Blinkenlights Reloaded: Almost There

After a rather unproblematic setup we have run into some final problems with our configuration so that the whole functionality is not available yet. It seems as if the all the hardware seems to drop dead whenever you really need it – and usually two days before christmas.

However, Blinkenlights is already working again and it looks great! We have to do some fixing on the greyscaling and the telephone number is still not active. We are working on it. Expect it to be finalized soon.

uComics not happy with RSS

How uncool. The value of the great Tapestry comic RSS feeds has been significantly reduced as uComics has requested the author to no longer provide Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes and other comics of their origin as an RSS feed.

Quite disappointing for me as it was the first time I actually followed these series as I am unwilling to read comics on web pages. I just forget to surf them regularly and for me its question of reading them at all or not at all.

However, Dilbert, User Friendly and others are still available as RSS. I hope it‘ll stay that way. Otherwise its like closing down radios because they play music.

We are not alone

Blinkenlights wasn‘t the first of it‘s kind and not its last as well. There seems to be a real blinkencraze going on out there. The latest report on Blinkenlights Reloaded at Slashdot again pointed us to other installations.

The latest discovery is an installation in Hungary, apparently in Budapest. As my hungarian ist simply non-existent, I have no real clue how it‘s made and how long it was actually running, but there are some videos (one, two, three, four, five, six – in AVI format) that show something very similar to our original work.

Any disclosures on this topic welcome. We put all blinkenprojects on our Links page.

Reloading….

The setup phase for Blinkenlights Reloaded has begun. Actually we managed to set up most of it already in a day, which is cool. So the first row was already blinking a bit. Work continues tomorrow and we are optimistic of being able to switch it on tomorrow night.

Don‘t expect your movies to run from day one. We have some work left to make everything run smoothly and we also work on a streaming solution for both the data stream and video as well.

If you run a QuickTime Streaming Server (or the open source equivalent) and have some bandwitdh left, please drop me a note. We‘ll setup a QuickTime Broadcaster stream and we want to redistribute the stream to as many people as possible.