[NikhilVerma]

I have a Canon printer, I actually can't trust that their print nozzle won't get jammed up after sitting idle for a while. So I had claude setup a systemd script to print a picture of my dog every week, I ensure it has enough CMYK spectrum to stress the printer. Its a nice surprise every monday as I sit on my desk to see a sudden picture pop up from the printer :)

[tdeck]

I wish printers could have a mode like this to print random images from an album, or a calendar, rather than wastefully draining ink into a sponge every few days.

If nothing else, maybe it could be some kid's high school science fair project idea.

[sunrunner]

How about printing a QR code for a randomly generated private key for Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin wallet, then every few days you get a tiny moment of excitement, hope, and then disappointment. It's still wasteful, but it could pay off big time?

[tekno45]

this is an amazing youtube video idea if you could get a type writer to do it.

[sunrunner]

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I'm sure there was something on HN a few weeks ago about an electric typewriter that someone had connected to (I'm guessing) a Raspberry Pi? My search-fu is currently failing to find anything particularly recently, at the moment.

[NSUserDefaults]

Or if you have a printer/scanner combo, you can turn it into a pen pal!

[magicalhippo]

Dad had an Deskjet 720 or something like that.

It sat unused and powered off for a couple of years after he passed, until I needed a color print.

Didn't do anything but hook it up to power and print. Took about 1/5 of a page until all colors were back in action, after that it printed about 20 pages flawlessly.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Laser printers are your friend. The savings on consumables alone will make it pay for itself.

[tobyhinloopen]

Epson Ecotank. I’ve been using mine for years and I only had to buy new ink once.

And I printed a lot of photos, notes, documents, etc

[Blackthorn]

Those will still get their nozzles clogged if you don't run them.

[ssl-3]

This is the part where I get to point out that Brother inkjets do a little dance ~every day that keeps the heads fresh. They do this on their own as for long as they're powered up.

This allows them to work well even if years go by between prints. It's a very thoughtful design element.

(They don't survive sitting for months and months unpowered on a shelf very well, but... you'll have that.)

[tobyhinloopen]

I never had that happen to me, in all the years I owned it. It also doesn’t randomly wake up and throw my ink away, and sometimes it sits weeks unused. It’s in my home office, so I would know if it randomly wakes up.

The only bad thing is that it can get messy if you select the wrong paper type and the ink will not be absorbed by the paper, making the rollers dirty. That’s annoying but fixable, and preventable by not selecting the wrong paper type.

[criddell]

Laser printers are great for documents, but not very good for photos.

I have an ink jet printer that I like. I don't print very often (average a couple pages per week) but when I do it's a mix of documents and photos. The ink isn't cheap, but the quality seems good and for the amount I print the expense is minor.

[hmng]

Not to mention more water resistant, when printing things like envelopes.

[tombert]

I used to do something similar with an old Samsung ML-2010 back when I was in college the first time around.

I think it was software and not hardware, but for some reason when I had that printer hooked up to my computer and idle for more than a week, it would simply stop printing. I probably could have dug through logs and figured it out, but I instead set up a cron job to print a test page every Monday and Thursday. The test pages would just have something on the top that said something like LOL PRINTER WORKS.

This wasn't actually as wasteful as it sounds; I was taking a boatload of math courses and needed tons of scratch paper in order to do my problems. Since it was scratch paper and would eventually end up in the trash anyway, I would usually prioritize doing my problems on failed prints and/or test prints, and I would usually exhaust those and then use blank paper afterwards.

[RicoElectrico]

I was about to recommend a cheap OKI LED color printer (I think C322dn); alas they withdrew from consumer market :/ The colors are super nice and uniform, even if the maximum resolution is only 600 dpi - and the toner won't dry out, which was my brother's crucial purchase criterion; we had HP inkjet clogged more than once.