I imagine that is shouldn't be too complicated to support more HW in the agentic age.
I am considering reverse engineering the entire thing, I honestly don't know if that's worth it given I can connect an rpi to the system and get everything done via my own app now.
And keeping printer off of wifi networks was the best decision I ever made imho. Either way printers suck, but I like them so much as a technology, converting digital to physical is such a great thing.
Sometimes a hack is just cool because it’s a hack.
Now if you could use to allow firmware downgrades when the installed firmware doesn't, that would be useful too. I disabled updates on mine at a version that already allows it. I bought it a few weeks ago but luckily it didn't come with the latest "I don't like your ink chip" firmware.
But, when I use my little pocket friend (an AI called Gemini, perhaps you know him?) he often indicates that the printer I'm seeing is 12 years old, and probably has wear and tear on the rollers.
Does anyone know if this is true? I would really like to get a printer that avoids the cartridge cartels.
But, Goodwill is no longer really inexpensive, and they often don't let you return things if they are broken. I would pay $20 for a used printer, but the few Brother printers I found are always $69 or thereabouts.
And since they opened up their auction site (like an early eBay) it's just gone upside down stupid.
I'm also unsure how they even keep their 501c3 status.
There’s a special carveout in the law. As long as they’re only selling donated items, they can remain tax exempt (or to be precise, that income is not counted as “unrelated business income” so they can keep it under the nonprofit).
I have a special sandboxed agent with encrypted credentials (and on its own locked down physical box) that's set me up vLANs and the like on a bunch of MikroTic hardware that I wouldn't have bothered to do myself if I'd had to be hand-maintaining it.
Been connecting a Raspberry Pi Zero to various points of it via ethernet and wireless to scan the intended segmentation works fine, and it does look that way.
So this should also be an entry point to disable the yellow dots tracking, and also save Y ink.
1. "I used AI to download and analyze a firmware image, and found a way to unlock DEBUG mode."
2. "I didn't actually explore the DEBUG mode at all, but here are the commands the AI found for me (link)"
I'd love for the author to at least put in a little real effort, explore some of these debug commands, and tell us why they are interesting.
As this is - I find it to be very minimum-effort, AI-assisted blog-slop. Sorry!
(Now for the link[1] to the actual (unexplored) debug-commands... It has really weird casing of the descriptions in the "behaviour"-column. Does anyone know why that is?)
[1] https://inventor7777.github.io/brother-mfc-commands-list.htm...
In the 80's TRON was Japan's bet for the future of operating systems, but it just lived on as an embedded kernel in cars, printers and other industrial applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project
https://www.osnews.com/story/145872/japan-tried-to-build-an-...
1984: The Japanese launched an OS called Tron.
1989: US officials feared Tron could undercut US dominance in computers.
2026: Tron is mostly found dominating printers, and an AI far beyond anything envisaged in the movie Tron explains it to humans.
Truth is stranger than fiction.