A printed nexus market address in a drawer

A printed page in a drawer is a paper notebook without the reader as the pen. The line was set by a computer, aimed at a printer and pushed through it. The result is a page a hand can lift, a page a shredder can eat and a page a printer remembers having printed.

What it is

A reader opens a file with the address on it, chooses print, and the printer produces a sheet with the line on it. The reader folds the sheet, puts it in a drawer, and closes the drawer. The sheet holds the string in ink until the ink fades, the paper tears, the reader shreds it or the drawer is opened by someone else.

The surface is close to a notebook page in what it preserves. Where it differs is that the string on the sheet is the string a printer saw, not the string a hand wrote. A wrong string in the source file becomes a wrong string on the sheet with no chance for a hand to catch a bad character mid stroke.

Lifeline

What the sheet keeps

• The exact glyphs of the string in the font the source file used, at the size the printer set.
• The independence from a network, because a sheet in a drawer does not sync, does not backup and does not phone home.
• The physical presence, because a sheet takes up a specific spot in a specific drawer and the reader can check whether it is still there.
• The freedom from a passphrase, because a sheet does not lock, and the reader who has the drawer key has the sheet.

What the sheet loses

• The privacy against a hand that opens the drawer, because a sheet in a drawer is readable by anyone with drawer access.
• The invisibility to the printer, because a lot of printers keep a spool file on their own disk that holds what was recently printed.
• The stability of the ink, because sunlight, humidity and cheap toner all fade a line over time.
• The updateability, because a rotated address is a new print and an old sheet in the drawer beside the new one.

What the printer remembers

A modern printer has memory. Office printers keep a job queue that shows what was printed and by whom, and often keep a small cache of recent jobs on internal storage. A shared printer on a network is worse for this. A printer that is only connected to one machine over a cable is better, but not free of the same trap. The reader who prints the sheet has to know what the printer they used holds and for how long.

A printer that has a scan or copy tray also has a scan history. A sheet that went through the scanner ends up as an image on the printer disk, sometimes emailed to an address the printer is configured with, sometimes stored until the disk is full. None of this is visible to the reader who was only printing.

How the ink ages

A laser print stays crisp for years in a dark drawer. An inkjet print smears if a drop of water hits it and fades if a sunlit shelf holds it. Cheap toner fades faster than genuine toner. A page that came out of a shared printer that a reader does not maintain may be legible for a week and unreadable in a year. The reader can test this by pulling a sheet from the drawer once in a while and reading it out loud. If a character is starting to smudge, a new sheet is a reasonable answer.

Engagement

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