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.

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!)

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.

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

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!

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.

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?

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

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.

> Additionally, since this is an experimental project, I wanted to remain super cheap for this data, free if at all possible.

There's also NewsCatcher which is free for open source side projects:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...

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.p... && open ./scan.pdf

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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_newspape...

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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!

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

btw, second best source of daily news in English in Eastern Europe was shortwave.

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 )

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.

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)

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...

This is the most Hacker News post ever made

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

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.

so pure -- easily as awesome as this lovely post, (What Hath Woz Wrought)[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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

Reminds me of the dusty stock ticker in Mr Burns' office:

https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very cool!

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

> There might be a better way to handle that..

Yes... Just add lp group to your account (since /dev/usb/lpX are root:lp)

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

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!

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

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

Perfect, I do the same thing for daily quote.

Any thoughts with eink display

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

This is awesome. Well done.

Glass onion's vibes

Hiejhe Hieijehjvjejheb

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.

hacker invents the newspaper

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

[dead]

[dead]

Very environmental

Hacker invents the newspaper

Why can’t people just simply exercise self control