You should get a camera and write an OCR scanner that automatically scans the receipts as they are printed, then pushes it into a DB so you can view all your issues via a simple web application, replete with tracking, reminders, and then an e-mail integration that e-mails the opener of the issue when you put a comment on the receipt that's printed and rescanned.
This reminds me of a comment I read a long time ago about somebody's experience working for a company that had a branch in Japan. They would demand that some spreadsheets be sent as a fax, and then some employee would be tasked with re-typing all that information back into a spreadsheet later on.
Well it’s not source code but my wife’s work print whatever they’ve worked on and it goes around the team while they make change requests one at a time using pen. Once they are happy they stamp it. So I could definitely see people printing source code…
I once worked at a job where one of the owners of the company, when asked to send a pdf copy of a document, would print out the document on the shared office copier/printer, then scan it back in using the same copier/printer and have it email him the pdf. Every single time he ever made a pdf of any file, even hundreds of pages, he would do this way.
At a job many, many years ago I asked a developer on a different team (across town) to email me an XML file I needed for a feature I was working on. After a few hours of not getting anything I checked with him and he said the file was too large and the email server wasn't allowing him to send it to me. It was a few hundred kilobytes, it shouldn't have been a problem but I didn't care too much, I just wanted the file so I asked him to zip it up to reduce the size. A few minutes later he said the email server was still rejecting it, even as a zip file. Getting frustrated, I grabbed my laptop and drove to the other office. He showed me the XML file... which was a Word document with screenshots of the XML document opened in an editor.
Exasperated, I asked him why he couldn't just send me the raw XML file instead of putting screenshots in a Word document. Turns out the document was on another system he had to remote into (with Citrix, I think? I don't remember what was used back then) and he wasn't "allowed" to copy files off that machine.
There's still plenty of places that specifically require a scanned copy of documents, instead of the original digital one. The printing and scanning process essentially makes it blurry and that's exactly what they want.
I wonder if there's any tool that can achieve the same effect.
When I experience this, they want a “real” signature made by hand with pen ink, but scanned and sent.
Although I keep a few signatures ready in Preview, these do not suffice. I need a tool that makes the signature look like it was created with a blue ink ballpoint.
I have scanned “real” signatures in blue and black with 3 different pens as transparent pngs for exactly this reason. Best 5 minutes in Photoshop I’ve ever spent.
I know this is a joke, but Jaron Lanier actually proposes machines communicate through human (?) or VR (?) interfaces. Something like that. I spent 15 minutes searching the web and my library but couldn't find it. I read two books of his, it must be in "Dawn of the New Everything" or "You Are Not a Gadget". I'm fuzzy on the idea, but found it interesting enough that I remember it.
I once got a phone's speech-recognition system to recognize another's text-to-speech system, just to see how accurate they'd be.
And I know one game that has a speech-recognition system to post in chat and then other players can use text-to-speech to read the chat aloud. Fun times.
This is a fun idea, but I've read thermal paper is surprisingly nasty stuff. [Edit: unless it's advertised as "phenol-free".] It's not just paper. It contains plastics (BPA or BPS) that you absorb through your skin when handling it. I'd avoid working with receipts at my desk all day. (I'd also avoid being a grocery store cashier...)
Yeah, the machine came with a few spools of BPA-free paper, but that just means there's a less-tested alternative like some of the responses are saying. I was a cashier for 4 years though, so this is probably a drop in the bucket for what's already in my system.
I think "BPA free" means "BPS". I think that's less-studied but not necessarily better. [Edit: but "phenol-free" is likely actually safe, thanks for pointing that out. I should read my own link fully!]
"If you must give paper receipts, look for “phenol-free” paper, which is safer for human health and has fewer environmental effects. Three types that do not contain BPA or BPS and are competitively priced contain either ascorbic acid (vitamin C), urea-based Pergafast 201, or a technology without developers, Blue4est. The latter uses a coating that reveals an underlying dark layer when heat is applied."
As someone who once worked a job in retail where we printed receipts on dot matrix printers on triplicate paper, we longed for thermal printing at the time. Noise, speed, and jams were a common occurrence.
No ink cartridge/ribbon/toner, the head is "solid state", and they can be very, very fast as the head is a linear array the width of the printable area.
