This page documents how I built a penguin out of fairy lights... Tux is the official mascot of the Linux operating system, to which I have made various contributions over the years. Tux was originally drawn by Larry Ewing, and looks something like: The goal was to turn this into something which worked well with fairy lights poked through holes in a piece of MDF. I guess I was thinking of pointillism when I originally came up with the idea. It seemed like a good idea, but the bit which worried me the most was to ensure that the image was clearly a penguin at the end of drilling several hundred holes in a big bit of dead tree. Being a software engineer, the obvious solution was to whip up something which could simulate Twinkle Tux. Taking the image that I had in mind, I first needed to force it into the colors which were available to me from fairy lights (red, green, blue, and yellow in the set I wanted to use). I therefore wrote a program which generated a false color Tux, in my restricted palette. This is the code I came up with, if you care about…