Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
I can't stand the screeching of a dot matrix printer. The correct way to print the news is with a teletype.
Perhaps a daisy wheel printer is an acceptable middle ground
What about the Selectric Typing-ball?
Not even two weeks ago.
This is the future we were promised
Man, I wonder if it’s challenging to source a steady supply of paper for that thing…
Apparently not... Is it somehow still widely used. It's the most likely paper to give you paper cuts though https://physicsworld.com/a/researchers-cut-to-the-chase-on-the-physics-of-paper-cuts/
Yeah. Airlines still use it for log books and reports.
Wild would never have guessed. Maybe because it’s possible for it to print as a continuous sheet, and I guess it comes in big rolls, etc.
And ink?
*ribbons
Haha yeah also that.
I was interested until I hit this sentence:
I use PHP as my language of choice in a day-to-day basis, and this is no exception.
Why?
Likely because it's
$current_yearand there are better choices available.
So, a newspaper with a lot of extra steps? I understand the gee whizness of getting this all to work but not really sure there’s a solid “why” to this.
Because it is fun to him?
Yeah, but I don’t know whether you’ve recently taken a look in one of the local newspapers— being able to select topics you want to read about may very well be worth the extra effort (also, fun of course)
You aren't actually forced to read every article in a newspaper. Though you will have to scan over the headlines, so you will have a small awareness of things happening in the world. But is that a bad thing?
There are pictures and ads in a newspaper. This is much more minimalistic.