Using pen on paper is much more natural, tactile and much more efficient in terms of concentration and uninterrupted work for me.

YMMV, of course.

On the other hand, the second version costs $500, a luxury purchase for many people.

However, e-ink lacks speed and color. The papers I read use a lot of color in diagrams and waiting for e-ink screen to refresh, reduce its color palette to accelerate and re-refresh to return its previous mode is both distracting and flow breaking for me.

Also, I use a lot of colors for different things on paper. Different highlighters for different stuff (yellow for "further research", blue to "remember this part"), etc.

iPad with Good reader is almost as good as my workflow but this thing is heavy, backlit screens are eye-straining...

Since PDFs are not made for screens it's also distracting to zoom and scroll too.

So we need another format (maybe ePub) for academic papers to read them effectively on digital devices.

Though I did order one.

While I love to read and write on paper, I don't buy any paper books anymore.

What makes it interesting is that there is a 100% free tier that offers 15 pages per month: perfect for infrequent use.

0: https://instantink.hpconnected.com/

We do a lot of printing in the home right now with virtual schooling for my youngers. Watching them try to complete math assignments (this is early elementary, mind you) on a tablet interface is a frustrating experience, and in my opinion hinders their ability to actually learn the relevant skills. Printing the assignments out on paper and having them use a pencil is both faster and gets them into a learning mode better.

I don't remember when I needed to print anything for a bank or the tax office. Certainly not the last 10 years. That probably highly depends on the country. And I did not have any big transactions like buying a house during the last 10 years.

I don't even own crypto currency. Amongst other reasons I don't want to worry in my private life what can go wrong with shitty IT...

The question really is, should you trust presumably a lot of closed source software while printing on internet-connected systems at home? Or even unmaintained open source software. Or open source software that you have not studied. Yeah, I can see some risks, but overall my local library is not known for their cybercriminality skills. So as long as I make sure that I delete my sensitive files ASAP after printing I would not be overly worried.

If I print at work, I at least definitely know that there are several people on the same local network / with admin rights that would have skills to do evil. So even that could be considered risky. But still I do print stuff there (rarely, but it happens) that I would not be comfortable to share.

But the city main library has some smart "document center" machine. Amongst other it can "print to pdf" for the paperless age. In other words scan. And send the results to an email address you enter on the touchscreen. Here I would be pretty worried what insecure operating system and software that machine is running. I wouldn't be suprised to read a headline on hackernews that the last 1000 pages printed/scanned on such type of machine are all publicly accessible on the internet...

Yes, most of us use GPS watches and have detailed maps on our phones too, but tech can & will fail and when it does while you are a little off course you'll be glad you have the paper map (and, of course, the ability to read it).

There is no need for everyone to have one though: I'm happy to print copies of my maps for others, I know a few people who don't have a printer of their own (they tend to use one at work if needed, or like your suggestion a local library).

I also like printing some things to read and scribble notes on away from the screen. e-ink implementations of this sort of thing are either expensive, so I've not tried them, or smaller than I'd like, or don't work well (big, inexpensive, works well, pick at most two).

Plus you've eliminated battery anxiety when the last thing you need is more things to be anxious about.

I might try Rite in the Rain next time I need to restock (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rite-Rain-Unisex-Waterproof-Copier/...) as it looks about 50% the price-per-sheet and is thinner (75gsm vs 95gsm) which may be better for the maps-folded -into-pocket use case. I am amused/confused that one of the keywords in the URL is "unisex".

Though at only a few sheets per run and most organised runs being cancelled right now, I won't be needing to restock for a while...

https://www.riteintherain.com

Musicians are not always particularly tech savvy, and even when they are, they may have little patience for futzing with technology. They expect things to just work, and to not detract from playing and working on the music.

Very well organized musicians and larger ensembles with a dedicated librarian have switched to the tablets, but when you're a bandleader trying to herd 19 cats who were all hired at the last minute, you don't want to add an hour to the time for performing or rehearsing to get them all up and running with disparate platforms, file formats, power cables, and so forth. You hand out folders full of "charts" and off you go.

Hint: The entry level is at USD475. ;-)

What that means is you cannot scan a signature and reproduce it, because the machine won't know where to start and where to lift the pen. We used something like documented here: https://wiki.evilmadscientist.com/Capturing_Handwriting#Capt...

