Fun and games

The command line doesn’t have to be a dull place to visit. If you fancy indulging in a little fun, try these entertaining tools and tips.

First, fancy viewing any photograph or image in ASCII art? Type sudo apt-get install imagemagick aview , and then type the following to view it in ASCII-rendered glory: $ asciiview Path/filename. png

If you receive an “invalid magic-not” error, you need to convert the file first, as follows: $ convert filename.png filename.pgm

How about producing text-based banners? Use FIGlet ( sudo apt-get install figlet ), which can be as simple as: $ figlet APC rocks!

FIGlet can also write banners using different styles – first, discover what options are supported with the showfigfonts command, then you can use one of them like so: $ figlet -f smslant I love Linux!

Other flags worth noting include

-t , which forces FIGlet to use the whole of the Terminal window’s width (use -w 70 to specify a particular column width instead), and -p or -n , which you can use when piping lots of text (say the contents of a text file) through FIGlet. Basically choose -p to put FIGlet into paragraph mode, where it eliminates line breaks within paragraphs.

Fancy watching a silent – but subtitled – ASCII rendition of Star Wars? It’s available online and can be watched by typing in the following: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Finally, the Terminal’s calendar command can be used to look at more than just basic calendars

– for example, calendar -f / usr/share/calendar/calendar. computer -A 365 lists some handy historical computing dates. Substitute computer with lotr (Lord of the Rings), pagan , history , and music for alternate calendars, or type

ls /usr/share/calendar/ to see a complete list of what’s available.