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Blinkenlights Reloaded - The Matrix Returns
An anonymous reader writes "On the occasion of this year's Chaos Communication Congress some hackers of the German CCC have set up another Blinkenlights installation in Berlin (they use the glass facade of a house as a giant computer screen). It is on the same house as from September 2001 till February 2002 but with similar capabilities to the installation in Paris in September/October 2002. Heise has a story about this (German, here's the Google translation), but actually there's better information on the project website itself."
Not quite on topic, especially because it's a different blinkenlights, but this article reminded me of it:
$ telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 24
Terminal window should be 200x59, with black text on white background for best results.
Some people have way to much time.
Blinkenlights Reloaded
The Matrix returns!
From December 22th, 2003 to January 4th, 2004 there will be a short revival of our Berlin installation: Blinkenlights Reloaded. The building Haus des Lehrers - currently under reconstruction - will be operated as we did it before. A new version of BlinkenPaint lets you create movies and you can play the interactive game Pong and activate your personal loveletters with your mobile phone.
Pong and your loveletters await you when you dial 0190-987654. A call is EUR 1,24 per minute (with every second counted). The income goes to the CCC to cover operational costs so that we can keep Blinkenlights free from ads now and in the future.
Blinkenlights Reloaded uses the technology we have developed for Arcade in Paris last year. That means greyscales. Version 3 of BlinkenPaint supports this as well as our new movie file format BML.
We invite you to send us your animations which we will bring to life on the big screen. And it works like this: [1] create your movies with BlinkenPaint, [2] save them in a text file (BML) and [3] attach it to an e-mail to movies@blinkenlights.de
If the movie is a personal Blinkenlights Loveletter and you want to get a code to activate your movie yourself at any time, send it to loveletters@blinkenlights.de instead.
We are happy to be able to bring Blinkenlights back to life and hope it won't be the last time. For us the first installation was big fun and this time it should no less. If you don't know the first incarnation, check out our documentation video.
We also hope that we won't get flooded by movies. We are going to be quite busy during as there is the Chaos Communication Congress taking place at the same time just next to the building. So things can get lost. But we are willing to have a look at everything we get, but we are just not going to make promises that your movie will run.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
http://www.ripserve.com/perkins/blinkenlights/phot os/1.html
s /
http://www.adognamedfish.com/gallery/blinkenlight
Well it looks like it has been slashdotted, but you can get some video of it elsewhere... Blinken Lights
If you already have the christmas lights, this is the right one for you.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).
The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.
During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.
Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.
For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.
Overview
Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.
For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.
A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.
WebCam
Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.
The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.
Contact
Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.
If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.
Several similar projects preceded the Berlin Blinkenlights.
La Bastille: A Tech House Installation, Providence, Rhode Island, USAm l [slashdot.org]
10 x 10 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org/ [techhouse.org]
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/16/2148245.sht
Marnix 2001, Brussels, Belgium
52 x 7 matrix of RGB lights
Links:
http://marnix2001.bbl.be/ [marnix2001.bbl.be]
MIT's Green Building Sound (VU) Meter, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USAg _vu_meter/green_bldg_vu_meter.html [mit.edu]
9 x 1 matrix of red lights
Links:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bld
Clickscape 98, Linz, Austria
13 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.servus.at/clickscape98/ [servus.at]
Poli-uni students dorm, Warsaw, Poland
14 x 16 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.astercity.net/~kvas/riviera.jpg [astercity.net]
FWIW, this predates email. My father had a well-worn copy of this on a sign above a type-setting machine in his graphics shop. I know that I'd seen it there in the mid 70s, and it was old when I got there.
--
If you would read the fucking article, you'd see that that's exactly what this setup does, among other things.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Alright, here's the deal:
I am a native German speaker and therefore i am subject to mistakes. Right now, I am having problems concentrating, so don't blame me for any mistakes. By continuing reading, you confirm that you have read and agreed to the above disclaimer. Here you go:
Blinkenlights reloaded
This year there will be another Blinkenlights installation, this time, after a detour to paris, once again in Berlin. From 22th December until 4th January the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) will again be playing them on Haus des Lehrers [The Teacher's House; translator's note] with a light installation. A new version of BlinkenPaint makes the creation of animations possible. The "ping pong"-game and provided "love movies" can once again be requested by phone by calling [from outside of Germany, pre-dial: "+49 190", from inside: "0190"; translator's note] 987654. Each call is EUR 1,24 per minute [from Germany! It will be more, if you call from anywhere else; translator's note]. The money will go to the CCC to pay the amount due to operate BlinkenLights, so it can be maintained without advertising in the future, said the CCC.
For Blinkenlights Reloaded, the name of this year's event, the same technology will be used, which has been developed for Arcade in Paris. So grey scale will be possible, which is supported by the new version 3 of BlinkenPaint. Everybody interested can send animations as email attachments to movies@blinkenlights.de. They will be played on the house. The movies need to be created with BlinkenPaint previously and saved as a text-file in the BML-file-format.
During the 20th Chaos Congress there's also a big BlinkenArea with the Blinkenlights team and many model projects.
See BlinkenArea for more information.
We would be very pleased if you can come to visit us. But we're also planing to run a telnet-based real-time BlinkenStream and a Webcam for those who can not come.
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev