Terminal Tip: Create a text banner

If this type of thing floats your boat, you should really give figlet (http://www.figlet.org/) a try. Multiple ascii fonts.

You wouldn't want to have your old VM/CMS login without it!

Dave got it right. Now, where did I leave that continuous lineflow??

(to Mr. E, once again)

Uh, sorry, didn't notice "image" in your question. Well, in fact you cannot generate ASCII art from image files with standard command line tools; on the other hand, there's a bunch of ASCII art converters with command line interface you'd try to compile and install on OS X. Finally, there're some samples of GUI ASCII art related software designed for Macs like free JavE 5.0 and ASCIIsee v1.0.1 shareware utility. Just try MacUpdate.com and stuff .

(to Mr. E)

Yup, for sure. Just replace 'open -f' option with 'lpr':

banner -w 72 "Happy 75th Birthday" | lpr

Can Terminal print images as well?

High quality printout indeed! Many years ago in Hong Kong, my parents had baby pictures of me and my sister printed using characters from a dot matrix printer. It was such a novelty then, I'm sure they cost something outrageous.

I am doing a study on influential bloggers on various blog sites. I have a preliminary model to study the blogging history of each blogger on a blog site and generate a list of influential bloggers. I used TUAW blog site as my experimental dataset due to its enthusiastic activity, focussed discussions and not to mention the overlap with my interests.

I am facing it hard to validate the results of the model. I think the best way to evaluate could be to ask the users (bloggers, comment-ers or readers) of TUAW blog site and have their feedback since no one would know better than the actual users at TUAW. It would be great if you could provide me top 5 members of this month whom you think might have influenced you by their blog post. I will then match these human suggested influential bloggers with those proposed by the model to analyze the accuracy.

If anyone is interested in discussing more about it then we can either discuss here or take it offline through exchange of emails. I could be reached at nagarwa6@asu.edu.

And in other news, computer users were transported back to the '80s earlier this evening...

ha. the manual page for it says "Banner prints a large, high quality banner on the standard output." ha. high quality. that's great.

Calexico, LOL!

Dan Bolling, here's a terminal command just for you:

banner -w 72 "Party Pooper" | open -f