We thought [Kristofer's] Tech Tip about using figlet with scripts was kind of fun. It’s a throwback to the days of logging onto a BBS and being greeted by a vertically scrolling ASCII art image that had been meticulously hand crafted (although a lot of the coolest stuff was actually ANSI art). No hand crafting here, just feed (or pipe) your text to figlet and it outputs the message in ASCII style letters.

When we went to try install this in Ubuntu, the toilet package was suggested. This one’s worth checking out too. It works in much the same way as figlet but uses extended characters and has a lot more color and font settings:

Give these packages a try and make character art cool again!

We wouldn’t want to let a week slip by without something new being made to twitter would we?  This time it is a toilet. Don’t worry, they are sparing us the graphic details, it pretty much tweets every time it is flushed. As you can see in the picture above, they’re using an Arduino for the toilet/PC connection. If you really want to make something twitter, this might be a good starting point. It’s basically twittering every time a button is pushed. You can download the source code on the site as well as find a tutorial on Arduino basics.

[via astera]