knobs-dials has made an improved version of the Cat Thermal Printer. This one doesn't randomly lose Bluetooth connectivity and it works flawlessly on Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu).

An extra bit of exciting lore: this is the same person who wrote the helpful personal Wiki.

Initial article from 2024-02-22

I came across one of these Bluetooth thermal paper Cat Printers. I initially tried it out using the Cat-Printer app that has its own UI, but getting the software connected reliably to the cat printer was so fickle and difficult that I only managed to print two pages. I suspected the Cat Printer that I had gotten my paws on :3 was, perhaps, a little broken. But I gave one more repo a try and, sure enough, the catprinter one worked like a charm.

Someone built a Cat Printer that people could send an SMS to.

I am toying with the idea of a ring-of-thermal-cats: buying one of these printers as a gift for dear folx and then building a sort of automation that can be run even by those who don't feel comfortable cloning a git repo, that allows them to set up a personal "mailbox" which can queue images to be printed. As someone who still sends folx postcards, I find this sort of long-distance gestures of affection to be cute.