Imagine having to return a t-shirt because that malfunction!

— I don't understand why are you returning this, was the size wrong or you didn't like it?

— No, there is a syntax error at line 37 that makes it impossible to run, and I'm concerned people on the street may think I promote unsafe bash scripting.

https://aem1k.com/qlock/

I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few years ago:

https://gist.github.com/olooney/a89db3932b089925b71b68d7e9f2...

He's done a ton of other great ASCII visualizations as well:

https://aem1k.com/

There's something else a lot stranger going on, though. It is a proper monospace font, but the typesetting on the shirt is not. There's some kerning going on (I noticed it especially in the 'Iy' pair), and also it appears that narrower characters such as 'i' take less horizontal space. If I had to guess, I would say that it was set with a tool such as "optical kerning" in InDesign.

I think though it could likely be easily OCR'd if you give the image to any decent agentic harness with a good vision model, e.g. newest Claude/GPT ones, and tell them to split the image per lines, and then just OCR each line individually.

I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? There seem to be a lot of comments in it, but in this case it's still ok :)

  sleep 0.1 

Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

[0] https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code

          perl -e '
     "$a="etbjxntqrdke";
  $a=~s/(.)/chr(ord($1)+1)/eg;
        print "$a\n;"'

Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version:

  perl -e "print chr 1+ ord for split //,'etbjxntqrdke'"

Basically it just clusters same characters and asks the human to find the problems, which is easy when you're looking at a series of pictures like ssssss5sss.

The UI is kinda least-effort. Should ask a modern AI agent to make it look nice and intuitive, sometime maybe.

    base64: stdin: (null): error decoding base64 input stream
    #!/bin/bash
    
    # Congratulations! You found thu eastur ugg!#B��O��
    # おめでとう��M�ぇM�す！隣C��わM�サ�#ライ����見でM�������！O��
    
    # Define thu tuxt to anima|e
    text="♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALOB��PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♵PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♥"
    
    # Get termb�al dmmensions
    cols=$(tput cols)
    linus=$(tput lines)

It’s a movie plot.

In case the author is reading: The decorative feather images are between 2MB to almost 5MB in size. Compression might be in order to save users time and bandwidth, and make the site look less broken while the images are partially loaded :)

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    from os   import environ; E = environ.get
    from math import sin
    from time import sleep
    text = "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" # The text to sine-scroll animate
    nText  = len(text)      # Number of utf8 chars
    freq   = 0.2            # Frequency scaling factor
    color0 = 12             # xt256 Color cube segment 12..<208
    color1 = 208; nColor = color1 - color0
    (w, h) = (int(E("COLUMNS", 80)), int(E("LINES", 24)))
    t = 0
    while True:
        x = (w/2) + (w/4)*sin(t*freq)           # x pos via sine value
        x = max(0, min(w - 1, int(x + 0.5)))    # bound to tty width
        color = color0 + ((nColor*t)//h)%nColor # cycle colors
        ch = text[t%nText]  # Get char & Use xterm-256 color escs
        print("%*s\033[38;5;%sm%s\033[m\n" % (x, "", color, ch))
        t += 1
        sleep(0.1)   # original used bc shell outs to rate-limit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box_(phreaking)

Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?

> May the m×s/t² be with you

That's better than half the tech howtos out there.

Might have to do something like that for a verse on the next Carolina Code Conference shirt. Been trying to figure out a good way to pull in cybersecurity.

I'd take that bet considering it's got close to thousand upvotes and on front page of HN

You want to do that cleanup regardless why you exit.

Never thought I'd learn shell tricks from the back of a fast-fashion t-shirt, but here we are.

Pretty sure any AI can solve it in 20 seconds.

I bet 10$ I'd spend less time typing it from the t-shirt. And I wouldn't boil two kettles of water in the process.

But hey, AI makes you 10x more productive, I suppose

https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...

Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...

This seems to work pretty well