wolrah 11 hours ago

Strapping a Pi to a lawn mower for silly reasons, plus a bonus cat at the end. This is what I want in my internet.

  • nirui 10 hours ago

    You forgot to mention the hypnotizing video. You can get people to do anything for you after letting them watch it in repeat for more than half an hour.

    • DocTomoe 32 minutes ago

      In the 'just make it stop' sense, not in the 'oh, I'm so suspectible now' sense.

  • en3r0 10 hours ago

    Agreed. I love that this happened, and on IRC!

mrweasel 44 minutes ago

This went a slightly different direction from what I first assumed. For some reason I had hoped for an IRC server, connected to EFNet running on a robot lawn mower.

Still an enjoyable read and a fun project.

neilv 9 hours ago

> Now, I grew up in a rural area of the southern US, and I had never been out of the South, but on Undernet, I met people in other states, other countries, even other continents! I made friends all over the world and learned a great deal about other cultures and ideas.

This was one of the greatest things about early Internet.

jeremysalwen 10 hours ago

Check out http://openmower.de ... You could go all the way and make the mower be controlled over IRC.

  • VoidWhisperer 8 hours ago

    You would need to have a reasonable amount of trust with the people you let control it, or you may have some... questionable designs mowed into your lawn haha

BobbyTables2 7 hours ago

Where does it keep the trout?

  • herodoturtle an hour ago

    Attached to the handle bar, ready for slappin'!

DonHopkins 8 hours ago

Two discussions about Larry Ellison battling it out for 14th and 15th place:

14. An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (idlerpg.net)

15. OpenMower – An Open Source Lawn Mower (github.com/clemenselflein)

  • rickcarlino 6 hours ago

    It’s nice to have a break from LLM talk for a bit, isn’t it?

herodoturtle an hour ago

The actual IRC discussion (first part of article) that led to this project is majestic. Captures the culture of IRC so beautifully.

bombcar 9 hours ago

Modern electric battery lawnmowers probably have processors that can run DooM; putting an IRC server directly on one would be fun.

The cheaper Chinese off-brands are probably pretty hackable.

  • ethan_smith 4 hours ago

    Most modern electric mowers use ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers that could run a lightweight IRC client with minimal modifications to the firmware and a simple WiFi module addition.

poemxo 3 hours ago

IRC in 2021? Is IRC still a thing?

  • internet_points an hour ago

    Slack is basically IRC-as-a-service, complete with modern (janky) web UI and gifs (since they haven't yet figured out how to sell a tiktok-style feed)

  • mrweasel an hour ago

    Still the best solution for group chats that you can get.

  • mischief6 2 hours ago

    yes, very much so. libera.chat is alive and well.