Producing stickers and QR codes on a label printer with Perl
Label Maker
Labels bring order to the mess of wires hiding behind the Perlmeister's home routers and organize the treasures hoarded in a multitude of boxes. With just some tweaking, the Dymo LabelWriter even prints on Linux.
For decades, I have organized my network cables with permanent labels (Figure 1) printed on a portable device by Brother. However, it bugs me that every time I print a label the device wastes raw material (Figure 2), which I have to buy in the form of fairly expensive cartridges.
Brother's engineers deliberately seem to have built the machine to use twice as much label ribbon as I actually need, boosting the ribbon cartridge turnover as a side effect! If there is a hell for committing such wanton waste, I expect that the product managers responsible for this feature will be there some time soon. Apart from this, typing strings like 192.168.0.1 takes ages on the unorthodox keyboard; using a desktop computer would be far quicker.
Faster than Manual
Recently, I found a label printer on eBay that I was able to connect with my Ubuntu desktop via a USB port. The LabelWriter 450 Turbo by Dymo (Figure 3) cost me around $40 secondhand, and I got it working in no time. What you need is the printer's CUPS system driver, which is available as source code [1].
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