Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own Cityscape
Hoagy writes "Many friends think I've moved when I show them this picture. I've constructed a lit model of midtown Manhattan to fill an otherwise unspectactular view out of our kitchen window. The website details the construction process and how to design and build your own. The city lights also automatically turn on/off via an X10 cronjob on my home Linux server." Nice hack job.
Well you should light that ESB up red white and blue like they do here for real. In honor of our fallen 9/11 heroes. If you're REALLY into it you can turn it off at 11:59 pm every night like they do as well.
BTW 10 karma points to anyone who could give me an exact location as to where that view would be from!
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David O.
C'mon guys, he did something artistic to his place that's kinda cool. I'm seriously disappointed with the negativity that I have read so far.
"Oh it's unoriginal because it's done on the news" -- Amusing logic considering that a news station can hire a crew of professionals to build something like that.
"Waste of time!" -- Yah, like there aren't people out there who think posting stupid comments like that on Slashdot isn't a waste of time. Never mind that he did it during a period of unemployment. I'll tell you something, I know a few people who got laid off in the last year or two, and they turned into total bums during that period. Frankly, I think it's cool that somebody used his artistic skill to improve his living conditions instead of sitting around, playing Quake, and behaving as if the world shit on him/her.
Before you make your negative post about what this guy did, ask yourself: What independent project have YOU taken on? Did you do anything remotely as ambitious? Did you release information about how you did it?
Consider this: When you say "this isn't original because something like that's been done before...", how much did you oversimplify your idea before you came to that conclusion? There was a post earlier that said "Nothing new, they do this on the news all the time." To make a comment like that, they had to filter out conditions like 'News stations pay extra money for stuff like that to appear local.' and "It's an uncommon thing for home-owners to do something like that." That's a lot of information to throw out, and what is the benefit? "Oh, I'm unimpressed. That makes me sound like I've seen more than most people."
When somebody works to create something like that, it really hurts to have people not like it because they're unwilling to put more than a moment's thought into it.
"Derp de derp."
700 xmas lights: about $30
700 white LED's: about $2100
And 700 xmas lights are hardly hazardous; we had over 1500 of them in our dorm room. It was just right
Secondly, to the people who say it's a waste of time, there are those who would say that posting on slashdot is a waste of time, yet you clearly enjoy it. Leisure is incredibly important, yet far too many people do anything other than sit on their couches, and watch TV. This, to me, is a really interesting artistic project, not only improving the view, but also improving the soul.
Thanks for sharing your project with the world!
this is just one of the coolest hacks I've seen in a long long time. Besides the fact that he designed it in a cad program, you actually (well, I do at least) get the feeling that I'm looking out of an apartment window many many stories up. What an unbelievable feeling! Kudos to this guy for "thinking outside the box" and doing something really new and cool!
I posted to
It doesn't necessarily float MY boat, but this guy seems to have put together a pretty cool little project that he's clearly proud of. I congratulate him, and thank him for his contribution. But I think the word "hack" (used by the editor) is extremely overused on this site, and at the risk of sounding like a pedant and inviting the hoards of /.ers to pick every nit in my post, this seemed like a downright incorrect usage to me. "Nice hack job"... I'd rather have insightful commentary than me-too jargon slinging and elitism. "Cool hack" would have been more appropriate, but even then the term "hack" (in this sense) grows so tiresome.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Dude, that's not the point. The point is that he can do it, and has done something in the true hacker tradition (in the noble sense of the word).
Put some lights below so it looks like streetlights are emanating from the street level.
It took me a little while to figure out why that was odd.