HP Printer prank
John David Hickey
Greetings!
I received a few requests for the printer prank that I suggested in the
now dead "Levity in the Workplace" thread. This prank allows you to
change the 00 Ready message in the printer display window to almost any
message you want. On most HP printers, you have a limit of 16 characters
(I think).
This prank works only on HP laser printers. Before you can get this
prank to work, you need the network address of your laser printer. This
is easy enough to find. I used MS Word to get the network address, but
this procedure probably applies to almost ony other application that
prints to your printer.
1. Launch your application that connects to your printer (Word for
example)
2. Open the Print dialog box (In Word, its the Print command in the File
menu)
3. Take note of the network address (In Word, the network address in the
Where: field)
Now you need to create two files using the MS-DOS Editor in MS-DOS.
Don't use NOTEPAD from Windows.
One file contains the message you will send and the other contains the
command that sends the message to the printer. I'll call these files:
PSEND.BAT and PMESS.TXT. Make sure you save both files in the same
directory.
PMESS.TXT
This file contains the message you're going to send to the printer.
1. Start a DOS shell and type EDIT.
2. Enter the following line in this file:
<--%-12345X@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY="INSERT DISK 1"
To get the arrow symbol (<--), press [CTRL] + P and press [ESC]
Replace INSERT DISK 1 with your funny message.
3. Do a File/Save As... Save as PMESS.TXT.
4. Exit EDIT.EXE.
PSEND.BAT
This file contains the command that sends your message in PMESS.TXT to
your network printer.
1. Start a DOS shell and type EDIT.
2. Enter the following line in this file:
type pmess.txt >\\r3913445\traduction
Put your network address after the > in the command. (you'll be
replacing the \\r3913445\traduction)
3. Do a File/Save As... Save as PSEND.BAT.
4. Exit EDIT.EXE.
--------------------------------------
Okay... Assuming that you are hooked up to your network printer, access
your directory where you save the PMESS.TXT and PSEND.BAT files.
Type PSEND.BAT and press [ENTER].
If you typed the network password correctly and it can find the HP
printer at the end of it, your command will change the printer message
to whatever witicism you place in the PMESS.TXT file.
Have fun and post your adventures to me or in the group!
********
My first adventure involved changing our network printer message from 00
Ready to Out of Cheese. It really caused a flurry of mystified looks in
my office. The engineers tried to some very worldly and knowledgable by
saying that the engineers that designed the printer hid command in the
hardcode. I freaked these people out by sending the following commands
to the printer while they were watching (each line is a different
message)
Out of cheese
You are wrong.
Silly Eng.
I think
Therefore
I am
Sweet
sentience!
Feed me cheese
At that point, they overheard my non-longer controlable giggles. The
looks on their faces was priceless though!
--
Be seeing you,
Dave
Grand Technical Writing Poobah
DNRC
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