For the last several months, I would have to reboot my printers every time I wanted to use one. Then it magically started working properly again last week. No idea what caused it.
Printers are a blight on the world
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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But 3d printers can just work out of the box and work in one whole extra dimension.
It's easier to make a 3d printer hold a pen and write a document out than risk attempting to use an inkjet printer that has been sat idle for more than 10 minutes.
This is weirdly very true. I literally have a plotter setup on my Ender 3 because I find the result more interesting than an inkjet.
(Serious) Can we use an old 3D printer to "plot" a black and white document? I would really love open source to drop its mighty power on printers.
Work printer here prints gibberish for a line or two on 4 pages every single day.
A different building on site I snuck around out of boredom on a night shift with a different printer does the same, but it isn't corrupted. Misconfigured* SMTP server auto generated messages. The engineers just throw all the paper in the shredder.
I told IT about it a couple times. Nobody cares lol.
I'm pretty sure every printer on the LAN wastes 4 sheets of paper every day for years.
It's likely a driver issue.
We'll never know~
if it correlated with someone trying to print something it might be a driver issue. a single job every day on all printers is probably a network scan
Ah, I misread it as every time they printed it spot out 4 pages of crap. A network scan makes more sense.
cat some_binary_file | lpr test still working as intended /s
If it's leased no one will give a shit you'll get new ones in a couple years and the problem will have been solved with no additional man hours being spent
I turn my printer off after every use because if I don't, it sits there and eats ink while its idle in the name of keeping the heads clean. Printers suck on purpose in order to generate revenue. A true microcosm of capitalism.
Do Not buy inkjet.
I haven't owned one in 20 years
I have this Dreadful problem where I can't find a printer that works with the way that I print. This is to say a few times a year. And I know what you're thinking at this point why don't you just go down to the UPS store or whatever? These places will print things for cents on the dollar.
That's because it would be a 45 minute round trip to print one piece of paper and I'd really rather not. It's such bullshit how printers can't handle not being used for a couple months.
Laser printers. Toner doesn't dry up just sitting there like ink does, so they're better for infrequent print needers.
Unfortunately however, the good manufacturer just enshittified so you can't use 3rd party toner, I believe, so there's no good brands anymore. But laser is what you need.
Do you have a library near you? Thats where i print lots of things.
The library next to us lets you print 200 pages a day for free in full color.