I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.
If this is your website, as a heads up it doesn't work well on my browser. Firefox on Android, I believe I have a dark mode and the text is still black but on a very dark background.
I've had this same idea since I also own a thermal printer, but I could never get past the wastefulness of printing a piece of paper that I would then immediately throw away after reading, so I never implemented it. I still think about it periodically: there is something oddly alluring about finding a small piece of paper made specifically for me whenever I go to the kitchen in the morning. E-ink just doesn't quite feel the same.
I wanna buy a dot-matrix printer for projects like that. Still would be wasting paper but at least it won’t be toxic and the result is usually more aesthetically pleasing IMO.
I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't get myself to buy a thermal print for just this project. I'll probably settle with a "Sunday Newspaper" as a compromise on my laserjet printer.
You can often times find them for really cheap on the secondary market. Like old ones from a restaurant. I got quite a few for very cheap over the years. One was 20$ for a 80mm one.
So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?
It's not really a scold -- god knows I've wasted a lot of stuff for the sake of fun projects, this just happens to be past the threshold for me. Not entirely sure why. I think it might be because thermal paper feels kinda yucky: it has weird chemicals in it, it fades super quickly, and cannot be recycled. I would probably feel slightly better doing this on regular paper, although like somebody suggested I would maybe limit it to a Sunday thing.
I think there's a point where it's worth waste in order to enjoy life, for example writing on paper instead of typing, or eating a burger every now and then. Not using a small amount of thermal paper each day is I think a pathological over-optimisation
Thank you, OP, for posting this, and thanks to the community for all your support!
To answer some common questions/comments/concerns:
- Totally agree with the sentiment regarding screens being a big problem in today's day and age. The main reason I wanted to make Guten was so that I could start my day off reading something on paper instead of staring at my phone. It also helps that you can't doomscroll on a receipt ;)
- I also love Little Printer - it seemed like such a cool product, but I unfortunately never had the chance to purchase one before it got discontinued. This is my attempt to bring back some of the functionalities in Little Printer that I'd find most useful in my day-to-day.
- BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
I'd be very interested in a "supply your own printer" version of this as well - either using these two color printers or thermal.
I suspect there isnt a ton of money to be made in selling printers, but rather the aggregation services needed to drive it. Let people buy a commodity printers, or a variety of them - if you use CUPS as an abstraction layer, you can basically run anything, and the CUPS turns the actual output device into an abstraction.
You can get used impact printers fairly cheaply off eBay. They still have a use case in restaurant kitchens - where heat doesn't play nicely with thermal paper, and the noise alerts you to a new order. In Europe where fiscal printers are becoming the norm, it's usually cheaper to buy a new printer than repair and recertify it, if it breaks.
Most receipt printers support the ESC/POS protocol, so an abstraction isn't really needed.
French company Exacompta makes a line of BPA-free and sustainable thermal receipt paper:
https://www.exacompta.com/en/recherche?search=Thermal
The EU banned BPA in receipt paper since 2020, so any European supplier should work.
>BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
Cheers to that. A note about buying BPA-free thermal paper on the site might be nice, especially for those who plan to have children interact with your project.
Depends what you mean by worse: ink is a big problem for recycling paper (along polymer-filmed "papers"). Thermal ink isn’t an exception and contrary to other printer types, it need to cover the whole page for the printer to work.
I don’t think it’s a major health problem if you don’t consume your daily newspaper after reading.
Not necessarily, if you choose a friendly alternative. In Germany, we have https://www.oekobon.de/ , I guess there a similar offers for other markets. As always, there are downsides. In this case, the eco version comes with a blue base color.
My daily supermarket uses these and I keep old receipts for personal finance evaluation, they definitely do not hold up as well as the website advertises. As soon as they get a few crinkles, they darken and get really hard to read.
Ideally, we’d all get to online-only receipts and stop the paper madness already, but that said, it’s still miles ahead of ordinary thermopaper.
This thing came out right on the cusp of IOT as a concept, They put a lot of nice effort into design. You could configure it for some predefined blocks of content and also some support for rss. Was nice to have a little actual pen and paper sodoku every morning on the bus.
Yeah, Little Printer may also serve as a warning that turning this kind of thing into a commercial endeavor is a very challenging road!
You should be OK if you do the Kickstarter style of thing, take pre-orders etc - but I would be wary about raising investment for this kind of project.
What's the deal with the thermal paper though? I guess it's negligible exposure since you would only be using it once a day. There is an alternative thermal paper that uses vitamin c. It's slightly more expensive but I feel like that wouldn't matter for something like this since it's not using nearly as much as would be used for retail printing. I wonder if it's worth using the vitamin c kind instead.
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I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.
Excited to see where things go from here.
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So maybe that's a low budget option to tinker for you? Or is the problem buying one at all?
Thank you, OP, for posting this, and thanks to the community for all your support!
To answer some common questions/comments/concerns:
- Totally agree with the sentiment regarding screens being a big problem in today's day and age. The main reason I wanted to make Guten was so that I could start my day off reading something on paper instead of staring at my phone. It also helps that you can't doomscroll on a receipt ;)
- I also love Little Printer - it seemed like such a cool product, but I unfortunately never had the chance to purchase one before it got discontinued. This is my attempt to bring back some of the functionalities in Little Printer that I'd find most useful in my day-to-day.
- BPA in thermal paper was a concern of mine as well, but I thankfully found some BPA-free thermal paper on Amazon!
https://epson.com/For-Work/POS-System-Devices/POS-Printers/T...
I'd be very interested in a "supply your own printer" version of this as well - either using these two color printers or thermal.
I suspect there isnt a ton of money to be made in selling printers, but rather the aggregation services needed to drive it. Let people buy a commodity printers, or a variety of them - if you use CUPS as an abstraction layer, you can basically run anything, and the CUPS turns the actual output device into an abstraction.
Most receipt printers support the ESC/POS protocol, so an abstraction isn't really needed.
Cheers to that. A note about buying BPA-free thermal paper on the site might be nice, especially for those who plan to have children interact with your project.
Honest question, isn't the bpa free paper just using something else than bpa that is unregulated and potentially even worse?
I don’t think it’s a major health problem if you don’t consume your daily newspaper after reading.
Ideally, we’d all get to online-only receipts and stop the paper madness already, but that said, it’s still miles ahead of ordinary thermopaper.
This thing came out right on the cusp of IOT as a concept, They put a lot of nice effort into design. You could configure it for some predefined blocks of content and also some support for rss. Was nice to have a little actual pen and paper sodoku every morning on the bus.
You should be OK if you do the Kickstarter style of thing, take pre-orders etc - but I would be wary about raising investment for this kind of project.
If you deal with receipts many times in a day you should be wearing gloves!