Also, the cynic in me says that thermal paper is exceptionally fragile and this benefits return policies. Thermal receipt paper falls apart readily when wet, bleaches quickly, and of course turns black if exposed to too much heat.
No trying to get cashiers to refill ink properly is, I assume, the main business benefit. The only thing they refill is paper, which should be dead simple on a decent thermal printer.
If you're never seen a thermal printer hooked up properly with proper software... those things are insanely fast. It can spit out a meter/yard long receipt in two seconds. Nothing else comes close.
It also uses paper in rolls, without requiring spools, and no ink/toner/ribbons to replace which would be both more complicated and take longer.
Pros: faster, quieter, better quality, don't need to know how to load ribbon when it runs out.
Cons: fancy paper, fades over time, destroyed by even minor heat.
We switched from dot matrix receipts to thermal a few years ago and there were several very vocal complaints about the relative impermanence of a thermal receipt.
There was essentially no reasonable distance at which we could store the to-go pizzas from their accompanying thermal receipts where information the receipts contained would be recoverable.
Good point, I forgot about food. We don't sell anything hot, but a lot of our customers work out of trucks or vans and some complained that the receipts were unreadable after leaving them in their vehicles in the summer.
If you spend more than two minutes looking into it you might find a link to cancer. I don't know. That is just the most concerning research I found in the short time I allotted to the task.
With a camera in the roof pointed at it that OCRs the most recently stabbed ticket and automatically marks it as 'done' with any comments you hand-wrote onto the slip of paper.
Those things always drive me crazy. Something about having a metal spike sticking up from a counter.
Although I’ve always had problems with sharp corners. For instance, if I’m reading in a chair and there’s a small table next to me and the corner is sharp, I can’t handle it and have to cover it (like set a book so it’s hanging over the edge). It bugs my eyes for some reason. Same if I’m watching TV and there’s furniture with sharp corners near the TV.
I really hate that this affects me so much, so mostly sharing in case someone else deals with this or knows what’s going on.
I had a friend in elementary school who suffered from the same thing. He never mentioned table corners, but he definitely requested that you don't hold pencils with the pointy bit up if you sit next to him.
These printers are fun. I got one from a hardware swap meet a few years back and used the same software to work it into a public art project I did a bit later. You could listen to or record your own “dream” story to a kiosk, and upon leaving one, you’d get a paper receipt. It was a fun, tangible interaction that gave a bit of permanence to something purely audio.
"instant photo" printers are another fun tangible thing like that! Polaroid nailed it way back when, everyone loves something instant and tangible like that.
You can get Fuji printers which use Instax film, or Canon makes a similar one they call the Selphy, or there's the Zink printer line as well.
There's something about a physical reference to information that you can't quite capture digitally. You can hand it to someone. You can use it as a prop to express your happiness or frustration. You can destroy.
I know this was a fun project but I hope we can capture more physical interactions in the future, and not just in VR.
Having done "post-it notes on a board" at an earlier job, I could not feel more different about it. Post-it notes sucked - they're not big enough to capture any history or context, and the types of tasks I was handed would be about 10-20 extra subtasks on their own.
I ended up trolling the system by simply adding post-it notes to post-it notes for subtasks as a protest against the fact that I could never keep any useful detail against them and the tasks themselves ranged between gigantic and functionally unsolvable (it was infrastructure work, so "done" didn't really exist).
A long time ago we tried to do something similar with a jira kanban board. We were using thermal printer paper with a repositional adhesive, like post-it notes.
You need a printer with integrated cutter, the Epson TM-88 used here will work. You can directly print and stick.
For our use case the 80mm width was a tad too small. If you're printing "landscape" on the thermal printer, the text is not big enough to fit a ticket title in a reasonably sized sticky note. It works, but it's not really readable from more than a few meters.
The paper is from MaxStick (no affiliation). Depending on your use case, pick a glue pattern without full coverage (e.g. center adhesive), so you can easily move the paper without having to pry your fingernails under an edge.
I thought about doing something like this so I could turn the tickets I work on into paper tickets but never quite got around to it.
(I did buy a cheap receipt printer on eBay though and managed to burn it out in the first 10 minutes of printing. ProTip: a receipt printer with the width specified in inches is likely to be a quality printer by a reputable manufacturer, one specified in mm is likely to be a piece of junk from China.)
