[b0rbb]

There was a REALLY cool project by the design firm Berg in the UK about ~13 years ago. Cute little thermal printer with online services that allowed you to have scheduled printouts of things like weather reports, horoscopes, etc.

And... oh my goodness, I was looking for pictures of it and it turns out some kind person decided to put work in on having a way to do onprem services for it! [Check it out here](https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/)

[wackget]

> The team at Berg invested a lot of time developing the visual language and aesthetics of Little Printer, across the physical device and their web service.

Shame they didn't bother to invest any time in making sure their expensive devices wouldn't end up as paperweights. Seriously, it's infuriating that they were lauded for the creativity of this project but it's fallen to hobbyists and volunteers to engineer an entire suite of software to make this dead hardware work again, just because the initial developers were either too lazy, too shortsighted, or too restricted by bean-counters to develop open source (or at least self-hostable) software for these machines. You can't even change the server address of these things without hardware flashing and risking bricking your hub.

[dylan604]

I know someone that this would be perfect for, but sadly too niche to have survived. It's a neat idea being able to get little "tickets" for various daily tasks for those that do better with those types of things compared to using a digital calendar

[xp84]

In the related world of task management at work, this reminds me of Walt Disney World’s “Cast Deployment System.” 20 years ago, it worked entirely on desktop PCs connected to standard thermal receipt printers. It would print and cut a little slip when you clocked in, showing you who to bump and where, and you’d hand the slip to them, because it also had printed where that person should go (their break timing, or to return to PC themselves). If they didn’t need you to assume a position just yet, it would give you a task to perform - e.g. “straighten plush in Store X until 9:08” or “sweep floor in Store Y until 9:10” - thus ensuring certain tasks got done on a regular basis without it being something a manager would have to constantly monitor. All of this was like science fiction to me in those days compared to anything else I’d witnessed in the entry-level service sector.

Note: no idea how it has evolved over the years but I’m sure “something something app” sums it up

[aosaigh]

I remember wanting the Berg printer but it was crazy expensive

[fragmede]

Yeah we unfortunately are spoiled with mass manufacturing. If they'd been popular enough for them to make a million Berg printers, the price would have been more in line with what we expect.