“Spurred on by a recent weekend full of hot-tub induced dehydration, beer, and lack of sleep, some friends of mine discovered an interesting (I think, I at least) capability of the command line computer interface. Prepare to be really geeked-out. As I wrote briefly about last year, on the Linux command line, you can pass the output of one program into another by joining them together with | (the ‘pipe’ character). For example, if you entered whois actsofvolition.com | gedit, it would take the output of the whois lookup for that domain name and open it in gedit, a text editor. It occurred to one of us, in our sleep-deprived state, that you might be able to pipe the output of the random number generator into an audio player, and hear random noise.” (Thanks kottke.org!)
Link:
http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/january/thesoundofdata
