Earlier this week, some people in our office noticed that some of our printers had randomly started displaying “Vote for Josh” on the LCD display panel that normally says “Ready”. Nobody has any clue who “Josh” is or what he’s running for, but I wanted to play around with this as well.

I did some research and found out that using Telnet, you can change the default message on an HP printer to whatever you want up to about 16 characters. Here’s a link to the article about this on Lifehacker. Link here.

 That method didn’t work for me, even while having the printer’s IP address and administrative password. I was only able to pull up a menu with limited configuration options, so I went back to Google and did a little more research. That’s when I found this website and app. Link here.

All I have to do is navigate to this app through the command prompt, input the printer’s IP address along with the message to display, and it instantly updates the message on the specified printer. I wrote a .bat file so I can update all of the printers in our office instantly for other fun down the road.

Here are some of the posts thusfar:

The printers currently read “Housing IT Rocks”. Thanks to someone tinkering with printers and maybe Telnet, we got a new toy. Still thinking of other witty things to post. I only wish we had found this a few days ago on April Fool’s Day.