this one time when i was young and dumb and into smoking weed, i remember running out of rolling paper so i rolled a joint using a supermarket receipt i had and smoked it
this was like 20 years ago, still makes me shudder after i learned about the BPA stuff
A few years ago my friend's mother started using medical marijuana for pain management. My friend had to explain that no, you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner, go to a head shop and buy a glass pipe like a normal person!
> you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner
I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
I know someone that this would be perfect for, but sadly too niche to have survived. It's a neat idea being able to get little "tickets" for various daily tasks for those that do better with those types of things compared to using a digital calendar
> The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
I've fantasized about fax phone banks for artists to send things out periodically.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
I think the key point that would make this delightful is the whitelist. Lord knows the moment its opened up it'll be spammed with the worst things bored teenagers can find.
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
I have a clockworkPi dev console which has the built-in printer, and it has always been a 'quaint' accessory, but lately I have been looking at it with glee and wondering what strange and fruitful things I could do with it .. the first is of course a zine, for which it is the perfect printing device .. just carry it with me, print out this months issue, stable the whole sizzle together and duct-tape it in some random loo somewhere, as deserves all good zine format ..
So, yeah, there could also be a window of opportunity by which other readers of the zine could send their own message to be included in the distribution channel (i.e. the bog roll) and things could propagate.
Well, I guess the point is, that suddenly I think that receipt printers are really the only printer I want to deal with, ultimately. I've gotta stock up on rolls.
My wife has a little thermal camera (Vivitar Instant Camera) that she takes to parties and events. The picture/print quality is a bit better than a gameboy camera, certainly not HD, but also fractions of a cent per picture rather than a dollar like you'd pay for a Polaroid. Fun stuff.
For the many posters recommending BPA free paper - does anyone have suggestions / a link for a reliable seller?
I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
Somebody did that back in the 1980s. They put a small printer into a phone that had the same form factor as a Western Electric model 500.[1]
This connected to a PBX and printed "While you were out" slips.
It was a real product, but did not catch on. Anyone remember that thing? I saw ads, but never one in person.
The problem with a production product is refilling all those little rolls of printer paper. They will always run out when no one is available to answer the phone, of course.
Russian writer Leonid Kaganov had this idea back in 2021, with an added twist that he also put the printer in his bathroom: https://lleo.me/dnevnik/2021/11/30
I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about preventing spam. The biggest thing that deters me from doing something like this is the idea that not long after I opened it up it would get hammered by bots so much that it would make the whole thing unusable.
Maybe tangential, but I just added a little 3-second delay to my stats counter. I’ll find out if that worked for the specific bots I’m trying to avoid in a couple days.
I might have to do this with my printer the Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
Yes, the use case of receipt printers is really intriguing .. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698598) .. I find myself wondering what other simple micro-printing things might be worth the effort. The offline nature, the anonymity of the reader - this makes it an appealing media, suddenly, in the storm of digital life.
In my case, I will probably try to use my receipt printer as a zine production line. The nature of the format inspires some great article writing ..
Something to note is the impermanence of the final product, as thermal paper does not have longevity (only ~1 year). I have not found a similar solution (printer + media with a similar form factor) where the print lasts longer, so open to suggestions for such use cases. I suppose in the short term, including a QR code in the print job that links to a perma/deep link online might work from a publishing perspective for bookmarking purposes.
This is really cool! I sent you an (hopefully) uplifting message for the week’s end. I know I shouldn’t but I really want to buy a receipt printer now!
saw this project on TikTok when it went viral, love both the concept and implementation. the creator could easily overengineer something simple like this, but looks like the Pi stands up well with high load.
the only problem i had with the site itself was actually accessing it - TikTok doesn't "do" links so i kept having to check if i'd spelt their name right!
Among other things it has very broad printer support and Chinese-Japanese-Korean character support (requires purchasing a model with the chars preloaded). It's still under active development but it references the PHP library the author mentions. This lib is actually used in a many restaurants in Asia.
I have wanted to do experiments with a receipt printer hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, with some simple controls... but every time I look up the cost of the printer I balk. It's probably not fair, but I guess in my head it feels like they should be cheaper. Or at least the cost then makes me question how much time I'm really ready to put into stuff like debugging the printer drivers and putting together a case, etc etc.
