BASH

Printers in 2026 tend to have a host of options, but they also sometimes come with a lot of baggage - a quick search for “manufacturers disabling printers” turns up a lot of interesting results. Sometimes the best printer is the ancient, non-network-capable printer, like the HP Laserjet 1320 printer we have at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project. [NOTE] The HP Laserjet 1320n is a network-capable printer. The model we have at the project is a non-’n’, non-networked printer. ...

About findmonitor.sh Note: Note: This script is NOT compatible with systems running Wayland. We use Xubuntu Linux at our project. The Working Centre’s not-for-profit Computer Recycling Project sometimes receives donations of many monitors all at once. Our previous method for handling monitors was to set them up, run them through a bunch of tests, print a label on our label printer, and enter the monitor into our point of sale. This method hasn’t worked very well for us when we’ve received a lot of monitors all at once. Large amounts of monitors were sitting untested for awhile because we didn’t have the resources to do the old process for each monitor. We needed a faster way to figure out some of the details of monitors, and make them easier to sell without needing to create labels and enter everything into the point of sale. ...

About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...