Glad to see that there’s finally some effort to hack the shitty anti-consumer printer ink DRM.
Quite honestly, back in the 90s I thought it was essential to have a printer. Back then I used to buy a binder, and a bunch of those plastic paper holding sleeves. And I’d print out entire gamefaqs which were sometimes 300 pages.
Then ink started to get expensive. So I stopped. Then now these new printers have DRM. So I just never bought a printer since the 90s.
And I feel I’m not alone. I bet there are millions of people who would be printer customers if printer ink weren’t the most artificially expensive substance on the planet.
If I could go out and buy a printer replacement ink pack for $5.00 and have it last a few months, I’d just buy them regularly. Instead I haven’t paid one dime in close to 25 years. Gee, guess that financial decision paid off for them…
The solution is to just buy a cheap Brother mono laser printer.
for bonus points get a used one!
If you’re extra lucky, it’ll still be running on the original included demo toner cartridge.
I have a brother multifuction laser. From a thrift store. 6 years so far on a 3rd party XL toner…
I’ve spent more on paper than the printer+toner
Bonus bonus points: get a free new one!
I went directly from a dot matrix (ImageWriter II ftw!) to a laser. Except for photo prints, I find it immensely practical to be able to print stuff at home.
Nowadays you have tank printers. They’re more expensive upfront but the ink is much cheaper. It’s even cheaper if you go for aftermarket ink. I have an Epson and it’s great. Don’t think I’ll go with the cheap ink however, I just don’t use it that much to justify the savings
Great news for the population segment that was dumb enough to buy an HP printer in the last 20 years, yet is smart enough to perform this operation!
My HP printer is 15 years old and we are not changing it until it breaks.
We are used to refill cartridges with a ink syringe.
Dad is that you? :D
Unfortunately he bought a “modern” HP a few years back. It’s a nightmare.
so basically just the hackers to come up with this workaround :D
Recently they threatened to brick HP printers that use third-party cartridges if detected
Simple. Don’t buy HP ever again.
If a company intentionally bricks your device then they are malicious and under no circumstances should you buy another product of theirs.
They should be legally required to refund full purchase price plus interest in every case. If there are legal fees to get compliance, multiply that plus the refund by five.
Luckily/unluckily (because effort), in Australia, consumer guarantees on length of time you can get a refund are vague.
E.g. it doesn’t matter that a fridge’s manufacturer warranty is only 2 years, you expect that to last longer.
With effort, you could probably get a fridge fixed like 5 years after purchase with some badgering / threatening small claims.
Bricking your product would probably fall under that category.
This is wild speculation, not a lawyer.
This happened to me. I honestly thought that it was something I did wrong, until I learned a little more.
that’s just the Old Switcheroo with extra steps !
Been looking for this sort of device for my Pantech laser.
The cartridge is good for 1,600 pages - no more, no less.
All well and good, they’re cheap, except… the vast majority of my printing is in A5 size (roughly half-letter, or exactly half-A4).
Those half pages count just like any other page against the total, and I get shorted by the better part of 800 pages or so.
Not that HP isn’t aware or not ticked off about this, mind. Recently they threatened to brick HP printers that use third-party cartridges if detected
Try that in EU.
I dare you. I double dare you.
<Jules Winnfield>What does ECCN look like?</Jules Winnfield>If you haven’t read the hackaday comments I highly recommend you do. Some really great behind the scenes experiences people are posting. Super cool.
If you buy whatever Brother laser printer, the ink doesn’t dry up and you never have to print anything anyway. It’s like $100 and the cartridge lasts forever.
And also; don’t print. If you’re a developer, put in the css that says:
@media print { body,html {display:none;} }That might not completely do it because it’s a joke but slap !important or whatever wherever you want.
Brother invalidates its laser cartridges after a certain number of revolutions irrespective of how much toner is left. You used to be able to override this manually but they removed that in a software update recently. Am livid. If you know different do you mind sharing what model you have?
There is an official way to override this. In mine it’s pressing 7 times some button. I can’t
Remember what it’s called, but it’s in the manual. The mode essentially lets you print until the cartridge is empty
That’s what I used to be able to do. It was pressing the back and cancel buttons in some combination brought up a hidden menu where you could reset the toner levels. You can still bring the menu up on mine but now it ignores any reset you do.
Disables print-as-pdf tho, could prevent some accessibility software too.