The thing I actually want to play with is probably some kind of board game that incorporates the printer... ideally with bar/QR codes so the computer can print out money, IOUs, instructions, etc., and have this computer mediation that still gives people physical items to manipulate.
While not an outright solution to the fact that they _are_ expensive, if you don't care about them being second hand or a little older you can score a pretty good deal on sites like eBay.
For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
Handling receipt paper is what turned out to be the cause of the high BPA numbers when boba tea was tested https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1899641377002025252
I worked as a cashier for years in my teens and twenties though, so it’s probably already in my blood.
this was like 20 years ago, still makes me shudder after i learned about the BPA stuff
I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
This is what I pictured, but now I'm curious how you'd use the inside of the can.
https://github.com/ValdikSS/printer-driver-funnyprint
I use it to print barcodes, and it's very handy compared to serious enterprise printers: it's lightweight, battery-powered, and works over Bluetooth.
And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)
Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.
The idea of a machine unexpectedly popping out a sheet of paper has gone from "this is all spam" to delightful again.
Physical items in a physical space whereby you call a place and not a person.
We've digitally moved from spaces to individuals and I think that's the main critique of the modern web: somehow networked ourselves but abandoned the networking of ourselves.
You could even do it all digitally somehow and just hook it up to a modern network printer. Whitelisted senders get printed while unrecognized ones enter a digital backlog.
The real desire is to explore the psuedo anonymous nature of the early web in a way that is robust to abuse.
They aren't difficult to find, but they're too expensive for a stupid project like this, which is a glorified fax machine.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5453537/
Thermal paper was widely used for fax machines and portable printers years back as well.
at the time, the openai API and the printer max speed capped out at roughly the same time and would use up an entire roll in ~ 10 minutes. if you didn't wind the paper back up it would fill a whole garbage bag.
So, yeah, there could also be a window of opportunity by which other readers of the zine could send their own message to be included in the distribution channel (i.e. the bog roll) and things could propagate.
Well, I guess the point is, that suddenly I think that receipt printers are really the only printer I want to deal with, ultimately. I've gotta stock up on rolls.
But knowing the things that pop up on HN, something like remotely massaging someone via a receipt printer is totally believable.
I’m actually hoping someone reads this and creates a remote massaging receipt printer.
I looked on Amazon after another receipt printer post on HN but couldn’t find anything that provided confidence in the BPA characterization. ULINE is quantities are absurd for personal use. Imagine their most be a decent alternative but never see any named.
(scroll to "Use alternative receipt paper": "Companies that offer phenol-free alternatives")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone
The problem with a production product is refilling all those little rolls of printer paper. They will always run out when no one is available to answer the phone, of course.
There’s a basic rate limiter set up to prevent misuse, and a character limit, but beyond that I just kind of wanted to see what people would send.
It’s been surprisingly chill, and I’ve only had to handle a few nonsensical text dumps or garbage messages.
Maybe tangential, but I just added a little 3-second delay to my stats counter. I’ll find out if that worked for the specific bots I’m trying to avoid in a couple days.
I might have to do this with my printer the Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(if you build yourself, source non-phenol [made without BPA/BPS] thermal paper rolls)
In my case, I will probably try to use my receipt printer as a zine production line. The nature of the format inspires some great article writing ..
the only problem i had with the site itself was actually accessing it - TikTok doesn't "do" links so i kept having to check if i'd spelt their name right!
Among other things it has very broad printer support and Chinese-Japanese-Korean character support (requires purchasing a model with the chars preloaded). It's still under active development but it references the PHP library the author mentions. This lib is actually used in a many restaurants in Asia.
The thing I actually want to play with is probably some kind of board game that incorporates the printer... ideally with bar/QR codes so the computer can print out money, IOUs, instructions, etc., and have this computer mediation that still gives people physical items to manipulate.
I connected it to my linux server and without any drivers I can print with e.g.: `echo "Hello World!" >> /dev/usb/lp0`.
It also supports bar/QR codes.
For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
For some reason I find it really funny to potentially be getting printed out adverts for shady boner pills or singles near you.
I don’t know, I kind of like having a place for some people to anonymously vent (as more than a few have).