I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d <printer_name>, and find the name through lpstat -p.
And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.
Wow! What a delightful exchange this is! Curiosity asked and answered in 12 minutes! I literally got goosebumps on my arms as I read your comment and reached the last part where you say "this works!"
With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer) I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and emulate whatever is needed for this to work on Linux.
IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has been available on Linux for even longer. I would be surprised if the feature was not available on Linux for your printer.
Edit: added footnote
1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019
What would be the use case of this? I have a remarkable 2 and there's the official Read on Remarkable extension that automatically sends a pdf of the page you're on or the book or whatever to your Remarkable. I'm not sure if it works on Remarkable 1 but there isn't any documentation on it being unsupported.
They disabled it by default as part of security hardening a few releases back. Probably around the same time they stopped shipping PHP and other stuff.
CUPS is still running the printing in the background, its just the web UI that's been disabled. IIRC.
I know about CUPS. There is no real alternative on Linux, is there? But it doesn't work like on macOS. I am sure they added some of magic on top.
On macOS I think it either recognized my printer or I had to select it from a list. I don't remember which for sure. It was a few years ago.
On Linux my Brother printer is not on the list. Brother offers a deb and rpm packages which may be obsolete for all I know. Then you have to install it manually. But in my case it never offered double sided printing.
For years I am using a crutch in terms of Android driver and Brother's own app. This despite being offered by the producer doesn't offer double sided printing either. It doesn't even give ability to print in grayscale.
> I know about CUPS. There is no real alternative on Linux, is there?
I don't know what lifting "real" is doing here, but lpd(8)[0] (line printer daemon) is what we used to use, and printcap(5)[1] to configure. It was general enough that you could make a music playlist system out of it[2].
Dunno about your printer but with my Brother Laser the CUPS driver can do double-sided printing on Linux just fine.
But you should in theory also be able to do this without any Brother-specific driver since pretty much all modern printers speak IPP for mobile device compatibility.
Usually, drivers for similar printers might work. There are also generic driver sets like Gutenprint. Nonetheless, note that CUPS now discourages the use of any drivers, and support will be removed in the future.
They claim that modern printers implement IPP and that should be the preferred protocol for printing. In IPP, printers advertise capabilities and are able to handle different high-level printing requests.
That is wrong. CUPS recommends using the IPP protocol, but the IPP driver (called “IPP Everywhere”) is only available on relatively modern printers. Everything else still has to use drivers, mostly PPD.
Any CUPS daemon will raise the following warning on startup. I just copied this from my Systemd log:
cupsd[873]: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS. See https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/103
Not saying this is the correct decision, but IPP Everywhere is available on most printers that are < 10 years old. Obviously, that rules out older printers, which are fairly common.
> As for printer drivers, those few printers that "need" them can migrate to standalone applications/services using the CUPS API to provide an IPP Everywhere-compatible Printer instance. PAPPL provides a convenient framework for easily creating these applications and porting existing CUPS raster drivers, and the following printer applications are already available or (in the case of Gutenprint) under development:
[...]
> ps-printer-app: PAPPL-based PostScript printer application that supports all CUPS/PostScript printers via PPDs and includes all of the Foomatic and HPLIP drivers.
So drivers will still be supported in a sense, just not directly by the CUPS daemon.
I have a Brother printer from 2019 (HL 2340) that does not support IPP Everywhere. A lot of other printers from before ~2020 don’t either.
You are (like so many other people) confusing IPP the protocol with IPP the driver, which is honestly not your fault and a terrible naming mistake.
And like you mentioned, people have way older printers because if all you do is print monochrome and mostly text, a printer from 2004 doesn’t lack much aside from AirPrint / Mopria. Which is why I suspect CUPS will not deprecate at least PPD drivers.
If you read the linked issue you will see that the plan for legacy printers is to move the printer drivers under a separate application that CUPS can then talk IPP to.
So yes, CUPS itself will only support IPP without any printer-specific driver. Since mobile phones also only directly support IPP this sounds like a reasonable decision.
> If you read the linked issue you will see that the plan for legacy printers is to move the printer drivers under a separate application that CUPS can then talk IPP to.
Ah, yes. Thanks for pointing that out! I wonder how much more secure that will make things for those who have to use legacy printers.
> Since mobile phones also only directly support IPP
Technically AirPrint is not IPP Everywhere, they use a different raster format and some different glue. For example my Brother printer supports AirPrint but fails ~50% of the IPP Everywhere self-certification tests. But that’s splitting hairs.
Huh, my first thought was that it ought to be somewhat mechanically obvious if the printer supports double sided printing. But now I’m thinking, some printers do just magically suck the paper back in for the second side, right? And I’m wondering if my printer might secretly support double sided printing as well.
