Geek + Printer =

[directhex]

A housemate got an 11-year-old HP Lserjet 4 Plus from his parents



And thought "man, there's this big LCD display on it."

So what does Mr. Printer do now?

Stuff, of course! (XViD, 510Kb)

It's incredibly cheesy, but it works

His MP3 player uses AMIP to save the artist & title of currently playing track to a text file on a network share - and our file server's constantly running a perl script to generate the correct 15 characters from this file, wait a delay, then send the new idle status message to the printer's JetDirect module (every time the LED goes black it's receiving data. Not an efficient use of our house networking, but hey ho).

[MD]

heh thats quite cool lol, only downside is, if you ever print and it runs outta toner you &^%*% lol

[Applecrusher]

how very sad....
where do i get one?
lol

[Jiff Lemon]

Got one here you have

Though I may have to investigate the linkage before selling!

[Howard]

Lmao!! We have that printer in our sixth form study room... How easy was that to do??!

[directhex]

i won't paste his perl script without permission, but broadly it follows the steps outlined above.

the laserjet 4 plus uses the PCL5e language to give facilities like this. Jetdirect works by doing whatever the hell it's told on TCP port 9100 (e.g. send mozilla to printerip:9100 and it'll just print out the http request).

we simply have this perl script running on one of our servers which, every second, sends a new RDYMSG from the formatting of the "now playing" text file. It's less than 40 lines of perl, and that's with lots of whitespace.

[Butuz]

Old Skool

Threw out a load of toners for that a while ago

Butuz

[Rory]

I thought Geek + Printer = GeekPrinter :?

[Tumble]

they're really nice printers too tbh.. reliable and silly easy to fix

[Steve]

I thought Geek + Printer = GeekPrinter :?

No, Geek * Printer = GeekPrinter

Everybody knows that!

[DR]

www.slimdevices.com... use similar stuff