I love paper media; reading printed books and newspapers, or doing crosswords and puzzles, there's something pleasantly less stimulating in the physical medium than the digital world of computers. In fact, this is coming from someone that made computers their trade, and I certainly have an appreciation for those fascinating machines.
Still, there's a niche that computers will never be able to fill, in spite of their high-refresh rate displays and powerful processors. But, I must say, that's a topic for another piece. Indeed, this article will be less philosophical, and more concerning the simple problem of storing data without the need for electronics.
A few years prior to writing this, I'd stumbled upon a fascinating program called "PaperBack" - made by a gentleman for the purpose of storing digital data on paper. Whether or not PaperBack is a tongue-in-cheek project, or a serious attempt at preserving data on an analog medium, I cannot say. Nonetheless, it caught my attention, and I absolutely had to experiment with it.
As I'd mentioned in my article about refilling your own printer ink, while I am an enjoyer of printers, I am no connosieur. My machine is a Canon MG2500 - purchased for less than $100.00 Canadian, and quite possibly the bottom of the barrel as far as printers are concerned. Next to the high-capacity inkjets or the absolutely massive laser printers capable of producing print at blistering speeds, it's not much. Frankly, it doesn't even have a display.
And yet, it's perfectly adequate for me. While it's used on a very regular basis, it's never given me a single problem. Sure, the ink cartridges are proprietary and must be refilled by hand, and sure, it may be quite limited in its abilities, but I've never had that get in the way of my work or hobbies.
With this in mind, I was quite concerned about the degradation of data on the production side - my low-DPI output - and on the data recovery side - with the rather mediocre scanner. Still, armed with the knowledge that I'm only competing with printers of the 2007-era, I pressed onwards.