I've had a number of printers during my lifetime. And I remember that with each generation of printers came a way to save money on printing. With my first ribbon printer, a giant 70 lb behemoth from Radio Shack, we would buy bottles of ink and soak the used ribbon cartridges until they were moist. The end result was usually a messy print on the tractor-fed paper sheets, but we didn't care, because it was just printing text, and you could almost always see the results, even if they tended to smudge.

After that came the dot-matrix printer, another tractor-feeder, and our money-saving solution was to always print on both sides of the paper. The problem was that the perforated paper would tear away from the tractor-feed and we ended up spending more time re-feeding the paper into the printer than was necessary.

My first inkjet printer, some crazy space-age Epson model, ran out of printer ink almost as fast as my mother went through a carton of cigarettes. We would try injecting black ink into the ink cartridges to save some money, but I think more of the ink ended up on our shirts and our jeans, and after that the ink heads always seemed to clog.

These days, inkjet printers are cheap, but surprisingly, the ink isn't. I've decided to avoid buying those inkjet kits, mostly because I don't want to ruin any more clothes. However, there are dealers who sell inkjet cartridges that have either been recycled, or they come with compatible cartridges that fit with the inkjet printers, and the ink doesn't completely suck. In fact, I think they all use the same inks now anyways, and hell, for such a price difference, I'm willing to sacrifice a cheap inkjet printer or two.

I'm still waiting to find a way to turn flour and food coloring into a usable replacement laser toner. I'll let you how that works out. If nothing else, it'll be organic.