Episode: 4552
Title: Printer Conspiracy
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4552/hpr4552.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:47 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4552, for 2026-01-13
Today's show is entitled, "Printer Conspiracy"
The host is MrX and the duration is 00:07:02
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This is an episode about a possible EPSON print driver conspiracy"
Hello and welcome, how could a public video it ends?
My name is Mr. X and welcome to this podcast.
As usual, I'd like to start by thanking the people of HPR for making the service available
to us all on these here in two tubes.
Each HPR is a community podcast provided by the community for the community.
That means you can contribute to them.
If we all give just one show, we have more shows than we know what to do with, we've
gone to a great deal of effort to make the process as simple as possible.
This pick up a microphone, phone, an MP3 player, something got to hand at the record button,
send it in.
The website's got a few ideas you could introduce yourself if you're not sure what to send
in is your first show, so as you could start.
So I feel a bit rusty myself actually because it's been quite a while since I've done
a show myself, so I thought this would start for a good start for 20, 20, 6.
This all started when I was having issues with the printer, so I have a very old Epson
R-300-NJ printer, I'm serving for many years, although it was at least 10 years, all
if not 15, and I thought I got it even before I was interested in Linux, for many
of these years, now I've been using the printer extensively on Linux and not in Windows
at all, it's been a really good printer and has been incredibly cheap to run.
Many years ago I got a number of sets of links for it, I think that only cost about
15 pounds, and then shot well later a colleague at work gave me a set of links, so I ended
up with a large bag full of cartridges, which I was working my way through ever since.
I used the printer in frequent, for many years, this is far from ideal for an inkjet
printer, as doing so tends to cause the ink nozzles to clog up.
Unsurprisingly, in later years, it has become somewhat temperamental.
The problems consisted of paper mess feeds probably down to the rubber take up roller
going hard over time, and missing bits of printer, this is assumed due to the infrequent
use of a printer, and age of the inkjet cartridges all of which were well out of their
expiry dates.
The mess fed paper could be solved by individually feeding each sheet through the printer,
the poor slash missing print could be solved by a combination of running the print head,
pinned routine, or by replacing the fend and cartridge.
Laterally, I had print problems again, and as per usual after cleaning the heads, and then
finally changing the cartridge, the printer is imprinting normally.
Shortly after this, I bought myself, to splash in by myself, an apple mark, many, thought
it could be useful to be able to print from it.
I visited the Epson website, download it and stole the Epson print driver for my chassis
R300 printer.
I tried printing from the Mac, and received a warning stating something like some of the components
within your printer are worn and mini servicing.
I'd never seen a mess like this before, as a normally print using the open source print
drivers on my Linux PC.
When I tried printing on my apple mark, no black text was visible on the page.
I tried using the Hickling routine, and this made no difference.
I eventually had to resort to changing the color of the text within the Libra Office document.
This led me to print the text that was at least legible.
At the time I was a little suspicious of all this, a printer had been working so well
just a few days previously.
I plugged my trusty printer back into my trusty PC running an old version of Ubuntu using
the open source print drivers.
I fired up Libra Office and tried to print a document.
To my surprise, a printer was very good, while it was not as good as when the printer
was new, the quality of black and color text was actually very good.
My suspicion though I can't prove it is that the Epson print driver has worked out
that the printer is 10 plus years old and needs to be returned to Epson for servicing,
or to purchase a new printer.
To ensure that the driver is crippling the output from the printer, the open source print
drivers have none of this nefarious nonsense, and allows the printer to operate as normal.
As I said, I cannot prove any of this, however I leave this up to you to decide what
you think is going on here.
At this point, I was going to end the podcast, however the story didn't end there.
My mother wanted me to print out some holiday insurance documents for her.
She sent me a copy of her documents as I told her my printer was working again.
The first print out slightly faintly, but was readable.
The other page is seemed to print using invisible ink.
I technically need the heads, but it made no difference.
It looked a bit like my printer, or at least the cartridge, this past its expiry date.
Cleaning out our loft, I found the original box for my Epson R300 printer, and discovered
that it was purchased in May 2005.
This means the printer is now over 20 years old.
At this point I decided that it was maybe about time that I replaced a raging printer.
I used a printer very infrequently, and really need color.
For this reason I decided this time to buy a laser printer, since I believe these don't
tend to dry out like ink jet printers, but they're less likely to suffer with infrequent
use.
All the time we'll tell though, I don't expect this one to last 20 years.
Finally, I told this and I'm not sure if using the Epson drive had anything to do with
the final demise of my printer, though who knows.
As glad to see, I leave that up to you dear listener.
Okay, I think that's it for this episode.
If you want to contact me, you can contact me at MrX at HPR at googlemail.com.
As MRX, ATHPR, the Atsemble, googlemail.com.
So until next time, thank you, and goodbye.
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