This produces SVGs which have those individual strokes that the machine can reproduce.

I wonder if you could recreate signatures by examining the depth of the ink where the person lifts their pen, since that typically has the largest deposit of ink at that point, particularly with a fountain pen.

These are based on the EBB board which uses a custom command set rather than the more common GCode command set which is the basis for most CNC machines.

If you're interested in CNC I'd recommend going with something that is based on GCode as it's much more transferable. GCode is used in everything from $100 PCB engravers up to multi-million dollar HAAS milling machines.

The $150 laser engravers from Eleksmaker for example have an unused servo pinout on their control boards specifically for adding an accessory like an actuator for a pen. It would be trivially simple to swap out the laser module, which is held in by thumb screws, and replace it with a pen.

Now I just paste that over the appropriate place on electronic documents and email it back.

I was about to go in to something I couldn't blow off, and I couldn't blow off returning the mail as soon as possible either.

But I had a Note 4 phone and a working cell connection and managed to get it all done in a few minutes right there in my drivers seat.

I think I didn't even end up using the Note4's stylus but writing the signature on paper and taking a pic.

It was a while ago so I don't remeber exactly what I did or what apps I used. I probably tried a few different things on the spot before I found something that worked. Maybe the official adobe android app had signature support like the desktop app does now, or maybe I had to do it more manually with some other combination of apps, but I know that I went from receiving an email with a pdf attachment to returning that email with my own new pdf attachment all in about 15 minutes with nothing but my phone.

I have a 600dpi png file with black foreground and transparent background.

Xournal drops it anywhere right over the existing pdf image, resized and positioned at will, and the transparent parts are transparent.

A clerk told me they tell you to print/sign/scan because most people is not familiar or has that feature.

If it doesn't work, here's an app idea: an app to make a document look like it was printed and then scanned.

FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653

not sure about the rest of the EU, in Poland there's a thing called Trusted Profile ("Profil Zaufany") where your bank serves as an "identity provider", i.e. you basically use your online bank account to verify your identity. it's kinda weird! but after that you can use your TP to sign and submit most (?) government forms/docs so it's pretty nice

I use a pen because my Lenovo Flex 14 came with one but I imagine you could use a mouse pointer as well.

On the other hand, I have a cheap laser printer and it just works. I don't print a lot. I've gotten out of the habit of printing and filing most things and just keep a PDF. But there's still a bunch of random stuff: recipes, trail maps, various things I do need to send as physical copies, etc. I don't need to print it all and could take 30 minutes to print the things I do need at Staples or wherever, but I have a home office and it's a lot easier to just print out a few pages every now and then.

The laserjet I’ve owned for 4ish years now has yet to infuriate me.

I kind of miss reading source code written by others on dot-matrix long sheets, you can reason around existing code in a different way than navigating through a text editor or IDE. Still not indispensable, though.

This was the very reason I looked out for a modern dot-matrix printer, last year, only to find, that they have gotten pretty expensive (at least when compared to the InkJets and Lasers and in color, you also want more than 80 columns, etc.).

Also, what I did not find was a printer utility, that would print as many pages as still readable onto the paper, with a special emphasis on source code (hilite, etc.)

I did not purchase, however, since it is not so often, that I have to go through somebody else's full source-code.

Granted, I guess this is a preference of people who cut their teeth in another era of 80x25 displays before modern editors so to each their own.

This! It's like "wading" through the code, being able to jump forth and back and setting remarks.

I sat there most of a morning with a rubber, a mechanical pencil and a highlighter and worked my way through the code.

It felt very good to have made sense of the whole thing to a reasonable level of detail.

I highlighted the key tokens, variables and function names and took notes on the side of the pages (sometimes in the back too).

It felt very very good.

Some of my colleagues where true masters of shellscript, some scripts were remarkable for what they achieved, along with both error checking and error recovery. I've learnt a lot that morning just by looking up commands and syntax I didn't know at the time.

Everything I would learn was because it was in the source of some other program,and finding something I never seen before was a thrill.

Fun times!

