When I buy a new device that comes with an AC-DC converter / power supply / wall wart, I print up a label on the label maker for what the wall wart is for and stick it on the wall wart. This prevents me from having to do the dreaded "dig through the box of wall warts" and read the tiny writing on the underside of each one until I find a match, or, heaven forbid, using a lab bench power supply with an adapter.

At work, I spent an afternoon labeling the several large boxes of random wall warts with their voltages and currents. (I used white for DC, yellow for AC.) Takes some time but man does it save time later, whenever someone comes in needing a replacement power supply for something.
EDIT2: I have a Brother PT-D220. I like the Brother because knock-off labels are available for cheap. I have labels that I printed a couple of years ago that look like the day I printed them.
Yep. Thermal transfer is a mature technology that is well understood even by the knockoff makers. The way the standard TZ tapes are laminated means that there are no (mechanical) robustness requirements whatsoever for the ink on the ribbon. It’s basically just carbon black in some kind of binder that can melt from one ribbon onto another.
For those who may not be familiar with how the standard laminated TZ tapes work: the thermal printhead transfers ink from the ink ribbon to the
back of the clear front tape. Then the background-colored double-stick tape (with release paper on the back) is pressed onto the rear-printed front tape. This way, the ink is not being viewed through the adhesive, but directly through the lamination layer.
Though I’ve never seen anyone use them, there also exist non-laminated labels for TZ printers: TZe-N2xx and the now-discontinued paper labels (AL-K251). Both of these are direct thermal, not thermal transfer, as best I can tell.
Heat shrink tubes (HSe series) and non-adhesive fabric ribbons (TZe-FA series) of course also print directly to the substrate.
Because the printhead design of the TZ printers is designed to print onto the back of the front film, when they are used on non-laminated labels and specialty tapes (where you’re printing directly onto the substrate), they exit the printer with the printing facing away from you.
HOLY CRAP there are shrink-tubing labels! I need those to mark audio and RF cables I make. Thanks for the tip! Now I have to figure out which Brother printer will work with the cheap knock-off shrink-tubing labels. I always work backwards like that when purchasing consumer gear that eats consumables.
Compatibility is a big question, especially with knockoff tapes. The TZ system has two generations of cartridge encoding, which is the entire difference between the original TZ system and the later TZe system. The encoding includes key printing parameters like tape width and whether it’s standard rear-print (laminated) tape or front-print (unlaminated) tape, since the image must be mirrored. (Also, there are the “high-grade” laminated tapes that only work in a handful of models, and these evidently have different printing parameters, as they support different print speeds than regular ones.) But it also encodes things like the color of the label. (As an aside, I’ve been trying to compile info on the various codes, in the hope of decoding the TZ/TZe encoding. I’m surprised that there isn't already a website with them all, but I’ve come up dry.)
TZ uses only encoding holes on the bottom of the cartridge. TZe adds another set of encoding holes on the face of the cartridge, read by feelers mounted right next to the print head. TZe cartridges always have both sets of holes, making them backward-compatible to TZ printers. So old TZ printers sense only the bottom holes. Cheap TZe printers sense only the front holes IIRC. And expensive TZe printers (like the big desktop models) sense both.
My printer at home (and one of the ones at work) is a TZ printer, and just worked with the knock-off HSe heat shrink cartridges I bought. But when I tried them on the big PT-P950 at work (an expensive TZe model), some of them got misidentified, and some were not recognized at all, indicating that their encoding holes are not correct.
Brother only wants the heat shrink to work with certain models, so they’re likely encoded a particular way. As far as the actual printing goes, they work just fine, but need to be mirror imaged, since they’re not laminated. On TZ, this appears to be controlled by one of the bottom holes. On TZe it may be more complicated. :/