A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.
They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."
HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.
DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.
Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.
In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.
HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.
Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:
This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.
But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:
Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.
Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.
This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."
In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:
As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.
It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This technique is not uniquely specific to pixel art, but it's a very common term to hear when starting out watching those "dos and don'ts" videos. So what is hue shifting?
Hue shifting basically means to change the hue when making your shade darker or lighter. In this context, 'hue' = colour!
You may hear 'you need to hue shift more' when getting feedback on your art, but what does that mean really? Here are some examples:
We can see even with just a bit of hue shifting, we have quite a different vibe for each drawing. In warm / daylight settings, no hue shifting can sometimes look a bit muddy or grey.
If we swap the image to grayscale, you can see that they look much the same:
As long as the hue shifted colours have a brightness that makes sense, they usually will work. You can get quite wacky with it.
But is hue shifting always good? Not necessarily.
Below is some of my art where I intentionally didn't hue-shift at all. You can see it gives them an uncanny, digital, or photographic kind of look. As always, techniques are about your intention, or personal style.
I recommend trying different hue shifting methods! I especially love to use a cool blue or teal for the lighter shades.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helped a little! Have fun with it!!
Here are all of the books in the morpho series on libgen. If you can afford to purchase any of them, please do! But if you can’t, you can get them all here:
Library Genesis is a scientific community targeting collection of books on natural science disciplines and engineering.
sandarafreedompark | rosamund hodge | venetta o. | sculpture by gian lorenzo bernini | richard siken | a softer world | anaïs nin | nicke zimov | vladimir nabokov | crimson peak, dir. guillermo del toro
Brush Stroke textures by radtastic — in this download file, there are 8 brush stroke textures (like the one behind the text in the image above). they were all made from scratch by raelyn. please don’t steal this or make a carbon copy. like or reblog this if you download or enjoy it.
Easily, this Demon Slayer piece was my most favourite and enjoyable project I worked on in 2021! Excited for all the new and fun projects I get to work on in the year to come
In hopes of inspiring younger generations, NASA created this series of gorgeous retro travel posters that encourage you to imagine a future where common space travel is a legitimate possibility. Source
Alright I’m not sure if you’re asking for a tutorial on how to sharpen gifs or if you’re asking for my settings so I’ll just make a mini tutorial on how to sharpen gifs with my settings.
I’m gonna assume that you already know how to make a simple gif (e.g crop, resize and color it)
So here’s my gif resized, cropped and colored but unsharpen.
And here it is sharpened:
Tutorial is below!
Once you’re done making your gif click on the timeline button
After that select your gif’s layers like so
Then right click > select Convert to Smart Object
Alright now to Sharpen. I use two layers of sharpening and one layer of surface blur. So for the first layer of sharpening click on Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen
Here are my settings for the first layer:
Also note I change the radius depending on the type of gif I’m making. If it’s live action or 3D animation, 0.4 is good. But if it’s 2D animation, use 0.3.
Now go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur
Here are my settings:
And Smart Sharpen again.
Here’s my settings:
Now to convert your gif back to frame animation so you can play around with the speed of your gif. On your timeline on top right there’s a button like this:
Click it. Go to Convert Frames > Flatten Frames Into Clips
After that a new bunch of layers will show up. Select all of them then again to Convert Frames > Make Frames From Clips
Again Convert Frame > Convert Into Frame Animation
And that’s it. You have a nicely sharpened, high quality gif.
Have fun!
It's Art...
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