­— Sid (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002)

I have done it once in the last 15 years or so, only 2 years ago. Imagine the faces in the office when I worked with that source code listing in front of me :)

Edit: I'm sure an iPad pro might be good size and resolution wise but I couldn't justify the cost just for sheet music. Plus the multi page issue.

Corollary to Moyer's Law - The timestamps will still be wrong.

Personally I have great experiences with Brother on Linux. Brother has well-maintained Linux drivers, recommended.

But my small-ish company owns several, and in my country it is basically essential...

A major reason to have a printer here, is that if you do ANY, and I mean ANY business, you need to file a electronic form with the government, and print a physical copy.

The reason for this, is that we have a transportation tax, and if the road police stops you, you must have the printed document on you to show to the cop the goods you are transporting had the tax paid.

Weirdly a lot of people DO NOT know that it is the road police that is the intended readers of the document, so the information that is relevant to them is often wrong (people file price, tax, etc... correctly, and then put random values in volume amount, weight, size, registration plate of vehicle, etc...) then they get surprised the police seizes their stuff.

And many just don't print it, and assume sending to the digital document is enough. (it is not, a cop in the middle of nowhere might not have internet to check on the official servers the document, and thus he will want the paper copy that he can read with a flashlight)

In any case I uninstall CUPS when I install a new installation of linux because, at least in the past, I'd see tons of files updated all the time every update all related to cups, something I wasn't using at all.

I don't. CUPS does not harm (it's lightweight and quiet), and I don't want to have to install it or configure it if I ever need to use a printer. Drivers should be installed automatically too, so I don't have to think about it. I install whatever mainstream distro, connect to whatever printer there is at the place I am with my laptop and it should just work. People have other things to do than (finding out how to) configure a printer and install packages for that.

Distros cannot assume people will know in advance what printer they will need to use with a laptop. For a desktop computer, it's slightly different, but still, common things just need to work out of the box, life is too short for fiddling for most people (I like fiddling though, but only when I choose to do it).

On less mainstream / more KISS distros, it would be okay (better) not to install CUPS by default though.

So you walk 1 minute to the convenience store, spend a minute fiddling with the plug, another few trying to go through the menu. Finally get your print, and walk a minute back. Say it takes 10 minutes total.

Meanwhile I just press print and in less than 10s my printout is on my desk.

I can see why some people don’t need a printer, but I need one often enough that walking to the conbini and doing that dance is a major PITA.

Personally nearest convenience store is not near so I have an inkjet printer.

Yep. Even if you need to own a printer, lots of modern printers for office or home also offer those options. For 99% of the cases it's just as good as printing from the computer.

This is how it should be, IMO. CUPS is ok, but I would rather never have to install any software related to HP, Epson or Canon on my machine, let alone a driver.

I hate it. If I need to send something to my insurance company, I have to print it out, and go to the UPS Store (and faxing is not cheap).

Otherwise, I hardly ever use my printer.

It was just a single T1 line in a data center with a linux box with a Dialogic T1 card installed, running HylaFax+.

This got us 24 high speed fax lines on an internet connected server, and all the application servers sent jobs to it via the regular hylafax+ client (which is like a slightly customized ftp)

The users didn't use the fax lines directly to send arbitrary files or prints from their desktops, they just used our software which had the option to fax things it generated. For some years there were several thousand end users and back end automated processes generating tons of faxes 24/7 and it hardly ever scratched the surface of that T1, because it often sent the faxes faster than the traditional 9600. Many times the receiving machine could receive at 14.4, and sometimes even at 19.2 or 33.6, and the server queing up the jobs and using all 24 lines could chew through a lot fast, so even when there was a lot of jobs, they didn't pole up much.

That wasn't a generic service but an integrated one, but it's only a small step from there to having a generic email-to-fax gateway/service, or a web front end, or even a virtual printer driver that faxes instead.

I used to use a generic service like that for a while also. Not one I made, someone else's service. Unity Fax, later renamed to fax.com. It worked like I just said, you could send and receive by email, or through their web site. They gave you your own phone number that anyone sending a fax to that number was sent to your email (or your inbox on the web site).

There are many such services just like that.

In any case, it’s infrequent enough, that it isn’t an issue.

But, yes, Japan is behind the times many ways. It's apparently on the government agenda to modernize. Social distancing has made it clear that requiring personal stamps to stamp papers has to be replaced by something else.