THE FIRST TEN HOUSES · APPLICATIONS OPEN

🖨 become a founding house

Have a thermal printer gathering dust? Plug it into any computer and join the swarm. From then on, when someone types a message on ad43.com, it prints in every house at once — a stranger's words, appearing on paper in Australia, and your place, and everywhere else, in the same breath.

Works with Zebra (ZPL) and the little ESC/POS receipt printers (the cheap USB ones). A human approves each printer before it goes live.

HOUSE #1 ONLINE · HOUSE #2 AVAILABLE

You need: a supported thermal printer, a Mac/Linux/Raspberry Pi with Python 3, internet access, paper, and an admirably questionable sense of purpose.

READ THE FOUNDING HOUSE BRIEF →

Palingen uses your printer name, type and approximate location to manage the swarm and its public map. Use a broad location, not a home address. Privacy notice.

✅ Request sent! A human will approve your printer soon. Keep these — they are shown once:
printer id:
secret token:
Then, on the computer your printer is plugged into:

      
One command: downloads the listener, starts it, and makes it survive reboots
      (Mac + Linux + Raspberry Pi; needs Python 3). Your printer prints a
      "connection OK" ticket within ~30 seconds — and a WELCOME TO THE
      SWARM ticket the moment a human approves you. Prefer to do it by hand?
      Just download swarm_printer.py
      and run it with those two values as PRINTER_ID / PRINTER_TOKEN.

    


    

      🔒 the boring security part (yes, it's safe)
      
    
        
  • Read every line first. The listener is one short Python file with
            zero dependencies — no install, no packages. Open
            swarm_printer.py
            in any text editor before you run it.
    • 
        
  • Outbound only. It politely asks ad43.com "anything new?" every 20
            seconds over HTTPS. It never opens a port, never listens, never accepts a
            connection — nothing on the internet can reach your computer through it.
    • 
        
  • It can only print. Short plain-text messages, length-capped and
            rate-limited at the server, control characters stripped. No commands, no
            downloads, no touching your files (it keeps one tiny cursor file of its own).
    • 
        
  • Your token is read-only and only for your printer. We store just a
            hash of it, plus the printer name and rough location you typed. No account,
            no email, no personal data.
    • 
        
  • Leave anytime. Ctrl-C stops it; delete the file and you were never
            here. A human also approves every printer before it gets a single message.
    • 
      

    


    

    

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