A few days ago, I committed support for the Sony UP-D711MD thermal printer. There's not much to say about this little thing beyond the basic specs; it uses 84mm thermal paper and is used in all sorts of scientific and medical contexts. It operates at 300dpi, unlike the 325dpi of Sony's other thermal models.

I figured it would be appropriate to use a medical image for this test. Say hello to Dracula, my ex-wife's constipated (ex-)Iguana.

I didn't exhaustively test the UP-711AD's options but it works well enough to move it off my desk.

If you wish to use this printer, you'll need a Gutenprint snapshot dated on or after 2022-10-26.

I'd still like to add support for the UP-9xxAD series of printers to complete the Sony thermal set, but they're too expensive to qualify for lowball impulse eBay bidding, and most of my attention these days is going to meatspace projects.

As always, happy printing.

2023-10-29 UPDATE: It's the UP-D711MD, not 771

Not unlike the last time I wrote about anything printing-related, it's been a while. Most of my attention has been spent on meatspace tasks (like finishing the tick farmhouse!) but it's now time for a status dump.

The main news is full support for the Mitsubishi CP-W5000, including both sets of cutters and duplexing support. This printer was Mitsubishi's swan song before their exit from the printer business, and brings aobut the end of an era.

Also gaining proper support is the old Fujifilm ASK-2500 aka the Nidec Copal DPB-7000. It turns out it uses the same command language as the older Sony models, so there's clearly some shared ancestry. The ASK-2000 (DPB-6000) and ASK-4000 (DPB-4000) will benefit from this, and should JustWork(tm) once I get the USB VID/PIDs for them.

The minilab-focused DNP DS480 and DS680 models were added as variants of the Mitsubishi CP-D70 family. I've never seen one for sale on its own, but one can still find media on eBay.

All of these additions were done without physical access, relying on interested third parties to provide sniffs and testing, so I don't have any first-print photos to show for any of these.

Preliminary support for the HiTi P310 and P320 series also landed, but in true HiTi fashion they're different enough from everything else that more development is needed before printing is expected to work. This was done in anticipation of someone sending me these printers, but they ghosted me.

Also added is preliminary support for the Fujifilm ASK-400, a rebadged version of the Citizen CX-02 (and DNP DS620). Once I get the requisite USB IDs it should JustWork(tm).

For existing printers, the HiTi P520/P525 and P461 saw notable improvements, and the older Canon SELPHY CP models landed a fix for a serious regression that prevented printing on most media types. Bringing up the rear is the ability to update the firmware of most DNP and Citizen models (and their various rebadged variants).

Looking to the future, there's still quite a long todo list on my issue tracker, but most of those tasks are on hold as I simply lack access to the the printer hardware or are basically an exercise in hardcore binary reverse engineering.

Along those lines, if someone from inside HiTi or Kodak Alaris could get in touch with me with documentation that would help out a great deal, but barring that, the best way to help is to send a printer my way, preferably with some money tucked into the box.

Happy Printing, folks!

Spotted next to my office door; shot handheld with a 100mm macro lens.

Actual size of each of these dog ticks is about 2x4mm.

...A female typically lays 4000-6500 eggs in a season. Suffice it to say I'm not pro-life.

It's been a while since I've talked about anything printing-related. That's mostly been due to not a whole lot happening, but lately I got the bug again, and not-so-coincidentally actually have a place to set things back up again!

So, as of a couple of days ago, the HiTi P461 is now working under Linux:

There are still some quirks -- I don't have matte mode and HQ mode working just yet, but that's a matter of obtaining some more sniffs once I have local access to a Windows PC again.

In related news, several bugs relating to the HiTi P510 series and P525 have been fixed this year, and they're confirmed working. Reverse engineering work on the v2 Heat Tables continues slowly.

Additionally, since my last printer-related update, the Kodak 605. Canon SELPHY CP1500, and DNP QW410 have seen improvements. All of this is committed to upstream Gutenprint, though the HiTi data files will have to come out of the selphy_print repository.

As always, donations to the printer fund are highly appreciated, and if there's anyone reading this with a line into HiTi, I'd welcome a dialog.

Happy printing!

This time of year, I get to see the sun set at the end of my workday at start of my ~75 meter commute back to the house.

...It's nice to have a dedicated office space again, but having it tucked away in such a beautiful place is.. heaven.

The label is rather hilarious after the fact, eh?

....I love it out here.

Taken at a fishing dock off of Lake Harris, just south of Leesburg, Florida.

"Pea soup fog" would be an apt description of the morning's conditions, with under 20' of visibility for most of the drive, but fortunately enough of the fog burned off for us to be able to see both the sky and water by the time any direct sunlight reached our eyes.

2022 was a year of major transitions, bookended by two foggy mornings whose circumstances could not have been more different. I may write up a summary, but.. I'd rather focus on what lies ahead.

Life is good.

I've been using Gitolite to manage my personal git repositories for over a decade. Combined with gitweb (and later, cgit), it's done its job well and generally stayed out of the way.

Where it falls flat though, is that if you want to use more than one ssh key, you're not going to be able to utilize its auto-created private namespaces without manual intervention or moving stuff out separately. Its simplicity also makes it a lot more challenging to integrate with other things, especially when the repositories are private.

The last straw though, was discovering that my server bandwidth was being swamped by things constantly hitting the anonymous git service, with no real ability to monitor/track/restrict it. If I was going to disable that and break a bunch of things, I figured it was the time to just go all the way and gain some new functionality for my efforts.

So.. I finally bit the bullet, and after a couple of days of insanity, have switched everything over to Gitea -- it's nicely self-contained and straightforward to administer, yet has all the modern bells and whistles expected of a software forge. It will also make it a lot easier to work with my occasional moonlighting clients without having to use the likes of GitHub.

This migration was more annoying than I expected, but that was mostly of my own doing as I decided to rewrite the history of two of my public projects to enable them to take advantage of git-lfs. This wasn't the right call, and I intend to go back and partially rectify it.

git-lfs aside, I think the overall effort is well worth it -- For example, I'll eventually be able to retire the standalone wiki and bug trackers I'm also hosting, which will help shrink ShaftNet's special snowflake server/service footprint and thus reduce my administrative burden. It sure beats letting everything rot, or just just dropping altogether.