This Tiny Printer Is a Physical Ticker Tape for the Internet

This cloud-connected device prints out a personalized feed of news, messages, and amusements onto standard thermal receipt paper.
20140716Little Printer
Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Pair the simple pleasure of receiving a letter in the mail with the immediacy of the Internet and you've got Berg’s Little Printer. This cloud-connected device prints out a personalized feed of news, messages, and amusements onto standard thermal receipt paper. It doesn’t presume to replace news feeds or phone notifications. Rather, it augments existing services, bringing the untouchable Internet into reality.

Friends can send messages directly to the printer, or you can print your own missives. Stick them on your fridge or leave a note in someone's lunchbox. Little Printer can fetch things from Gmail, Asana, Twitter, and GitHub, printing whatever you feed it in a delightful and minimal black-and-white style. You can receive grainy, monochrome images from Instagram, or set it up as a Bitcoin ticker. But where I've found this little desktop friend to really shine is in feeds that take advantage of being displayed on paper, not on the notification screen.

In the morning, Little Printer notifies me if I need my umbrella today, and prints out some graphs describing my mail account. I receive an entry from Bad Transport Poetry to take with me on the morning commute, and a hand-crafted 64-bit unsigned integer from London Integers.

When I get home, Little Printer smiles and hands me a page from the Rapper Coloring Book, and a new Tetris block that I can cut out and play on my fridge in the World's Slowest Tetris Game.

Little Printer alerts me when the number of people in outer space changes, and reminds me to watch out for werewolves when there's a full moon. I can subscribe to The Moon Race, which sends me historical notes documenting the progress to the moon in real time, starting on the day I sign up. And every once in a while, a single word---"Why"---scrolls out, "to remind me of the futility of my existence."

There's been some criticism over this seemingly "wasteful" use of paper (I get about three feet per day, although it varies). Yes, the Little Printer is a pioneer in making the Internet of Things personable. But couldn't its paper be replaced with a screen and still achieve the same cheerful interactivity? I would argue that the Little Printer is beautiful because it uses resources; in the same way that a photographer is more conservative clicking the shutter of a film camera than a digital one, we can choose what data is actually worth the paper, fridge door space, and our attention, and create value through that curation.

Physically, the Little Printer is an elegant piece of hardware that reposes artistically whether it's printing or not. The user interface is all online, and very easy to use. Developers will be pleased to note that the API is as friendly as the Printer itself. You can get one for $199 on the Little Printer website.