Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Fun printer hack story from work.
Higher-end HP laser printers have a small LCD letter display on the front, that they use to display status messages, etc. This morning, I heard about a way to change this message to any arbitrary string, using a very short piece of perl code. Now, I am too much of an upstanding citizen to actually make use of this knowledge. However, I am not so well-behaved as to not send the information to someone who would make use of it — the office’s resident bitter sys admin.
He took the news with quite a bit of relish. (I heard him from about 5 cubes away exclaim, “Oh goody!”)
For a while this morning the printer said “GRAPE JAM”. After that it said “PRESS ESC TO CONTINUE”. When I left the office it was saying “MY MIND IS GOING I CAN FEEL IT”. He claims he’ll be changing it about once a day from now on.
It’s confusing the hell out of sales. I approve.
I LIKE GRAPE JAM!
Tell him I’ll pay him a buck if he makes it say “VINCIBLE PANTS!” for a day. =D
HOW???? HOW DO I DO IT???
That’s just awsome!
The code is here:
http://www.lafferty.ca/software/hpcode
Tweak to your pleasure.
Or if you’d like I could fiddle it somewhat.
The proper BOFH thing to do would be to print “END YOUR LIFE IT’S THE ONLY WAY” and “QUIT PRINTING PORN”.
Which is exactly why the BOFH stories are rarely amusing.
great stuff. thanks!