms than EU which itself tends to have safer norms than the world.
This thermal paper from Germany which another commenter mentioned upthread
https://www.oekobon.de/
claims "no BPA/BPS" and "phenol-free". (Hopefully that doesn't turn out to mean that they found something even worse to make it out of!)
do you know why merchants prefer to sell or why customers preferred to buy BPA/BPS instead of paper drenched in ascorbic acid (vitamin C)?
It even seems easy to make you own DIY version: squeeze some lemons, unroll, drench, dry and reroll a properly sized roll of normal paper in it.
>BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
Cheers to that. A note about buying BPA-free thermal paper on the site might be nice, especially for those who plan to have children interact with your project.
The EU banned BPA in receipt paper 5 years ago. French firm Exacompta makes good options in blue and standard white: https://www.exacompta.com/en/recherche?search=Thermal
Yeah it's the bpa more than the waste that would bother me.
Honest question, isn't the bpa free paper just using something else than bpa that is unregulated and potentially even worse?
Depends what you mean by worse: ink is a big problem for recycling paper (along polymer-filmed "papers"). Thermal ink isn’t an exception and contrary to other printer types, it need to cover the whole page for the printer to work.
I don’t think it’s a major health problem if you don’t consume your daily newspaper after reading.
Please be aware that handling thermal paper is super unhealthy: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5453537/
Not necessarily, if you choose a friendly alternative. In Germany, we have https://www.oekobon.de/ , I guess there a similar offers for other markets. As always, there are downsides. In this case, the eco version comes with a blue base color.
My daily supermarket uses these and I keep old receipts for personal finance evaluation, they definitely do not hold up as well as the website advertises. As soon as they get a few crinkles, they darken and get really hard to read.
Ideally, we’d all get to online-only receipts and stop the paper madness already, but that said, it’s still miles ahead of ordinary thermopaper.
Wow this is great! Danke
There's a reason why a lot of the Costco receipt checkers wear nitrile gloves now.
This same project has been done several times. Most notably by BERG London https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/
This thing came out right on the cusp of IOT as a concept, They put a lot of nice effort into design. You could configure it for some predefined blocks of content and also some support for rss. Was nice to have a little actual pen and paper sodoku every morning on the bus.
This looks cool! Reminds me of the long defunct Little Printer (https://vimeo.com/32796535).
Yeah, Little Printer may also serve as a warning that turning this kind of thing into a commercial endeavor is a very challenging road!
You should be OK if you do the Kickstarter style of thing, take pre-orders etc - but I would be wary about raising investment for this kind of project.
Very cool, but FYI, many types of thermal paper contain extremely high levels of the chemical BPA.
You’re not supposed to eat/lick/consume it.
You don’t have to. It would seem it also leeches through your fingers.
Perfect for printing Aristotle's guide to comedy and passing around to the other monks.
This is a reference to the story of the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
This reference is right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite place it.
Good job you can get BPA and Phenol free rolls then.
At least for plastic containers that are BPA free, it would seem the alternatives are just as toxic but we pretend it’s not because we have no alternatives.
Sure, but it's a lot easier to avoid a harmful chemical (and protect children from it) when you have been informed that it's there.
What's the deal with the thermal paper though? I guess it's negligible exposure since you would only be using it once a day. There is an alternative thermal paper that uses vitamin c. It's slightly more expensive but I feel like that wouldn't matter for something like this since it's not using nearly as much as would be used for retail printing. I wonder if it's worth using the vitamin c kind instead.
Based on some of my reading on the current thermal paper, we really need a safer alternative.
If you deal with receipts many times in a day you should be wearing gloves!
I'm using a [Gprinter GP-1324D](https://www.ebay.com/itm/365264659480) in everyday work, printing task tracking stickers, various labels, etc. It's designed to print shipping labels / recipients in business scenarios so it's fairly robust. The only con I can think of is its physical size. I'm not familiar with eBay, but on Xianyu(Chinese second hand market app), yes you can buy one using only $20, shipping included.
Linux CUPS driver here: https://github.com/feisuzhu/gprinter-cups
This is even better as it allows you to glue the printouts on a diary page instead of discarding them, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kMFWM64gVQ
This reminds me of Little Printers from a few years ago: https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/
Nice to see the concept is still alive and useful!
I’ve wanted to make something like this for a while! Though with sudoku puzzles instead of news. My mum goes thru tons of those sudoku books, and doesn’t want to use her phone for it. Just a button to get 1 puzzle, or hold for a roll of 10 or something seems like an easy thing to set up.
adafruit used to sell a little pi powered thermal printer[1] but I always found the case a little fiddly and fragile. And my office mate didn’t care for the thing coming on at random times. (Not as bad as the text only 40 col commercial receipt printer that used actual ink and was as loud as a full size Epson MX-80.
Free idea: Uber for printers. Need to print something? Car drives up with a printer in the boot, you print whatever (umbrella as appropriate) and the driver is responsible for ink and paper.
[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/717
Before I bought a printer for home, I'd go print things at my local library. Pretty convenient, and it was free for 10 b/w pages a week! But getting my own used Brother printer was a real step up.
I cant imagine how much it would cost per print. I doubt anyone would be willing to pay 5–10$ for the first page. It’s cheaper to drive to a print shop or send your pdf to a printing service and receive hard copies by mail.
