Hack of the Day — ASCII television
While killing an extra few minutes waiting for my wife to pick me up for the ballgame lastnight, I was surfing the web and found the webpage for ttyquake, a version of the original Quake ported to use the ASCII art library aalib.
Digging around, I found that someone had written aatv, a program to display live video on the Linux console. That seemed like a good hack, so I modified my FreeBSD webcam program to do the same. A cool and semi-useless hack that took only ten minutes.
On the right you can see a screen capture of my attempt to watch Sportcenter via xterm.
A dead easy hack.
I recall burning three or four weeks of a sabbatical getting Saccade.com on the air with Wordpress. So much tweaking…