As I write this, a spaceship full of astronauts is flying around the moon for the first time in my life. They don't even have a working toilet right now either so they're all gasping for a piss while they do it. It's all very exciting.
Moon shit is some of the best kind of science IMO. I'm into basically anything moon-related. A while back I decided even on my computer I'm more interested in the moon than any of the stereotypial nerd telemetry like CPU graphs and whatever. I reckon it's a healthy grounding thing to rig your computer to remind you of the passage of time and your tiny place in the universe instead of focusing your attention on a bunch of meaningless blinkenlights about an environment under your full control.
So whenever I open a new terminal, I get this little ASCII art thing that shows me the current phase of the moon.
Since the moon is cool as fuck right now, let's see if we can hype some more
people up into making their terminals do this. First up, you need phoon and
lolcat.
brew install phoon lolcat
The first one – phoon – prints the ASCII art moon phase. The second one – lolcat – applies some rainbow colourisation to it. All you have to do to get that cool rainbow moon as the splash screen for every new terminal you open for the rest of your life is to pipe phoon into lolcat.
phoon | lolcat
You can chuck that into ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc and you're good to go. I've
been using fish lately, where this sort of thing
belongs in fish_greeting.
function fish_greeting phoon | lolcat end
Highly recommended! While watching tonight's livestream of the Artemis fly-by, I noticed that the shadow in the top left of the moon was different from the top right shadow in the Earth perspective, despite the moon not being visible from my window in Malmö tonight.
This sense of perspective really enhanced the coolness of the livestream. And I wouldn't have picked up on this if it hadn't been for the fact that my computer reminds me of what's going on with the moon basically every time I use it.