I’ve tweeted a few times about my Little Printer, but thought I would write a little post about it as well.
I first heard about the Little Printer a few years ago and loved the idea of a small printer that could print out little snippets of news for you. I forgot about it for a while, until a few months ago when I came across their website again. I set up an alert on eBay, and stalked the listings until I managed to win one for £40 (not bad considering the other auctions were going for £80, and it’s £150 new)
Size wise, the Little Printer doesn’t take up too much space on my desk – it’s about 4 inches square. It always has a face on it, and you subscribe to various things – they can either be specific to you (e.g. getting print outs of your Google Analytics, copies of your to-do list, what was the most popular photo on your Instagram feed yesterday) or just a series of things – I like the Mr Men series.
The printer is really simple to set up – you plug in a box into the router, then plug your printer in wherever it is going to live. You’ll get given a code to set the printer up with your account, and that’s it.
I love the Little Printer for printing out those things that you don’t want to write down on a huge piece of paper (like, a code to get your train tickets does not need an A4 print out) but prefer to have something physical rather than a note on your phone. The Little Printer would be really useful for a shopping list or a to do list – I send screenshots of my iOS to do list as a photo message to the printer (using Moldiv to stitch screenshots together) and it appears on the printer within a minute or two)
What would make the Little Printer amazing? Integration with IFTTT. I love IFTTT, and use a few different recipes, but to be able to combine them with a printer would make them extra amazing. Another thing I would like to see would be to make it easier for people to send me little messages to the printer – I am in the process of getting this application set up on Heroku to allow anyone to email the printer (and also so I can work around the lack of IFTTT channel), but having never used Heroku before, it’s a little confusing to me! I love the idea of creating your own publication, but have no idea what I would want to receive on a regular basis!