Redeeming Social Value

Now that something about 150,000 of you have visited this post, and about 19,000 of you have made links to it, perhaps I can do something to redeem all the attention paid to it. In a way loosely coupled to INSERT COIN, the campaign to save trees, through reminding people where we get paper, came to my attention.


What can be better than reminding people of what they already know?

I have modified the program (available here) to be a little friendlier and have a fixed message, "Remember... These Come From Trees". It is easy to use, you just need to give it a hostname or IP address on the command line. More information on making it work can be found in the context of the original post. For most smaller displays the message will scroll, marquee-like for a nice effect. The bigger displays may benefit from printer-specific formatting with spaces in the message string (in the quotes on line 47).

I hope this can do a bit to conserve paper. I am particularly interested in conservation as a way of improving the world. Saving energy and natural resources by not wasting them is a no-brainer. It is very clear to me that not conserving when the opportunity easily comes to hand is ethically indefensible.

Order some stickers, too, for those things that aren't HP printers.