Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Very nice tool I recently discovered: ink, a small tool using libinklevel, used to query the ink level of your printer (USB or parallel). In my case this is an Epson Stylus DX4200 (which works very nicely and out of the box btw).

Installation:

$ apt-get install ink

Usage:

$ ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz

EPSON Stylus DX4200

Cyan:                          76%
Magenta:                       76%
Yellow:                        76%
Photoblack:                    72%

Graphical ink level display:

$ apt-get install qink

Another nice tool built upon libinklevel is called qink, which is a QT-based GUI which displays the same information graphically (see screenshot).

A list of printers supported by libinklevel is available.

If you haven't yet read about it, some printer brands place tiny, almost invisible yellow dots on every page you print. These dots encode certain information (date, time, printer serial number, or similar things). I think you can easily imagine the security and privacy implications. The EFF has now cracked the DocuColor Tracking Dot code.

They have also written a program which decodes the dot patterns. The code is released under the terms of the GPL.

(via Boing Boing and CCC)