Similar to this, many years ago on HN there was a website shared that would convert an image into HTML. I used it to generate the 404 image on my personal website: https://micro.muppetz.com/404 - Warning often causes older/slower browsers to really choke!
If anyone remembers what that URL was, I'd love you to share it. No amount of googling recently has been able to find it, I expect it's probably lost to the sands of time. I've tried a few others I found on google but none produce anything like that quality.
Purely for fun - I'd like to make some more 404 pages like the one I linked to, and other various bits. I really like rendering images using text and the webapp I used did such a great job (IMHO)
I don't think it has any practical purpose.
I just realized now that many of the web based ascii text generators use figlet under the hood. I wish I could delete my comment but I seem to be unable to.
I have a popular web based ascii text generator (https://patorjk.com/software/taag), it uses FIGlet driver that I wrote (https://github.com/patorjk/figlet.js/). Many of the other ones out there also use their own drivers (I've seen some written in php and python). There are also different types of ASCII text fonts out there other than FIGlet (ex: my app compiles fonts that were made in the AOL days in the Arial font - which is interesting because it's a non-monospaced font).
FIGlet is the most popular spec for these types of fonts though (it's an app and a spec). The mailing list hasn't been active in a decade, but people used to submit fonts there. It was cool to see what people made.
Love Figlet, we used to use it frequently on the shared unix machine where members of the Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA) would hang out: https://www.csua.berkeley.edu/
I don't think it's been a thing for years and if you ask me, it stopped being a thing when the old Sequent Symmetry went. Not only non-root users could wall, remote users could wall. A smaller, sillier internet.
I respectfully disagree. There was a vibrant community on soda well into the early aughts, even if it was running FreeBSD on x86 vs. some older more esoteric hardware architecture.
It's good to see that the CSUA encyclopedia still exists somewhere, even if it's not hosted on soda anymore:
https://www.erzo.org/shannon/writing/csua/encyclopedia.html
I had the good fortune to meet and work with the primary author at a small games company called Skotos Tech during my later undergraduate years.
I mean, I'm not being entirely serious but it was kind of the beginning of the end as shell accounts became increasingly pointless. Although maybe my mental timeline is a bit off, I remember a lottery scheduler getting implemented on the FreeBSD soda and those writeups seem to be from the late 90s not early 00s as I thought.
The t-shirts used to be a good way to run into strangers IRL who would inform you that they too partied with Nick Weaver.
Yes, I partied with Nick Weaver. The lottery scheduler was implemented in the late 90’s, but soda’s kernel ran with the lottery schedule well into the aughts.
I agree that shell accounts weren’t as important by the aughts, but the culture was still going strong in the early aughts.
I love figlet! I use it to generate the ssh banner in every server I set up. Not just for the l33t factor ;) but also to quickly confirm visually which host I'm connecting to (specially when multi-hopping, where you can see the whole chain of hosts). It works not only with pure ssh, but also with tools working on top of it (scp, rsync, port forwarding... I'm not sure if even sshfs).
Same here! I feel "at home" when I set a more personnal banner. ;-)
Still I did not know figlet was a thing: I hitherto used the Text to ASCII Art Generator (from patorjk.com) to do so. So thank you for posting this. Obviously a CLI tool had to exist, but I never thought about it.
Nice. I've used this for years. I love self-descriptive code so I use a `flowerbox` and `flowerpot` bash script daily, with flowerpot being just an alias of figlet.
I made use of a “for fun” type React module called react-rainbow-ascii (paraphrasing) that had figlet integration that worked really nicely just yesterday. If the author stumbles upon this comment, just know I appreciate the ability to leverage all of the figlet fonts!
text art with functional value: https://github.com/reportaman/arttime. It's displays your text art/figlet, while serving as a nifty clock/timer. No dependencies other than having zsh installed on your system, which exists on Mac by default.
- http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet : a figlet with vitamints
- https://github.com/xero/figlet-fonts : more fonts for figlet and toilet.