I spent the evening being a bit creative. I decided that some aalib style text graphics might be useful for one (or more) of my projects, so I worked to figure out how to go about it. The biggest problem is that it's largely a Linux-only library. While my Linux install of GIMP has the fancy aalib plugin, I can't get it to work on Windows. Since most of my time these days is spent on Windows, I'd have to reboot every time I wanted to make a graphic.
This didn't sit well, so I tried installing aalib on Windows directly. The only way to get aalib is as a source code tarball; you have to compile the thing yourself. I didn't have any luck with that.
In the end I decided to create my own aalib style software. That's what I spent the evening doing and it's worked out very well. The only real kink is that I'm using a GUI toolkit to handle the image files, and that's just too darn kludgey. So I spent some time looking stuff up and have coded my own image loading/saving code. It'll handle only the BMP format, but that's more than enough for me (as I tend to use MS Paint instead of something fancier).
Perhaps tomorrow I'll recode everything to make it all a nice CLI program.
Since Thanksgiving is tomorrow, here's some reasons why men should be thankful for women and why women should be thankful for men.
And lastly here's some people that are just thankful they didn't need their arm reattached. That gun's got kickback something awful.