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In yet another episode of the ongoing battle between cats and printers, a kitten is evicted from its comfy perch by a tactless printer. -via The Daily What
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I get lots of text messages, more than I would like really. I have received a few that had directions or other important details that I would like to print out. I wouldn’t want to print them on the wall though like the printer contraption that designer Liat Segal has invented will do. It uses servos and markers to make the message in a series of dots and dashes as the user pulls it across the wall. It is a cool device, but very strange. The brains of the device is an Android smartphone. link
Photo via TheDailyWhat and reddit
In the art installation called Just in Time, or A Short History of Production, French artist Xavier Antin printed a book using a chain of four desktop printers of varying technologies from 1880 to 1976, using the output of one as input of another: Link – via The Ministry of Type
Hungry? Don’t just harvest food … print ‘em! Behold, Cornucopia, a "food printer" concept by Amit Zoran and MIT Media Lab:
While digital media has transformed every facet of society, the fundamental technologies we encounter in the kitchen today provide only incremental improvements to the tools we have been using for hundreds of years. In order to bring our cooking technologies to the digital age, we have developed three concept designs: The Virtuoso Mixer, The Robotic Chef and The Digital Fabricator. Each one addresses a fundamental process that lies at the heart of cooking, namely the mixing of ingredients; the physical and chemical transformation of these ingredients into new compounds; and finally their modeling into aesthetically pleasing and delectable textures and shapes.
The secret to saving money on printer’s ink (which, by the way, is more expensive than human blood per volume) turns out to be quite simple: change the font in the documents you print.
Because different fonts require different amounts of ink to print, you could be buying new printer cartridges less often if you wrote in, say, Century Gothic rather than Arial. Schools and businesses could save thousands of dollars with font changes. [...]
When Printer.com tested popular fonts for their ink-friendly ways, Century Gothic and Times New Roman topped the list. Calibri, Verdana, Arial and Sans Serif were next, followed by Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium. Century Gothic uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial.
The amount of ink a font drains is mainly driven by the thickness of its lines. A font with "narrow" or "light" in its name is usually better than its "bold" or "black" counterpart, said Thom Brown, an ink researcher at Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s top maker of printers.
I, for one, am sticking to Comic Sans regardless of the cost!
Matthew Inman once again puts into comic form what we’ve all thought at one time or another. Has anyone ever been completely happy with their printer? Between the cost of ink, the difficulty of setting them up, and their reliability, it’s a wonder anyone uses them anymore! Link -via Gorilla Mask
Printed by Naunton
Some one hundred and twenty years after Georges-Pierre Seurat completed his iconic A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a group of artists called The Human Printer resurrected the art of pointilism by painstakingly recreating a photograph dot by dot using markers to replicate the halftone effect of CMYK printers.
See more here: Link – via Drawn!
Back in the days, printers are big. Really big. The News in Print has a nifty post about 6 of the biggest old school printers ever made. This one above is the Xerox 9700:
The Xerox 9700 is largely recognised as the world’s first laser toner printer, ‘largely’ being the operative word. Looking more like a kitchen work top than a printer, it would perhaps be a little sexist to suggest that’s why the pretty lady seems right at home.
It is hard to find another reason why she appears to be so happy: when it was released in 1977, the 9700 retailed at $500,000 and took up 5 meters x 4 metres of floor space and produced 120 pages every minute. A sparkling investment.
Link – via thrivecore
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by greeneagle.
Hayden Hamilton has devised a tool called GreenPrint, software that analyzes what a computer sends to a
printer, to eliminate paper waste and save ink.
GreenPrint “looks for pages that have no type or just a few lines of type (users can set the parameters). Then, the software automatically eliminates these pages from the print job. Users can reselect the pages if desired and deselect any other pages they don’t want to print — say, the pages of legal jargon at the end of an airline reservation. The software lets users eliminate images from a print job — for instance, the maps generated in online driving directions — thus saving ink. GreenPrint also allows users to avoid printing altogether by saving documents as PDF files.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
