Morse Code Flashing Keyboard Light
2008-04-21 08:21AM PDT/Home
In one of the many climactic scenes of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicron, the protagonist manages to decrypt the coordinates of a WWII era stash of gold. The twist was that he did it on a laptop whose screen was being monitored. It's a long story and I won't do it justice. But how does he overcome this and get the decrypted coordinates without tipping his hand and giving the location away? He has his keyboard light flash the results to him in morse code of course! And this being a novel's novel, all protagonists know morse code. And I suppose, how to make the keyboard light flash.
Ah, but now we can too! Thanks to Amit Singh's post about his latest hack, Manipulating keyboard LEDs hrough software. I thought hot damn, I've got make a command-line tool that flashes the keyboard lights in morse code based on whatever gets sent to it via stdin. The fact that I don't know morse code is completely immaterial. Don't confuse me with details, I must do this!
Except, even though Amit Singh's a genius, and I'm sure he knows morse code, his keyboard_leds code didn't work for me. I get a bad or missing LED cookie error. I can't believe it. Such a let down!