I think my favorite thing in tech is blinkenlights, and my homelab is designed with that in mind. It’s pretty, and it’s like you can see the bits and bytes flowing around ♥️✨

I compile the kernel on all of my raspberry pis with LEDS_TRIGGER_ACTIVITY enabled, just so I can turn the power light into a cpu blinkenlight, and set the led triggers to some kind of activity on all my laptop and openwrt leds to turn them into blinkenlights too. Blinkenmaxxing.

Sigh. Now I’m gonna have to go watch this again

https://www.wikihow.com/Watch-Star-Wars-on-Command-Prompt

Edit: nevermind looks like its down.

Edit2: its still available at https://telehack.com/ Just type starwars at the prompt

The term has its origins in hacker humor and is taken from a famous (often blackletter-Gothic) mock warning sign written in a mangled form of German. Variants of the sign were relatively common in computer rooms in English-speaking countries from the early 1960s.

Although the sign might initially appear to be in German and uses an approximation of German grammar, it is composed largely of words that are either near-homonyms of English words or (in the cases of the longer words) actual English words that are rendered in a faux-German spelling. As such, the sign is generally comprehensible by many English speakers regardless of whether they have any fluency in German, but mostly incomprehensible to German speakers with no knowledge of English. Much of the humor in these signs was their intentionally incorrect language.

https://github.com/blinkenlights

Project Blinkenlights

17 followers

Berlin, Germany

https://blinkenlights.de/

@blinkenlights

[email protected]

https://github.com/tfeldmann/Arduino-Blinkenlight

https://tcoenen.de/

This library gives you non-blocking blinking patterns and smooth fade effects for your LEDs, buzzers or any other status indicators

The circle is complete.

I know a guy who worked at Cray in the 90’s. He said they would sometimes add meaningless blinkenlights to machines just to make particular customers happy. The blinking lights must mean the big, expensive machine is working hard, right?