So my fucking shit Epson printer can't print black and white without colour ink cartridges. FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING MONEY SUCKING PIECE OF SHITE.

Why on Earth are printer drivers so huge? Seriously, 1GB to print, Epson? There are entire distros of Linux that take up less than that!

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

Some time 199x, when I was still a little kiddo, my dad bought a PC. It had a big ass HDD (dimensions-wise), 1x 3.5" floppy disk drive and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. It ran DOS. Dad managed to hook up a dot matrix Epson printer to it and used the computer for writing... whatever, really :)

Then dad got some of those 5" floppies with games and installed them on our PC. Mach3, Indy, Entity and Atlantis were my favourite ones. Later we got Wolfenstein 3-D, but that was just too scary, too intense for me.

All that was years before we got Windows 3.0 installed there.

Poorly written docs.

I've been fighting with the Epson T88VI printer webconfig api for five hours now.

The official TM-T88VI WebConfig API User's Manual tells me how to configure their printer via the API... but it does so without complete examples. Most of it is there, but the actual format of the API call is missing.

It's basically: call `API_URL` with GET to get the printer's config data (works). Call it with PUT to set the data! ... except no matter what I try, I get either a 401:Unauthorized (despite correct credentials), 403:Forbidden (again...), or an "Invalid Parameter" response.

I have no idea how to do this.

I've tried literally every combination of params, nesting, json formatting, etc. I can think of. Nothing bloody works!

All it would have taken to save me so many hours of trouble is a single complete example. Ten minutes' effort on their part. tops.

asjdf;ahgwjklfjasdg;kh.

why the fuck does my printer not work for linux. dammit! i tried everything and this piece of shit epson xp-400 dont want to print. im about to print a fucking sledge hammer to it real soon!

I grew up on a farm in western KS. My parents bought PCs when I was in grade school. First was a trs80 , then an Epson Equity 1+, where I built a spare key for it, and built levels in willy for my brother to beat. Then a 486 and pentium which I broke often. I ended up working at the same store in college for extra cash. While I'm an adverage developer, I do on and make decent $$. I still help them out with keeping their PCs running, for moms sewing, and dads Linux box. I figure I owe them for their investment in me. They gave me the tools to figure out what I want to do with my career and my life.

It is 4 am now.
There it is. My obsession to destroy electronical things got me once again lol. I found a Canon printer last month and put it in my room to gather more electronical parts (for future arduino projects).

I am quite impressed about what makes Canon printers so different from Epson printers.
Canon really makes it fucking hard to open the inside of the printer.
Epson printers were way easier to open. A big plus for Epson.
Canon printers have weird design. Everything somehow sticks inside of something else with no room inside the printer. Like spaghetti.
Wherelse Epson printers have a plenty of room inside with a better design. No need to waste alot of time to reverse engineer it (figuring every single cable, motor, and what else not out). A plus for Epson here.

Now... what might have impressed me alot?
Take a look at the attached picture. The power on button(design), the display (it is usually soldered on Epson printers) and the "door servant" as I call the part with the blue cables. The "door servant" pushes the stick down when it has electricity.

I never found these like this in Epson printers.

So client wants an android app that implements some legacy Epson printer SDK, works on a chinese Windows device with an android Emulator on it, connects to local Webservice that had to be configurated and ran (local Network) , sends and tracks data, if Server down then handle it on the Client and reconnect as soon as Server up, running own TCP Server on Android device that listens for specific http requests, which make the android connect to an Epson printer to start printing. The stuff that is being printed? A png file that has to be converted to a Bitmap, a QR Code that has to be generated by the bugged base64 encrypted stuff coming via http in (webserver-> Android TCP server)
Dont forget the Software Design (MVP), documentation, research etc.. Im about to finish the app , its my 5th day on this Project, the 6th day was planned to be full testing. Client Calls me and ask me how far I am, I reply, he says ok. 30 minutes later he tells me he wont pay me next time that much because this work should take 3 days, or even 2. "A senior Android developer could do this in 2 days"... When i sent him my notices he called me a liar, his webdev has alot of experience and told him it should take 2-3 days...ffs

Epson printers are piece of shit. Don't buy this crap.

Playing Sierra Online games like Kings Quest and Thexdar on an Epson 8088 with duel 5 1/4 floppy drives and no hard drive. I don't miss the days of having to swap disks when moving between different areas in the games.

I remember when my dad got a 486 DX/2 with a 300 MB hard drive and I could fit all my games on it. Prior to that on the 286 that had a 40 MB drive I created a batch file with a menu to select a game that would unzip the game and launch it, then when I exited the game it would zip it back up and delete the directory.