Epson TM-U220B - the best toy.

2026-10-17

A couple of weeks ago, when I was tired and bored, I decided that what's missing in my life is a screeching old-school dot-matrix printer.

And so I procured one from eBay. Actually, I ended up with two units, because the first one they sent me was dead, even though I was buying a "tested" printer. But that's another story.

So, the official reason to get it was to print labels... and I mean, yes, that happens too 🤣 Actually, this is the first thing I used it for! Behold, I am getting organized!

I have a couple of these flat folder-like boxes I grabbed at Tesco a long time ago, and I've finally found a good use for them. They are perfect for small electronic components when paired with a 3D-printed configurable insert.

With the containers sorted, the next step was printing labels, of course. I am too lazy to do this manually, though, so I had Claude write a skill for it: I give it the names I want and the cell sizes, and it lays everything out as well as it can. It squeezes as many labels as possible onto the roll without wasting paper, and uses the biggest font that fits. I also got a two-color ribbon, so we can get fancy with that. It turned out pretty nice.

The debugging of that skill was truly surreal, though! I would get a test script from Claude, print it out, measure things on it, send it back a photo with a ruler next to the printout, and it would then figure out what to tweak 😵‍💫 After a couple of iterations, we got a pretty decent result.

My plan is to have more fun with this little screaming machine and write an Emacs mode for it. Not sure how useful that can possibly be, but it's a fun project where I'll also try to output some graphics.

Or you just terrorize your friends by sending them videos of it working...

Though before that, I kinda need to make some progress on the RF Clock project 😅