Some disagreement out there about what BERG’s Little Printer is for. I don’t have any special insight but I think it’s a charming and clever thing and I badly want one (I’ve put my name on the tell-me-when-I-can-order-one mailing list). So I had a think about what I’d print if I did have one:
- Inscrutable password suggestions.
- Daily quotes from John Cage’s Diary
- Disquieting messages for people in other rooms.
- Orders!
- The frightening bits from out-of-copyright works.
- The funny bits from out-of-copyright works.
- Dog names.
- IKEA product locations, Argos reservation numbers, mall maps.
- Jokes.
- (black and white) pictures of funerals and snakes.
- Sequentially-numbered tickets.
- Encouraging messages (when it looks like I’m a bit stuck).
- Lists.
- Postage stamps (obviously).
- Cocktail recipes.
- The names of all the fictional countries in the Wikipedia entry for ‘fictional countries’, one per day.
- Itineraries.
- Daily diet and exercise sheets.
- Obscene notes.
- Treasure.
- Something to do while your computer’s rebooting.
- Eventbrite tickets.
- Local currency.
- Everything said by one particular friend online during one day.
- Game tokens.
- Optimistic assessments of the situation.
- The catalogue number of the CD on the radio now.
- Hidden meanings, asides, sub-plots, back stories.
- Chess moves.
- Philip Larkin.
- In-game messages.
- Running totals, lap-times, half-time scores, way markers.
- One-time keys.
- The distance from earth of the Voyager 2 space probe.
- Billets doux.
- Wind-ups, complicated hoaxes, in-jokes, gags.
(…I could go on).