Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
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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.
Because it is fun to him?
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.
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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.
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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.
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)
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?
There are pictures and ads in a newspaper. This is much more minimalistic.