kshshshshshkzkzkzkzkzshshsh
14 November, 2008I had planned to have a really productive day today. There was going to be work, and chores, and the production and consumption of actual nutritional food instead of popcorn.
I didn’t count on the discovery that Linux will allow you to play any old data through the speakers.
My niall.xpi Firefox extension is rapidly becoming a graveyard of half-baked ideas. The latest addition is a ‘toggle sound’ button which sends the HTML for the current webpage, via a shell script, to /dev/audio *.
As for why I find this horrible cacophony so appealing: I could claim it’s because it sounds like 65daysofstatic (bitmaps and Java source especially), but really it’s because it reminds me of the cassette-tape programs for my Dad’s Nascom. We had Dungeon Adventure and Dungeon Quest and Space Invaders and Keys of Kraal and Jailbreak In Space… ah, happy days.
* currently with minimal input sanitation; this may turn out to be a Very Bad Idea, but never mind…
Mmm, squeaky. Everyone does this at some point with Linux
Hehe, then I shall revel in my n00b status. What else should I be doing?
well, not *should* be doing, but you’re probably regularly typing sl instead of ls which nets you an exciting ASCII animation of a steam locomotive which you can’t cut short. I think it’s designed as a means of stopping people from making that mistake again…
also, since you can cat to any device, another fun thing to do is attach an oscilloscope to a serial port or something… mmm, pretty. I spent a lot of my dissertation doing this.
The program ‘sl’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install sl
bash: sl: command not found
(some apt-get magic later)
sl… hehehe… sl… hehehe… sl… hehehe…
(plots to acquire ‘scope)
==== ________ ___________
_D _| |_______/ \__I_I_____===__|_________|
|(_)— | H\________/ | | =|___ ___| _________________
/ | | H | | | | ||_| |_|| _| \_____A
| | | H |__——————–| [___] | =| |
| ________|___H__/__|_____/[][]~\_______| | -| |
|/ | |———–I_____I [][] [] D |=======|____|________________________|_
__/ =| o |=-~~\ /~~\ /~~\ /~~\ ____Y___________|__|__________________________|_
|/-=|___|| || || || |_____/~\___/ |_D__D__D_| |_D__D__D_|
\_/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/
Oh, that would have worked better if the page width wasn’t restricted. Ho hum.
sl | tee /dev/audio … hehehe
It could only be better if the result sounded like an actual steam locomotive
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