SGI: Hardware

This isn't exactly the straightest path to the goal, but it was an unexpected little discovery.

We've got a 3-in-1 for junky stuff - quick scans, faxes, no-hassle copying. Yesterday the second one died. Canon. Junk. Two years old, always babied, twelve cent part inside kacks and away ya go, Canon "service" tells you "Buy a new one ! That thing was so oooold ! "

Someone should put them to sleep when they get to be so ooooold .

Found that Xerox now makes an ethernet-connected color laser mfp with postscript. Yay ! Except they don't sell them here. Booo. Will have to get one later.

For right now, we grabbed a cheap used HP Officejet 8500. Except for being slow as molasses to wake up and sounding like two skeletons screwing in a tin can when it runs and the driver is about 150 megabytes, it's okay. Print quality is better than the Canon. Scanner is also good.

But the sooprize is, it will scan thru a web browser. It will scan over the network to Fireflop 3.0.19 on Irix, with decent quality.

Woo ! Hoo ! Not so bad. I imagine that the whole family (8500, 8600, whatever) does this. Maybe even other HP mfp's. It might be an option for other old abandoned hardware, as well. I haven't tried it on FFlop 2. Needs javascript (maybe) and popups (for sure) so probably Dillo is out. But I bet someone could extract whatever commands are going to the HP and make a little script that would capture a scan for almost anything that has ethernet.

The printer is kind of junky but still, pretty neat.

Very cool that this works. Thanks for sharing! I've got an OfficeJet Pro 8600 that I should try this on.

I've still got my old HP ScanJet 4p hooked up to my Indigo2 through SCSI. Works great with Impressario.

Black Cardinal wrote: I've got an OfficeJet Pro 8600 that I should try this on.

Should work. Go to the printer's website (network address of the printer), Information tab, Applications column, Webscan. Tell No-Script to allow that address and you have to allow popups. There's not that much control over the scan - all you get is jpeg and whatever you set the scanner default to - but hey ! What other choice does one have for a current scanner in Irix ? Or Plan 9, for that matter ? I'm pretty happy with it.

Someone (maybe HP ?) has a pretty neat idea for printing - send the printer an email with an attachment. The printer will strip the attachment to print pdfs and doc files and maybe some other formats. For most things that's kind of useless but if you have visitors who want to print a few things, nice. Otherwise, "Here, install this 74 megabyte driver ..."

While researching this thing I came across a nice trick - the HP drivers are as bloated as a dead Godzilla. But also available is the "Corporate" driver set. 'For IT use only' according to HP - but it's the same drivers stripped of all the crap. All it installed was the printer driver and the scanner driver and probably a few secret track-you cookies but none of the usual garbage.

I've still got my old HP ScanJet 4p hooked up to my Indigo2 through SCSI. Works great with Impressario.

That would be the nicest, but old stuff is rare as hen's teeth here. And waaaay overpriced. Oh well

hamei wrote: There's not that much control over the scan - all you get is jpeg and whatever you set the scanner default to - but hey ! What other choice does one have for a current scanner in Irix ? Or Plan 9, for that matter ?

*twitch*

I'm trying to comprehend the idea of hamei using Plan 9...

frankblues wrote: I'm trying to comprehend the idea of hamei using Plan 9...

Really ? I'm a big fan of Plan 9 ...

hamei wrote:

I've still got my old HP ScanJet 4p hooked up to my Indigo2 through SCSI. Works great with Impressario.

That would be the nicest, but old stuff is rare as hen's teeth here. And waaaay overpriced. Oh well

Don't look for old scanners in stores, but on the trash. That's where I got my scanjet 6100c from. I have no idea if it works with impressario, but it does work with xsane.

canavan wrote: Don't look for old scanners in stores, but on the trash.

They never existed new, so there aren't any in the trash

Techpubs does have a chapter or three on writing Impressario drivers, tho.