• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    154 months ago

    I can’t stand the screeching of a dot matrix printer. The correct way to print the news is with a teletype.

  • hotspur
    link
    fedilink
    English
    104 months ago

    Man, I wonder if it’s challenging to source a steady supply of paper for that thing…

  • @essteeyou
    link
    English
    84 months ago

    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.

      • Xyre
        link
        fedilink
        English
        24 months ago

        Likely because it’s $current_year and there are better choices available.

  • geekwithsoul
    link
    fedilink
    English
    04 months ago

    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.

      • geekwithsoul
        link
        fedilink
        English
        34 months ago

        Maybe? But in the article he was talking about his priority being that he wanted to disconnect from his phone but still wanted news. Just seems there’s been a solution for that for a few centuries now. His solution seemed to me at least to be a lemon that wasn’t worth the squeeze as it were.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            44 months ago

            I’d actually be interested to see a cost breakdown between this and just buying a newspaper subscription; it looks like he spent about $100 on materials, plus then there’s the ongoing costs of electricity (negligible), printer ribbons, and paper. Ribbons appear to be about $1 / ea if you buy in bulk, and I don’t recall how much printing you get out of a single ribbon, but let’s assume a 24 pack is enough to last you a year. Paper seems to be about $30 / 1000 sheets, so assuming he sticks to the single-page-per-day format, that’ll last almost 3 years.

            So up front costs, $100 Ongoing costs, $35 / year, roughly.

            Newspaper subscription is about $150 / year, so this’ll actually be cost effective if he keeps it up. Of course, you’re getting a lot less news than you would from a newspaper subscription, so the relative value is questionable there.

        • @jqubed
          link
          English
          24 months ago

          I’m assuming they still print newspapers, but I can’t remember when I last saw our local paper for sale at a store. The vending machines are long gone.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      34 months ago

      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)

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        14 months ago

        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?