Adding a QR code would help a lot in terms of making a cyber-physical object where you could close the ticket by pointing at it...
I've had a few crap Chinese receipt printers. I do appreciate that they print Chinese characters because I print a lot of anime fan art and art reproductions of 19th century Japanese prints and like to put as much kanji as I can on the back sides. On the other hand other than some official Pokemon art that renders beautifully on thermal printers because it was thought through like the Ansel Adams Zone System
I do almost all this work with inkjet printers and rasterize it all myself.
(I wrote my own text rendering engine for vertical CJK text, not because I was unhappy with the results I got printing characters with uniformly square metrics but because I wanted western characters and dingbats I introduced to look good. Sooner or later I'll probably write my own text rendering engine for horizontal roman text because I haven't met a kerning engine I really like and because there are many typographical details like ordinals (e.g. 5ᵗʰ) that I'd like to have better control of.)
I am buying these off eBay in the United States. English units might mean "culturally sensitive" which is a tracer for quality.
A Zebra or NCR sold in the US will be marketed with English units, the same printer is probably marketed in the E.U. with metric units.
The people selling the off brand printer might not know or could care less what units are used in the area it is being marketed in, which is a tracer for them not caring about any other quality attributes of the product.
These printers also have an expansion network card.
A decade ago I worked on a project to deploy a couple hundred of these to a restaurant chain as part of a POC for an online ordering program for pickup orders. The requirement for each franchisee was to acquire a static IP and configure one of these printers to bind that static address using a network card that replaced the serial connection. The online interface from the vendor was configured with that static address and sent text over TCP to print the incoming orders. The printer than just printed whatever it received.
The project was initially deployed without any whitelisting or authentication (at the vendors behest) so for a couple months these printers were printing a mixture of garbage and scan attempts from random devices connecting. It was quite humorous at the time but scares the hell out of me given the other things that were on that internal network. The project failed for other reasons, but it looks like that particular vendor is still around.
Kind of tangential, but I think it could be a lot of fun to make a "boardgame" computer that has a thermal printer, some number displays, and some buttons. It wouldn't try to run the whole game, but would only assist. It could print out scoresheets or special tokens, roll dice, keep track of a few numbers, that sort of thing. Maybe a barcode/QR scanner so you could round trip, like scan a printout and then choose an option as described on that printout.
The printer in particular could open up all kinds of generative and variable interactions or play pieces in a game while still preserving the physical tracking of the game. Maybe with some plastic holders you could even turn the printouts into rough cards...
Although not a tangible as what you suggest, there already is a trend in modern board gaming to have app-assisted games, usually to manage hidden state and real-time elements, and primarily in cooperative games. A couple examples are Space Alert, X-COM and Mansions of Madness 2e.
When I was DMing a D&D campaign I had an idea for using a receipt printer to print a "token" that would represent items that the players acquired and they could keep it or pass it around or turn it back in after it was used or destroyed.
I would recommend switching to their Events API. Webhooks are great until they aren’t. Querying the Events API means you are able to resume if GitHub, your network or your Raspberry Pi was down.
And bonus, your pi doesn’t need to be exposed to the world.
Learned this one the hard way. Events are definitely the way to go. You can guarantee perfect synchronization of state if you use it carefully (i.e. as a log you replay as needed).
If it could be closed right away, wouldn't you do that before you print it out? Perhaps I'm a luddite, but wouldn't typing the ticket number into a box almost certainly be faster than getting your phone out, turning it on and scanning the code?
Heh, that's in the article under _Wrapping up and next steps_
> For the tickets themselves, a QR code could be added to link directly to the issue on GitHub. You could also add in more details from the issue itself like tags and severity.
The printers unusually can create barcodes and some of them also QR codes.
But it is also possible to print images. You can also configure them as standard printers and print via any common printing system (cups, windows spooler, …)
Fun fact: code page 437 didn't die with DOS. It's still what receipt printers default to, judging by all the mojibake variations on ”Tack för besöket, välkommen åter!” I've seen in daily life in Sweden.
I had one of these as well that you could print just by writing to a device file. I'm sure it had fancier formats for graphics and stuff but it was fun to just use some ascii art to get something printed.
