[Mac Tips] Show the Nyan Cat in Terminal

[Anthony Bouchard]

Small things amuse small minds.

Terminal is a powerful tool. But it can be used for fun things too! You can watch Star Wars in Terminal, and now you can open the Nyan Cat on Terminal. The possibilities are endless! To show the Nyan Cat in your Terminal window, you will need to enter a command. There are two different commands for two separate systems:

BSD

nc -v miku.acm.uiuc.edu 23 

GNU

nc -T miku.acm.uiuc.edu 23 

So launch a Terminal window (open up Spotlight, type Terminal, then hit Return) and copy and paste one of the above commands into Terminal and hit Return. You may get a popup saying that something wants to connect to your computer, just click allow. The popup should only come up if you have the LittleSnitch outgoing firewall for Mac installed because it appears to be an outgoing firewall connection warning.

Nyan Cat works for all of the following Terminals:

• xterm
• Gnome Terminal
• Konsole
• PuTTY
• Linux framebuffers (software, run as is; hardware terminals use TERM=fallback telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu)
• iSSH
• ConnectBot
• urxvt
• rxvt
• Terminal.app on 10.7 (10.6 and before, run TERM=ansi telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu)
• cygwin
• Windows Terminal: (Command Prompt) Run as telnet -t vtnt miku.acm.uiuc.edu
• VT220 with TERM=vt220 telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu
• Shell in a Box (web terminal) with TERM=linux telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

When the mail server is down, you can check out the mirrors which are basically backup servers:

• telnet thefinn93.com
• telnet nyan.howes.net.nz
• telnet baud.org.uk
• telnet ebal.ee 666

This kind of stuff is basically great for pranks and making people laugh. You will definitely get some weird looks if you start doing this on computers in a public area. How funny would it be if you set all of your school's computers to show the Nyan Cat? Unfortunately, there is no sound. Only animations. But nonetheless, it's funny.

Will you be trying this out on your computer or iDevice? Share in the comments below!

Sources: Nyancat Telnet Server

[klange]

Hi there! Thanks for the post, I'm the author of the software behind this. The idea came about while some colleagues and I were messing with caca. It started as a simple ANSI Nyancat tool that I wrote for my toy operating system, and a friend said "you should make a telnet server for that". It took about a day to get everything up and running, and here we are.

[blondelefty]

Small things amuse small minds.

Guess this represents you otherwise you wouldn't have made a post about it.

[iPod]

How do you enable telnet on windows?

[Anthony Bouchard]

Guess this represents you otherwise you wouldn't have made a post about it.

Nah. I posted this because I knew you'd read about it

[BenderRodriguez]

Guess this represents you otherwise you wouldn't have made a post about it.

OUCH
Its interesting I like the starwars one myself

[iPod]

Whenever I try this on windows 7, I get unknown command. Any ideas?

[iBadger]

To enable Telnet in Windows 7: Open up "My Computer"Click on "Uninstall or change a program"Click on "Turn Windows Features on or off"Click the checkbox next to Telnet Client Boom Done


I wanted to see the starwars one. I found a link on another site.

Type this!

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

[iPod]

To enable Telnet in Windows 7: Open up "My Computer"Click on "Uninstall or change a program"Click on "Turn Windows Features on or off"Click the checkbox next to Telnet Client Boom Done

Yeah i've done that, but when i run the commands, it says it is an invalid command

[BenderRodriguez]

Whenever I try this on windows 7, I get unknown command. Any ideas?

The -T needs to be a -t
Not capitalized

[blondelefty]

Nah. I posted this because I knew you'd read about it

You're funny I only had to read the first sentence and look at the picture before realizing how sad some of your posts have been reduced to. And don't be silly! I would never read something so childish! But that's just me… if you like watching cartoon cats with square bodies in front of a terminal window, hey, that's your thing.

[BenderRodriguez]

You're funny I only had to read the first sentence and look at the picture before realizing how sad some of your posts have been reduced to. And don't be silly! I would never read something so childish! But that's just me… if you like watching cartoon cats with square bodies in front of a terminal window, hey, that's your thing.

So first u say it's childish but then u describe it like u tried it lol