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X11 in ASCII
ChristTrekker submitted a story that we probably have run once upon a time, but hey, it's a holiday weekend, and who doesn't enjoy reading about a X11 in ASCII graphics? Complete with screenshots and code for you do it yourselfers. I like the enlightenment screenshots. Painful.
There are mirrors of photos, dumps and the original site.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Google Cache:
Main Page:
Here
i would link the rest of the site but it's all screenshots which google doesn't cache.
Runnin' On Empty
Yahoo cacheF www.meow.org.uk%2Fstan%2Fxserver%2F
(google didn't have it... StRaNgE...)
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=http%3A%2F%2
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
He says he wanted to watch DVDs, and I can't understand why he would need X for that. mplayer supports -vo aa to render using aalib, without all the overhead of an xserver.
I've even actually used it once on a computer that was too slow to play DVDs in X. It was far from enjoyable, but still impressive.
I seriously doubt anyone visually impaired will be able to understand anything of the text after it passes through aalib.
anyway, there are tactile displays that can handle regular (high contrast) screens just fine, AFAIK.
Virtouch and ABTIM, for example.
But if this is what I guessed this was - something like AAlib that directly maps groups of pixels to "nearest" ASCII symbol and ANSI color that (very vaguely indeed) matches closest the cover and color - then this is nearly useless for people with braille terminals. Heck, it's almost useless for people with working eyesight...
Actually it just might work if the blind person in question would be a supergenius that can easily say that "jhejkrhwkjfhskf" is supposed to be a part of a shaded picture, and an end result of photo digitization, JPEG compression artifacts, inefficient image scaling algorithms used in the app, and rough conversion to ASCII. But on the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to say the picture is messy. =)
There's also the problem that the screen changes and that is difficult to describe in speech. So, again it may be the case that the blind persion may figure out that "ehrjhwk#%jfdsk##", after being spewed through braille or speech synthesis, means the Mouse, truly, doth move, but again it's quite unlikely.
Well, if all you wanted was DVD's in ascii art, mplayer is your friend.
mplayer -vo aa
Just make sure you compile mplayer with aalib support.
Yes, it uses aalib and XGGI.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Some of us have been getting our acsii pr0n fix for a long time. Here's my recipe:
./configure --enable-video-aalib), and loki's sdl mpeg player. Boot with framebuffer into a nice display like 1024x768. Set the environmental variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to "aalib", and you can play mpg video in a console.
:)
Install aalib, install SDL configured for aalib (
I sometimes play (non-pron!) movies on an unused display in my office. Looks kinda cool and matrixy and its funny how long someone has to look at it realize it's an actual movie.