ASCII art

They don't really work on screen and require the viewer to have choosen a fixed pitch font. Much better when printed out ona teletype roll paper at 50 baud...

They work beautifully when I connect to my Pis from Gnome terminal.

They work fine when rendered in an ascii native editor. Too many editors are now totally hosed for some "I'm gonna do it my way" egotistically develper, they're useless for basic text.

I remember being totally shocked when I discovered mid-purposed Wordpad was the only M$ based editor that could accurately replicate ascii pages perfectly. I could finally read all the hacking groups ascii formatted logos and such. ;)

nb

Starting from a Fidonet post long ago I found a local backdoor into Janet, where there were academic bulletin boards, and documents discussing (among other things) how a lot of local and regional networks might one day be joined together to form a single transparent worldwide network. All the stuff I found was ASCII, of course. One day I dialled in and the normal login screen had been replaced with a little Christmas tree in ASCII.

ISTR a few of the Fidonet groups were also available as newsgroups (the Germans were some way ahead of the UK). After tinkering with Linux around the time of Red Hat 5, I used Windoze boxes for a number of years. I made them look like real computers by installing Emacs, PuTTY and Liberation Mono.

Now that I've at last found something like hacker heaven with Debian and Raspbian, I note that the media are starting to use "geek" to mean "someone with an iPhone". Perhaps they get the same pleasure from swiping up a selfie of a twerking homie as I've just got from putting some ASCII art on my login screens.

Hils in data 22:51, sabato 07 dicembre 2013, nel gruppo comp.sys.raspberry-pi ha scritto:

Install figlet ! The original. Don't use the web emulator!

Only difference was that each letter was created by printing only that letter in the appropriate pattern, rather than by using letters of suitably different average density.

I still have something which displays a zany *moving* ASCII art picture of a reindeer and a Christmas tree. Thought I might post it, but it (ncurses-1.9.4/test194/xmas) needs libc.so.4.7.6_aout which is truly ancient.

Still all nasty modern electronics and displays though. Origin is mechancical teletypes and punched tape, like the one sitting behind me. Mind you that is a Creed 444, the "Rolls Royce" of teletypes, all you need for them to work is mains and a 20 mA +/- 80 V high impednace DC supply.

news.individual.net lists *loads" of fido newsgroups, don't know if there is any traffic in them though. The internet effectively killed the international BBS networks that existed on dialup before the internet became cheaply available for the common man.

heh heh....

I recall when the www was fairly new, many early geeks discovered irc, thanks to then free windows clients like mirc. ascii art postings became so common, flooding became a reason to get booted. I recall one ascii artist actually came up with an ascii version of those 3D posters, the kind that could be viewed in true 3D if you crossed yer eyes jes right. I prolly got it archived on some old windows backup CD.

nb

Mplayer plays movies in ascii. Needs aalib, or libcaca if you want colour. Not tried it on my Pi, but it works fine on a Pentium 4 under Ubuntu.

Gnuplot can plot to a character display ("set terminal dumb"). It's obviously crude and limited by comparison with graphical plots, but I found it useful when setting up plotting scripts on a headless Pi.

Can someone tell me what it says? I can make out "ils" not sure about "s" What's the first character?

Ah, why do you think that?

step back some meters and try again.

Or check who sent it, Martin

Can't make anything out at all. Not even standing the opposite end of the room :(

I'd forgotten how long mirc has been around, fair play to the developer for finding a profitable niche. I recently used a Pi to monitor a very low traffic IRC channel, using irssi and screen rather than using a bouncer. It works well, in theory I can connect to it from anywhere with only an ssh client.

Wonderful! Thanks for that, it's now installed on a Pi and my laptop. There are an additional 263 fonts in a separate archive. These aren't with the repo binary.

Still looks like random curlicues

The "s" thing at the beginning is supposed to be a bit like an 'h.

I blame the germans.

Too much of a Clue.

-- =

It's a money /life balance.