Fluffy tan software engineer squeaking at computers. I solve practical problems! ❤ @binaryfox ➕ @nrr. Kangaroo rats are real creatures!
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friends`s or of thine own were.
Any man`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
my new burger restaurant concept is inspired by modern software. the options for mayo are "yes" and "maybe later", and if you pick maybe later, the chef stands at your table with a squeezy bottle, threatening to add mayo to your burger when you least expect it
In the San Francisco Bay area, the typical polycule and the typical early startup have a similar number of members. And, specifically: similar actual members, though most people are employed by at most one startup, while they may be part of several polycules, depending on calendar compatibility.
While the typical startup has venture funding and a much larger explicit IT budget, the typical polycule has more robust IT infrastructure, better phishing resistant authentication for its single-sign-on service, and higher reported satisfaction with IT support, despite having a much wider range of device types, ages, and operating systems to secure, and no MDM, mandate, or authority to enforce policies.
In this paper, we use an interview-based and embedded ethnographic approach to study these two very different approaches to IT requirements-gathering, decision-making, and implementation, and extrapolate relevant lessons for in the deployment of resilient IT systems which are responsive to community feedback.
@growlph @cendyne there's a variety of printer sizes and capabilities they've built over the years. I have a 105SL that can do 8 inches per second and peel or rewind onto a spool for batch prints. I've got an RP4T that does wifi prints of RFID labels. I've got a few LP2844 and LP2824 units with cutters to cut labels to arbitrary length.
Their equipment covers the gamut and I'm happy I chose ZPL as my initial printer language to support.
@NeoFox My go to test print is a small vase mode bin. It's fairly quick and lets me see problems pretty easily. If it prints just barely good enough I also get a usable thing for storing bits and bobs in!
@NekoEd it's something tougher than hot glue that feels like silicone or something
My 3D printer, having heard me speaking praise of it, decided to fail in a new and interesting way. I got several good prints, then it stopped dead in the middle of a large one. This has happened before, so I just rebooted it.
This time though the motors didn't move at all. Several reboots didn't help. I take the case apart and sure enough, a chip has let out the magic smoke that powers the motors.
Guess I'm waiting for a motherboard replacement for a while. Back to messing with 2D printers instead.
@SimonTesla Shelves!
You know those little electronics parts drawers for all those little bits and bobs? This is that but for bigger bits and bobs. I wanted something that would fit into IKEA IVAR shelves and make use of the full 12" depth. These are Akro-Mils 30110 Shelf Bins that I've designed these custom guide spacers for.
Planning to organize all the random cardboard boxes full of junk into these.
I wish I could get my 3D printer to print this well more consistently. It's so hard to reliably do huge batch prints.
I've just found that @html5test is on Mastodon! Niels has put a lot of work into the WebUSB Point of Sale space and I was able to use it as a springboard for some aspects of my code. Most importantly Niels has shipped a very nice little automatic text codepage encoder library: https://github.com/NielsLeenheer/CodepageEncoder
This saved me hours and hours of frustrating effort spent dealing with legacy text encoding schemes and I'm extremely grateful for Niels' work here.
Their other library was a great reference to sanity check myself as I created a different strategy for constructing command documents. Niels' work is a lighter-weight way to build documents for targeted use cases: https://github.com/NielsLeenheer/ThermalPrinterEncoder
My library is meant to be a more one-stop-shop of features and that's the only reason I chose to not directly use Niels' excellent work on the encoder, otherwise it would have saved me even more time :)
Thank you Niels for your pioneering work and sharing it with us all!
@lukegb that's a neat project! Sounds like it was a good fit for the job back then.
I love XML but it is, at the end of the day, very annoying to write by hand. Receiptline is much more human friendly while still being sane enough to generate automatically as a data interchange format. If I had to support full Markdown in this library it would be insane.
Even still I'm strongly considering a handful of non-standard extensions to the syntax to support more features. Having a proper schema for it would be very nice but alas I don't get XSD support here :)
@kevin interesting! Then my library should be able to talk to them directly over USB, assuming it talks over USB the same way an Epson printer does.
If you can get me a screenshot of that chrome://usb-internals page with it plugged in I can whip a test page up and you can try it.
@kevin Ahha! That's a TM-T88V clone that should be close enough to work. I have a serial printer here I was planning to test with.
Based on the photos in your link there is a USB port on the printer. If you plug that in, chrome://usb-internals and click the "devices" tab see if it shows up. If it does copy the manufacturer and device IDs and paste them here. I might be able to whip up a test page and get it talking.
@kevin in theory yes! Tell me more about the printer you have?
And now all of the formatting appears to work correctly! Onto integration.
@cendyne the fleet I'm testing against for this year are TM-T88V models.
The library is hopefully flexible enough to support most ESC/POS compatible models out there, though right now the characters per line is hardcoded. There's a few other things like the list of codepages that needs to be made dynamic and/or configurable. Unfortunately ESC/POS doesn't have a way to reliably get things like printer DPI directly from the device like ZPL does.
What models are you working with?
It supports fancy formatting now too.
Next up is shipping a package to npm!
Our team now has:
* Chromebooks
* Barcode Scanners
* Label Printers
* Receipt Printers
which is enough to run registration and con store services at fur cons. Or fundraisers. Or a donation drive. And this is the beginning.
We're building a self-sustaining library of equipment nonprofits need to further their causes.
You can't install a Windows printer driver on a Chromebook. That's where WebUSB steps in, so long as someone writes a driver. (me)
Chromebooks are built to last and can be had cheap used. Old label printers were built like tanks and have a rich market for parts. Receipt printers are built to withstand daily hard labor in dirty fast food kitchens.
For light-duty use with maintenance these things will last forever and ever. Buy them used, clean them up a bit. For a fraction of the cost of new you get one that'll work just fine for occasional use.
All of this culminates in the nonprofit company I founded: make commercial-grade equipment available to other nonprofits to use for DIRT CHEAP. My company takes care of the repair and maintenance, and charges a fraction of what commercial rentals cost. Any profits go into more equipment.
