Finally i found a couple of minutes to whip up some perl scripts that download info from the web and display it in a nice way on my led display (which was graciously donated by Cobra).

Even though the display is huge, the actual resolution is quite low: 6×32 characters. So I had to be a bit creative in fitting it all in. I decided to have some small scripts that retrieve rss feeds and webpages from the web, extracts the info and puts it in a display friendly manner. Another script combines all this output into one file, adds some fancy notation to produce the headers (eg. on top of the display in the picture and half way). The text scrolls up, with the top line always showing the header with time and date.

Current sources are the slashdot rss feed for nerd news, the nu.nl rss feed for news, the knmi home page for weather forecasts and finally the METAR weather observations from EHVB, the observation station at the Valkenburg military airport.

Future plans: increasing the serial link speed between server and display to 19k2, instead of 9600 now. An update now takes 3 seconds, with faster updates perhaps sideways scrolling is possible (the display can only be updated by sending the entire 6×32 characters at once). Perhaps a status line on the bottom, that changes every so much frames, displaying server status and other useful little pieces of info.

The unbelievable happened. Democracy is officially dead, offered to the multinationals and capitalism. Here’s what happened: Danmark wanted to prevent the software patents directive to be passed as an A-item (meaning it would just be accepted without discussion or votes). They wanted to ask for a B-item, but not if they were alone. The Netherlands and Poland would support Danmark. But when it came to it, Danmark bowed to microsoft’s blackmailing (‘if you don’t support software patents, we will close our offices in your country’), The Netherlands cowardly went quiet and Poland (who once before saved us from software patents) had no choice to also step back.

To me this is so very clear: the parliament doesn’t want this directive, the people don’t want it, the only ones who want it are the big multinationals, and they apparrenlty have succeeded in buying off the ministers. What a great EU we live in, YUCK! I’d say, if you can’t beat them, join them. Sign up to this pledge, in the hope we collect enough bribery money so we can win the ‘one vote per euro’ election that is apparently standard procedure in the EU council.