For those not driving, Uber package delivery will probably do the delivery for you.
I’m not driving and just walk or ride my bike to the next print shop (150m) or the further one (300m). I’m blessed to live in an affordable, living suburb.
There’s many Uber (and competitors) cars parked in my neighborhood but I don’t see them often in the road. They probably roam around more pricy neighborhoods for work.
Always happy to see other thermal printer projects :D
I have my own project for using these for TTRPGs: https://sales-and-dungeons.app/
This is great for the environment. Millions of people could balance the strain they put on the planet by reading the news from their lithium powered Gadgets on good old paper. Win win
Most thermal paper is made with harmful chemicals.
After my PET 2001 I had purchased in 1977/78, I bought a Commodore Vic-20. Using the book, "Practical Astronomy with Your Calculator", I wrote a program in Vic BASIC which was the same as the PET's to identify the four most prominent moons of Jupiter based on their elliptical plane being on edge when viewed from Earth. I wanted a way of going on my roof in Brooklyn with my small refractor to identify them, so I bought a thermal printer and printed out the primitive graphics on a line for a given time for the next few hours or so of stargazing. I can't remember the printer brand, but it wasn't one of the Apple, Atari, or ZX offerings. Good fun. I have to say, I would use my phone nowadays or my e-ink tablet instead. Not from being 'sucked in' but merely because it would be quick and more accurate and have other uses for the same task like Stellarium!
Hey, I made something like this last year. It wasn't a self-contained unit, it was just a receipt printer with a script that would run every morning at 8am, getting the forecast, word of the day, and quote of the day. The idea was that if something important happened that day, I could hold onto that day's slip of paper and maybe write a note on it? I dunno, I stopped using after a month or so.
Fun! A friend of mine has been working on something similar: https://www.wintermute.org/project/The_Screenless_Office/
I've wanted something like this since the days of TinyPrinter, but I just can't justify thermal printing. I'd love to have either impact or laser, however.
I mostly want it for lists and recipes, but some other goodies would be fun, too.
This is cool. Please make it so its not just for news and developer friendly so it can print any content on demand using api. Tried to use a "memobird" printer for similar purpose but couldn't get any support for their API.
You can write your own script to do this. It's a few lines of scripting to query whatever APIs you want, and then output to /dev/usb0 or wherever the printer is hooked up. Seems a bit unnecessary to add an extra API wrapper just to do that
You can test this right now by running `echo "Hello, world!" > /dev/usb0`, assuming a printer is connected to that USB port of your Unix-based device.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141016/a-laymans-ex...
Interesting.i have always known usb0 exists but didnt think this would work. Now i am wondering what the equivalent command to print using bluetooth printers is.
This is great! I wonder how hard it would be to use a pen plotter instead of a thermal printer. You could even use a procedurally generated handwriting font and Claude to make it feel like a handwritten letter.
That’s a neat idea — I wonder about pairing it with a low cost plotter like: https://www.generativehut.com/post/ly-drawbot-a-70-pen-plott...
How about showing all the money you spent/earned in the previous day, in one personalized receipt?
https://github.com/alibahmanyar/breaklist
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41742210
I'd like to have a program to prepare and typeset PDFs for newspapers to be printed out of a gazillion of news sources is like to read, very few of which have an rss.
I have a TidByt in my office and this feels like the printed version of that. The ability to choose and order the sections of your daily newspaper from a library/app would be slick.
theres definitely something nice about how analog this is, but as an anti-screen solution it doesnt make much sense since you would have to spend more time using a screen to make sure your tasks are filled out the night before. for me anyway there are certain tasks i just remember so i mainly only make a note of the things i would forget, but with this i would have to write down everything
Are there accessibly priced printers to do actual newspaper or magazine style printing? Like if you wanted to be your own small publisher.
Newspapers and magazines are pressed, not printed.
Is that available at small scale?
Yes: https://www.newspaperclub.com/
Disclaimer: I was one of the founders of the business, but left a long time ago. It’s still a great service! We print a newspaper for our friends and family each year.
You could even 3d print it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spvYDhja1mo (or try finding used etching presses). Though there is also the question of ink price, and ultimately an industrial printer may work better at small scale.
Cute project, I can see myself getting into building something like it as a hobby project.
Would I pay for one? Honestly, there's no way in the world.
Totally misread the headline as "Gluten" on first glance.
This is totally awesome and would be even more wonky if it came out on a reel of teletype tape.
I think the idea would work better using an ordinary laser printer.
Very cool looking thing, though I am confused from these comments as to whether it will kill me or not.
Does this fill your body with BPA like store receipts do for workers that touch them a lot? That would be a bad way to start each day.
As cool as thermal printers are, if you want to have printed news from the nyt in the morning, it might be simpler to just, you know, subscribe to the newspaper.
those cheap-as-chips thermals are nice, esp some old ones , they come with a parallel port - very retro! I used an 80mm one to print short todo/lists, they fit well into my 'ancient' pocket filofax (4-ring), alas this kind of paper is not echo friendly.
thermal receipt paper should not be handled
they contain BPA and BPS which are endocrine-disrupting
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
https://www.ecocenter.org/our-work/healthy-stuff-lab/reports...
Very inconvenient that people are still using Twitter. A presence on a more open network that would at least be cross-posted to, would be much appreciated.