In many home offices a large portion of the pages printed are for temporary use; for instance, emails to be read later. After a day or two, they're in the recycling bin.

Also, many households find it more convenient to use paper napkins--rather than cloth--at the dinner table.

Why not consolidate these two waste-streams?

Load your napkin printer with a stack of napkins; then print emails, driving directions, or rough drafts of your novel. When you're finished reading them, take them to the dining room or kitchen.

Best of all, you can surreptitiously read your email at dinner without seeming rude.
-- AO, Mar 24 2003

(?) Like this, but smaller http://www.indiamar...napkin-machine.html
Way too big to fit on my desk. [AO, Oct 17 2004]

"you can surreptitiously read your email at dinner without seeming rude" - perhaps that should be a back of hand printer?
-- dalek, Mar 24 2003


...also available: The Toilet-Roll Printer
-- hippo, Mar 24 2003


Great, now I need a laptop in order to jot down those great ideas at the diner...
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 24 2003


this is better than the lame spin-off.

still unsure why you need to print emails but there you go!
-- po, Mar 24 2003


[po] If you have a lot of email that you want to read at your leisure, it’s a lot easier to print it than to carry your computer. Or even easier, you phone the person who emailed you, and ask him* what he** wrote.

*or her **or she
-- AO, Mar 24 2003


Now *that's* going to make you popular.
-- DrCurry, Mar 24 2003


should make them edible, too, for a third use... an after-dinner snack that tastes like dinner...
-- dumpstergirl, Mar 24 2003


Could be the start of a geek fasion in black facial smudge marks.
-- yamahito, Mar 24 2003


What [yama] says. Even the offset printed patterns on paper towels will rub off on your skin.
-- bristolz, Oct 28 2004


I neglected to mention that the printer uses skin-colored ink. (It’s a little hard to read if you’re of northern-Eurasian ancestry, but works well for the rest of us. Also, if you develop a facial blemish during dinner, you can disguise it by smearing an email on your face.)
-- AO, Oct 29 2004


Why not instead develop a fast-fading ink? If it fades to invisibility after a few hours or a couple of days, the paper could be re- used.

You could even make a UV-bleachable ink which would be fine for a few days indoors; incorporate a small UV lamp in the paper-feed of the printer to "wipe" the paper just before it's reused. Sort of very low-tech electronic paper.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 04 2007


This idea is interesting. Technically all that is wasted is the ink, because those napkins will be pushed into your face sometime or other anyhow.

I would find it useful if the computer automatically checked my E-mail once every morning and printed out the unchecked E-mails onto napkins and deposited them on the dining room table. That way, when I wake up and go to eat breakfast, there is a nice stack of E-mails waiting for me, and I don't even have to bother turning on the computer.
-- spiraliii, Mar 05 2007



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