COOLEST THING EVER!!!!!!!!!

Lately I have been very serious about putting an end to my life as a Windows user, at least outside of work.  My Mac came upstairs from the cellar and is now living on a new desk in the living room.  I have shut off my old Windows XP desktop and am going to do my best to not use it anymore.

I am a Mac user from this day forward*!

I have some experience with Linux.  I ran Ubuntu on a laptop for a while and liked it, but I didn't delve too deeply into it.  While I was in college I used Linux and Unix quite a bit.  I got some level of skill living in a command line world while working off of a Unix terminal.

Ever since the release of Mac OSX, the Mac operating system has been built on top of a Linux operating system.  One result of this is that Macs kick 10999 flavors of ass over Windows.  Another is that many of the things you can do via the Linux terminal can be done via the Mac terminal as the Mac terminal is literally a Linux terminal.

Unfortunately for my hacking skills, I haven't been living in a terminal world at all since 2004 and I forget everything.  So earlier tonight I did a Google search for "Mac terminal commands".  One of the pages it retured is titled Top 50 Terminal Commands.  It's not really what I was looking for.  It's just a collection of commands that can change the way things work on your Mac.  What I was more interested in is using the built in Linux utilities.  Still though, there are some interesting things...

and one thing that may be the most amazing thing ever done by human beings.

This is the line you enter into the terminal's command line.  I did it from my user's root directory:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl


What you get when you enter that command is a telnet connection to another machine somewhere.  For that reason alone I should have ignored it, but the teaser the webpage gave it was too much for me.

The command connects you to another machine somewhere, and the program that runs when you connect is...

is...

I can't even believe how awesome it is...

Star Wars episode IV... rendered entirely in ASCII characters.

Oh.
My.
God.

Awesomeness beyond all that has ever been awesome before.




*At least until I get tired of being a Mac user and decide I want to be a Windows user again... or a Linux user.