Quick question though. Why go through all the hassle with the custom udev rule and dialout group if you are just using sudo to run the script after all?
Literally why I built this in the first place. Work is one thing, but my side project issue notifications kind of just got lost in the mix of noise coming through my email, and I'd forget to check them out.
This is awesome. I'm a solo dev and I created an electron app named Label LIVE. I recently added an HTTP API so you can fire off label jobs using a POST request (or retrieve label PNGs via GET). What Label LIVE affords is a WYSIWYG imaging pipeline that can target many different thermal printers at the correct DPI, or generate/submit PDFs to a printer (system or network). If you mention this note and your project, I'll send you a free license for "testing." :D (and no, no direct Linux-Desktop support yet, sorry!) Read more at https://label.live/guides/automated-label-printing-integrati...
I wrote some software with two other guys for a restaurant in Copenhagen. I did the backend for an automated seat allocation system, while other guys wrote a web app for browsing and ordering menu items. The restaurant insisted that the orders be printed as paper slips, while the guys had imagined a PC running the ticket system software (that the chefs would interact with). In the end they did exactly what the linked post describes (but for another ticket system — Zendesk IIRC): an RPi connected to a thermal ticket printer, using some open source library for converting from the ticket data fetched from the API to the format required by the printer.
IIRC, he actually used it on coop for awhile with a physical ticket spike to store completed tickets on. It's pretty cool to see when the issue volume is just right.
I have a receipt printer I was using for grocery lists. I still haven't found a good use for it yet. I love how extremely fast it is though and it has auto cut. Maybe I can use it for a ticket system at work.
I bought all the equipment to do something like this a while ago, and wanted to set up a script that would print a daily briefing every morning. Then I realized that I would basically be generating tons of garbage for an absolutely frivolous purpose, so I never did it.
I did end up reusing the printer to turn it into a Game Boy Printer, though! ...And I make sure to only print pictures I plan on keeping. ;)
In other news: a guy I know seriously had the bright idea of DJ music events for deaf people. He is looking for funding if anyone fancies a punt on the ridiculous.
I did something like this but linked it to Slack and put the printer in our office.
If you responded to a message with a printer emoji she (Her name was Tilly) would print the message (could even print images/first frame of gifs) in black and white.
Thanks for this. It motivates me to finally get my Dymo label printer under Linux control. My last remaining use of Windows is printing out serial number stickers for my side project. The numbers are just plain text, so it shouldn't be hard to switch over, but seeing this work is a nice reminder to get it working.
This is cool and quirky, but if the core problem is really just “when you email me I might forget to reply” I’d first look at reducing noise, not adding signal. For all its weird preachy branding, the idea of inbox zero is a great for implicitly turning emails into todo items.
Cool! Side note, did you know a lot if these receipts contain PBA? In an experiment it was proved that people who handle many receipts, like Cashiers at tills, with PBA in them have much higher levels in their blood.
I did this at work once. We had receipt printers for a kiosk thing we were building and I printed Jira tickets on it. Nobody thought it was funny except me.
You should get a camera and write an OCR scanner that automatically scans the receipts as they are printed, then pushes it into a DB so you can view all your issues via a simple web application, replete with tracking, reminders, and then an e-mail integration that e-mails the opener of the issue when you put a comment on the receipt that's printed and rescanned.
I don't mean to critique the creation, but nobody would bat an eye at an identical solution printing the issues on a normal A4 desktop printer. The lyrical praise and the raving reviews entirely hinge on the gimmicky and "comic" detail of a receipt printer being used instead. Is the hacker community really this under-stimulated?
The UX between a A4 desktop printer and a receipt printer is different, this is almost in the realm of a practical solution to a real tech problem (almost).
Also, not speaking for others but I enjoyed it because it's a great example of the hacker mindset and their willingness to write a blogpost to share it with others made my day slightly better.
If you look close enough at anything (and everything) you can reduce it in the same way. The sum of human experience is just meaningless stimulation: if receipt paper is the thing that stimulates us today, so be it, it’s no less valid than watching a rocket zoom into space. What is it to be human if not to enjoy whimsy?
sitting at your computer watching a video in a news article of rocket going into space is not contributing to a satellite launch, it’s no more valid of an activity than enjoying the whimsy of someone using a receipt printer
