SpritesMods .com Standalone HPLJ display hack - The Story

The Story

As you might know, I still live in a students' flat (at least, for the next few weeks...) , and students sometimes aren't the kind of people which have cleanliness as their top virtue. Normally, poking them once would be sufficient to make them clean up their stuff, but sometimes it takes a bit more...

Tonight, I overheard a couple of people who live with me in the flat talk about a person who has left 2 HP LaserJet4's in the hallway, for more than a week. Putting them in front of his door didn't help, and the next action they had in mind was to tape a huge angry sign on them so he perhaps would notice it. While that's one way to do it, I decided it wouldn't be fun and perhaps the offending person would remember it better when we did something more playful.

A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what's displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC. Problem was: I didn't have a PC connected to the laserjet, so I had to divine a standalone solution.

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