tmtvl
a minute ago
Not to be confused with <https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/>, of course.
Project Blinkenlights
97 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by doener32 Comments
jolt42
12 hours ago
Is this still well recognized?
ACHTUNG! ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENSPEEPERS! DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKEN. IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS. ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.
andai
10 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
Has some nice photos. More welcome!
And on the modern computer, there is:
Blinkenlights: PC Binary Emulating Visualizer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31473846
I was always fascinated by stories from older professors about how they could hear when something had gone wrong with an algorithm, because the sound would be wrong.
In my case, I could hear when some Windows malware (its indexer, updates, etc.) was running, because the computer would make funny noises. These days, everything is so silent, and the LEDs are gone, I only notice from the lag!
I sometimes wish there were still sounds, and more besides (e.g. sounds for strange network packets, and so on).
You can do a lot "artificially"; I set it up so my computer makes a frog croak sound when the LLMs finish cooking, and I have a colored orb in my notification bar showing the packet loss.
vincent-manis
9 hours ago
Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the head moved from one track to the next. I would do a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the building to the break room to get a coffee while the compiler was working. The disk made a distinctive sound when the compiler went to write the executable, and I would immediately walk back to the computer room to see the compilation results.
bradrn
12 hours ago
Yes! I know it! (And I’m not old at all.) I saw it at, as I recall, a model train exhibition when I was very young, and I found it so hilarious I’ve never forgotten it. In fact I was quite surprised when I eventually learned it was a well-known thing, considerably older than I am.
m4rtink
9 hours ago
Stuff like this is even more funny if you can actually read German. :)
jdsnape
12 hours ago
I have a letterpress print of this from the Cambridge (UK) museum of technology when I was a kid (so about 30 years ago I guess!). I love the juxtaposition between letterpress and the idea of relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten
epihelix
3 hours ago
Yep :) The first thing that came to my mind also. Nice to see someone else remembers...
voidnullvalue
6 hours ago
I have it 3d printed by my workstation on a small sign
pjot
12 hours ago
Thought this was the ascii Star Wars in your terminal à la
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nlatmavatar
8 hours ago
It's wild that it still works to this day. I just checked it the other day via PuTTY.
I first ran across it over 30 years ago while I was still in school, and I'm sure it's been up longer than that.
hellojason
10 hours ago
Haha yep, first thing I thought of as well.
lacunary
10 hours ago
me too and I hadn't thought of it in what feels like 20 years. I'm mad that's not what it was
NDlurker
9 hours ago
Same. That was my introduction to telnet
positive_sec
12 hours ago
So nice to see this here! We were inspired by Project Blinkenlights to conceive BlinkenCity, a city-wide installation of the same idea (abusing the radio-controllable individually-addressable street lamps in many German cities): https://positive.security/blog/blinkencity-38c3
sunir
11 hours ago
When I was younger, I was in Berlin and wandered unannounced into the Chaos Computer Club and I met Tim there. What a legend.
The whole club is legendary. We need more of their spirit of the art of the possible and irreverent. Life is for the living, and computers are for the hackers.
zahlman
13 hours ago
> Stereoscope — Toronto 2008, City Hall: two towers, one matrix (96×32 pixels, 16 greyscales).
Oh man, I think I remember that.
laurensr
an hour ago
I like to telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Xikaku
10 hours ago
This was so cool when I first saw it at Alexanderplatz on the way to Sternradio (who remembers the best Soundsystem in town?)! Dialed in with my Nokia and played pong.
unprovable
12 hours ago
It's been so long since I last saw this. Stalwart of the internet.
Animats
12 hours ago
Downtown Shenzhen is rigged for that.
For a while, the SF Bay Bridge was. I once went to an Autodesk event in SF where the guy behind it was controlling the lights from his laptop.
karim79
12 hours ago
I think it got the HN kiss of death. We need a new page about how to avoid this. Basic scaling skills I tells ya.
esseph
12 hours ago
It's a lot of the same people that refuse free CDNs.
Gigachad
9 hours ago
You don’t even need a cdn. The cheapest vps can handle HN load serving static pages. The problem tends to come when it’s some inefficient dynamic page triggering db calls to load a blog post.
esseph
6 hours ago
> The cheapest vps can handle HN load serving static pages.
Until it runs out of ram just from the tcp connections.
400-600 RPS should suffice given a default Debian install running Apache with a TLS cert, given 300MB of base OS and 1.7G of RAM on a 2GB vps. Being very generous here as many are 512MB... otherwise it takes far less.
nullc
11 hours ago
Ever wonder why those CDNs are "free"?