This is a good point. I obviously said the code was a joke but accessibility is something I was ignorant of early in my career when I was just trying to make the code work. Once I got some experience under my belt, I really focused on it as critical before shipping. And, surprisingly, I was always able to request extra funding for it.
Also, there’s easy tools to help you. I know VS Code has accessibility code linter extensions. I’m not as familiar with Xcode or others but I’d bet there’s something that at least treats it like a code warning if you do something that would make your web site gibberish to screen readers and the like.
We’re pretty much all gonna be disabled at some point. Some of us will piss off the mafia and be sank to the bottom a shallow sea while in our prime. But ideally, we all live to have vision problems or some other need for accessibility to exist.
why would I put that in the CSS??
It’s a joke, dog. It makes it so the page comes out white when printing. It’s not something anyone should actually put in their code.
I mean if you are a pretentious asshole worried about stinky users stealing your precious content…
ok, but as I understand that was not a topic in the parent comment
TIL the scope of a conversation can never include anything that wasn’t in the original post. I can’t imagine how boring your conversations must be irl.
Seriously though.
Bought an old second-hand Brother printer a while ago and couldn’t be happier.
Model is like 10 years old, yet all spare parts and cartridges as well as just toner are readily available and the printer is perfectly fine (damn how precise laser printers are!).
They just make it happen.
I was sold on laser the minute I had to print something after a month of not needing to and it just popped out before I could get to it (thanks for AirPrint/wifi printing). My old inkjet would’ve been dried up and had to be cleaned taking like 10 minutes and wasting paper. Yeah, laser is the only way to go.
We just print photos from Walgreens or Shutterfly if we need quality color photos. Super cheap and I don’t have to maintain the equipment. Although about the only photo printing we do these days is large for the wall on glass or canvas.
Our favorite photos are also displayed on our living room AppleTV’s screensaver. We just favorite them in the Photos app and they automatically show up. My parents are used to seeing our favorite photos from vacations when house sitting before we’ve even told them what attraction we’re doing. Best feature ever.
Sounds so wholesome :)
You are probably talking about toner (dry black powder).
I have a basic Brother monochrome laser for high volume. I can buy a compatible cartridge for 9€. An Epson A3+ (tabloid) inkjet for color and photos, not a real photo printer, only 4 inks. Compatible inks cost less than 3€.
A great option is to buy auto reset refillable carts, and refill with genuine epson eco tank ink, super cheap, and guarantees Epson quality
My ecotank died just like all the other inkjets. It went few weeks without printing and blue nozzle dried completely up and on the pipes I can see dried up ink on other colors as well. So I had to dig up old Brother HL3040 back to the duty which I retired after print quality started to drop (it needs new fuse unit or something similar, so not that big of a deal) and I thought having an option to print nice color pictures would be nice.
So, if you plan to run ecotank (which does have pretty good printing quality when it works) set up a scheduled task on your computer to print something, in color, quite frequently even if it wastes some ink and paper. I think the main issue with mine was that even if I print stuff somewhat often there was a period where I only needed b&w documents so color nozzles went unused for a while.
I might get a new set of nozzles and ink tanks for my unit as it’s a ton cheaper than a whole new printer, but if you’re looking for a printer this is something to take into consideration, regardless of their marketing material.
Edit: Mine is Epson, didn’t know that ecotank term is used by other manufacturers.
I have a brother ecotank…i know this one will wake every noon and do some quick maintenance, like attempting a 10 second print. I guess it’s exactly to avoid ink drying up.
At this point if I have to print something I just go to the library. I’m fortunate, but it’s been like two years since I’ve had to print something on actual paper.
I did IT for decades. I absolutely refuse to own a printer. I would rather drive to the library or UPS store on the rare occasion I need to print something than to have one of these gremlin habitats in my house.
I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.
They died when inkjet ink became their core business the rest of the company revolved around.
Also Carly fiorina, she ruined it for women ceos for a while.
some ‘third-party’ printer consumables have custom chips on them already.
[…] inkjet throws another vague error when all you want is to just print a text document.
If that’s your usecase, it’s cheaper (and greener) to save as pdf.
Sometimes you need a hard copy
Sure, your situation may be different. Here and for employees, it’s about once per year (printing shop) and the odd package sendt (printer in post office). Even tax application is all digital now. And still, most people have one.
