Hey Hubski,
I made a black & white/color ascii picture converter in C# that should be able to compiled in mono without much of a struggle. I ran a couple of tests to compare outputs and for the most part I'm satisfied. I ended ditching the original function I had written to generate black and white (but it could print out to notepad which was kinda cool) due to a smushing bug; but it gave the black and white outputs a lot more character.
Do you have any simple programs you'd like to share?