Some time ago I bought one of those nice DL1414 4-char LED alphanumeric displays. What good is a display if it is not controllable by the PC? So here I describe how to connect it to the printer port of your PC, and with a little PERL program I wrote, you can output fancy ticker lines on it. The pinout of the DL1414 can be seen here, for the numbering of the parallel port, you can go to this site, for example. You need 11 wires (preferably a ribbon cable) to connect to display to the parallel port and a 5V power supply which you connect to Vcc and GND (pins 6 and 7) of the display. The wiring is as follows:

function	parport pin	DL1414 pin	function
D0	2	8	D0
D1	3	9	D1
D2	4	10	D2
D3	5	11	D3
D4	6	2	D4
D5	7	1	D5
D6	8	12	D6
auto feed	14	3	/WR
init	16	4	A1
select in	17	5	A0
GND	18	7	GND

When all the cables are connected, you can output any text using dl1414ticker.pl.
Have fun!

update: we now have a video!