The question then is, does this lp utility just feed the text directly to the printer or is it just a legacy compatibility layer that goes through the normal printing APIs to do its thing.
I think two things need to be true for a “feature” to be able to mature into a full fledged company/startup:
1. People need to be willing to pay for it.
2. Other companies shouldn’t be able to replicate it easily and put you out of business overnight within a single release.
Part 2 is especially important if you’re building or extending functionality on top of a platform. An example might be the old swipe-to-touch keyboards on iOS. Once Apple built them natively, game over.
I'm not so sure either, but the Atlantic article referred to in the post is much better in my opinion, while covering the same topic. It includes more surveyed statistics about how public sentiment and wellbeing have changed over the decades.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing...
I’m fairly sure there is more to it from a technique perspective. Works like the Visuddhimagga and the Vimuttimagga explain the whole “focus on one thing / focus on breath” thing in extraordinary detail, and I consider these basically a forgotten technology. I have found these micro-steps to be really helpful in learning to meditate more deeply but are almost entirely ignored in the Western explanations and meditation apps.
That said, the traditional texts are still hard to parse. I’ve considered writing a manual-to-the-manual of sorts that explains the same concepts but in a modern way. I should mention that Leigh Brasington has some really awesome content out there (videos, books, and articles). I am not a master meditator, but if that sort of a thing exists, Leigh is.
Others who have explained mindfulness of breathing in a modern way are Bhante Gunaratana, Bhikku Analayo, Culadasa, Larry Rosenberg, Bhikku Buddhadasa (though his take is unconventional), Michael Taft, etc.
But as you have said there are many more techniques. I've heard the breath called a relatively difficult meditation object for beginners.
All I heard is a bunch of obscure references and name dropping. If there was a clear technique, one would be able to outline it like outlining the steps to deadlifting correctly.
There are many techniques that work. They can all be clearly outlined as well, but that is more work than I'm willing to undertake here. The names I dropped (as you kindly put it) have done all that work and compiled their efforts into well thought out, well written, well edited and well reviewed books. There are a lot of nuances and individual variations on problems that come up and how to get past them that all these books address.
But you have to make the effort of reading the books (or finding a competent teacher) and then practicing the techniques hard enough and long enough for a fair appraisal. 10 minutes a day of instructions from Headspace is predictably useless. You can write it off at that if you like, but it would be like pumping a dumbbell for two reps a day and concluding that weightlifting is useless as exercise.
You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time (Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.
It's really incredible that at that point humans(or whatever homo species) could 1) invent novel techniques for tool making and 2) train others, who could train others, etc etc until the technique traveled flawless across the accessible world.
The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.
There's an argument that some technologies only make sense in a particular context and so if you invent that technology without the context it dies out.
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.
The Alexanderson alternator was an intermediate technology between the spark gap transmitters and tubes. Unlike the spark gaps transmitters, it produced a more spectrally clean waveform, but only at modest frequencies (up to 600 kHz, according to the Wikipedia page).
The other thing this article made me think of: the stone tools get stored in a cave and forgotten (the small band of users get wiped out for some other reason), then another band finds the cave (because of a rainstorm) and the tools and the broken bones nearby. They figure it out and “own” the cave and the tools for a few years/generations until history repeats. Over the 200,000 year use of the cave, maybe it sat dormant for 1-5,000 years at a time. Imagine finding a cave in a mostly empty land, and finding useful artifacts inside.
I second this recommendation with a suggestion that has hugely helped me. I have more or less copied the approach to to-do lists described in that book into a Trello board and then – importantly – made it my home page on Chrome.
This accomplishes two things for me:
1) any time I open a new tab, I get a reminder of what needs to be done
2) adding an item or recording an idea to be processed later is just a cmd-t away.
This approach (combined with the Trello mobile app) has made the list so easy to maintain it's almost hard not to use it. YMMV, of course.
I do the same with a personal dashboard that pulls in my "today" Asana tasks as my new tab homepage. Are you using the New Tab Redirect Chrome extension? It seems that you can set a homepage for when you open a browser natively with Chrome but not a new tab.
I think this can be a very good start. Whenever I'm reminded of my tasks deadlines I'd work harder. Would also love to include different color signaling for deadlines...
Hmm,I hadn’t thought of a week/day in Trello. It’s an interesting idea, but having a les productive week seems like it really screws things up by forcing moving back to Maybe and Backlog while you plan out your week. But i see a possible benifit in that.
I wouldn’t do that to my collaborative work board, but for a personal board that seems interesting.
And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.