Watch Star Wars in CLI
How you can watch a classic movie written in ASCII from your own command line.
I first stumbled across this when I was in Secondary School, back then I knew relatively little about coding/tech (I know slightly more now, but not much!). Back then I used Telnet on one of the schools fairly unrestricted windows boxes by running:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Both me & my friends at the time were amazed to see a film in ASCII on my machine (the Teachers were less than impressed).
Fast forward a few more years than I would like to admit and it turns out it is still very much possible to see exactly what I watched back then the telnet method still works but I wanted a way to run it on Linux or Mac . . .
In the browser:
- Go to: Telehack
- Type: starwars
- Hit enter
Windows
There is already a really good guide on doing this for Windows available here.
Linux/Mac
Try this at your own risk, this is purely for educational purposes.
- Open your terminal of choice
- Type:
nc towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
For the curious among us I bet you are thinking "What is this command doing?" Well to be honest I didn't know either so I did a lazy dig and this is what I found out: NC is Netcat — "What the hell is that?"
netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.
There is a brief but good guide on using nc available here. And a rather interesting paper on how it can be useful and also misused available here