Yesterday, I made the mistake of helping a friend get their new Windows 11 laptop up and running. It was purchased from a well known high street store, and as usual, I had to prise a few bits of advert-laden stuff off which just slow you down out of the gate.

That wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part is that this person has a printer which has been quietly churning away on their desk for a decade and gets used to run off about one sheet per week. And guess what, Canon didn’t think their MG 3250 would last this long, so there are no Windows 11 drivers.

Congratulations on dropping a grand on your new laptop, now you’ll be needing to consign a working printer to the e-waste mountain because somebody couldn’t be bothered.

Fortunately, there are still Linux drivers for this printer, so all you need is a Raspberry Pi and some faffing to expose it as a networked printer instead (get Windows to talk to it using generic postscript drivers).

While setting this up, I was really pleased to find Raspberry Pi now have a custom SD card imaging tool of their own - after years of basic third-party offerings. It offers all the customizations you’d want - like the ability to specify “turn on SSH, here’s my username/password” - in other words, all the things we’ve been faffing about mounting SD cards to fiddle with by hand for years. Not having to go out to my cold garage to find a spare keyboard and that mini-HDMI lead is excellent. Well done.