Don't forget the label maker!

I assume most people remember the days of carbon copy paper. While at the office today, someone brought me a Casio label maker that was "broken". I promptly opened up the tape compartment, pulled out the tape and noticed it was empty. Normally, it's not something that the administrative people in my building think of, but these empty tapes are simply tossed out. Today for one reason or another, my curiosity got the best of me, and I started to rewind the tape. As I was rewinding it I started seeing the blank spots in the form of letters and numbers where the black ink from the tape was transferred to the white label to actually print the label. I decided to disassemble the empty tape and provide some pictures of what I did.
Here's the disassembled tape next to the label maker. I tried to keep the reels in relative form to a working tape.



And here's some tape content:




Are those passwords, or references to files that may be on a computer? Who knows but it's a starting point. In addition to the tapes, many label makers have memory(the 8100 has about a 2500 character capacity) and are capable of being plugged in to a computer to receive and print data. So, next time you're on site and processing a cubicle or office or what have you Don't forget the label maker! You never know what you'll find and it may just help when you create keyword search lists, or password wordlists.


I'm now in search of the cable to see what can be transferred or if memory can be retrieved.