This article is a brief tutorial in how to make your own ascii internet TV station. I say brief, its pretty simple - that's why its brief.

The inspiration for such an article comes from having a telnet link posted in a channel to a server which was showing a World Cup game live via ascii and sockets. I pasted this around to a couple other people and some folk didn't understand how it worked, so I wanted to share some knowledge.

Incase some of you aren't following me, the link I was shown was

Introduction

The scenario is you are without Internet connectivity anywhere. You have found either an open wireless access pointed or perhaps you're staying in a hotel which permits rented Internet via services like

Spectrum Interactive (previously known as UKExplorer). You make the connection, whether its physically connecting the Ethernet cables, or instructing you're wireless adapter to lock onto the radio signal. You are prompted with some sort of authorisation page when you open a browser. You don't have access to it, so what do you do?

Prefixed Portage

Most Linux distributions have great package managers like apt or portage. But installing programs when you don't have root access can be a pain. You need to find, download and install all the dependencies and their dependencies, setup a prefix somewhere in your home folder and hope that everything works.

Prefixed portage is perfect for those kinds of situations. It's a modified version of portage, the package manager of the Gentoo distribution. I am using it on a computer running Linux, but you can also use it on OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris to install applications and libraries from the portage repository.