Categories
fun geek opensource programming software tips tools

pimp your powershell with some ascii art

ASCII art in a PowerShell console window.

Wouldn’t you like to be greeted with some random ASCII art when you open up a new PowerShell command window? I thought so!

Here’s a project just for you. Download the ASCII Art Message of the Day project, link the script in your PowerShell profile and bam!, random ASCII art awesomeness every time you open a shell.

Follow the installation instructions from the readme f ile, and you are set. You can even customize what color you want to use. I know, it’s fantastic.
The random ASCII art comes from asciiart.eu, so check it out if you want to have an idea of what you’ll be getting.

Categories
fun geek programming

Conway’s game of life

Recently the mathematician John Horton Conway passed away, who invented the well known Game Of Life. An algorithmic game I ended up building a version of in HTML at some point for fun. After seeing the news I remembered I still had this sitting around on my hard drive somewhere. So in memoriam, here it is to play around with.

It’s in an iframe, but if it doesn’t render properly you can use the direct link as well.
Thanks for the games John. RIP.

Categories
fun geek internet opensource

randomly interesting links

Entropy ≥ Memory . Creativity ²

Since I’m a tad preoccupied with building a house and all I’m going to use that as an excuse to dump some links here to stuff I ran into over the last couple of weeks that are interesting enough to share with you, my dear blog reader:

  • Such as a web site where you can search for an open source alternative for commercial/proprietary software you’d like to replace. It also has all the OSS software nicely sorted in a bunch of categories, making it easy to find new and exciting new OSS goodies as well.
  • If you like a laugh, check out 27bslash6.com. He replies to emails and it’s hilarious. You might know him from emails such as the 7 legged spider.
  • Or how about some mash-up business? Been a while since I ran into a good one. This one takes stuff from twitter and turns it into a newspaper! Seriously. An online paper that is, at Paper.li. I made his one on stuxnet for example, by pulling links from the twitter hashtag. You can create one by tracking a user’s followers, lists or as mentioned a hashtag.
  • Stuxnet on it’s own is a topic worth reading about as a geek. It’s amazing how much pwnage this software worm has in it’s tiny bytes. Symantec has a very detailed and good read on it.

That’s it!

Photo by jef safi, cc-licensed.

Categories
ads art fun geek

vintage computer ads

Clicking away through various Flickr groups and user accounts finally landed me on this old computer modem ad, telling us how damn sexy that particular piece of hardware really was. I never particularly found any computer hardware sexy since it’s way too uncurvy for that, but a huge square top box set like that was never sexy in anyone’s book I reckon. Never the less, these ads show how fast technology is moving forward, and this makes these vintage computer ads quite funny to watch. It just makes you wonder if we will be looking back at our current ads for the iPhone, mp3 players, or whatever in 20 years or so and find them equally hilarious. There’s more, in  SA_Steve‘s vintage ad collection (not all geek).

Categories
copyright fun internet movie tv

french taunts in high definition

Since we can now post videos, I shall do it a second time! But I’m not doing it just because I can (even though it would be a valid excuse) but because the awesomely funny lads from Monty Python have decided to put their own clips up over at YouTube in their very own Monty Python YouTube channel.

Instead of suing the ass off their fans who have been posting their copyrighted clips over the last 3 years in crap quality, they blow their nose at them and instead post the clips themselves in high quality, as they where intended to be viewed. How cool is that? Eat that RIAA and Metallica I say!

Instead they only want to use this opportunity to sell their DVD’s and movies. A bloody good idea in my opinion. Thanks to that, we can now enjoy the French taunts in high def.
Superbe!