Archive for April, 2008
Japanese fans initially had some trouble with the 1998 American movie “Godzilla.” The monster looked totally different from their iconic monster, and the film just didn’t fit in with their established lore. However, instead of wholesale rejection of the foreign knock-off, famous Japanese film studio Toho welcomed the Hollywood Gojira into the universe they manage. Newly dubbed “Zilla” (other candidate names included “Fraudzilla”), several Godzilla movies suggested that American scientists had mistaken it for the original Godzilla.
Japanese filmmakers re-created the American Zilla for a short battle with the Real Deal Godzilla in the 2004 film “Godzilla: Final Wars (Gojira: Fainaru uozu)”
Remember the hack to change the “READY” status message on your HP printer over TCP/IP? Well, that was fun (”PC LOAD LETTER” and “OUT OF CHEESE” being the classics). Unfortunately, the display isn’t long enough for some messages (like Twitter’s 140 characters vs. 2×16 on your LaserJet 8100 DN. So I wrote a little script that scrolls your string through the printer display. The lounge lacking a wall-mounted plasma screen, we initially planned to port iSchoolWhatsup to the printer, but meh.
scroll.py
from socket import *
import time
# Find your printer’s IP address by printing a status/test page (it’s usually a menu item somewhere).
address = ”
def scroll(msg):
length = 16
i = 0
while (i < len(msg) - (length - 1)):
print msg[i:i + length]
send_printer(msg[i:i + length])
i += 1
time.sleep(.15)
time.sleep(4)
send_printer(”ready”)
def send_printer(msg):
# myHost = ‘128.32.226.104′
myPort = 9100
s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM) # create a TCP socket
s.connect((address, myPort)) # bind it to the server port
s.send(”"”\x1B%-12345X@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY = \”"”" + msg + “”"\”\r\n\x1B%-12345X\r\n”"”)
s.close()
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