DragonFly BSD Digest

I almost maintain a theme all the way today.

• The origin and unexpected evolution of the word “mainframe”.  2 words.
• I Don’t Have Spotify.  (via)
• Electromechanical computer from 1948 and hydromechanical computer, videos.  (via)
• My stupid noise journey.  I have done similar.
• Ambient computer research.  (via)
• Stealth Macintosh Portable Case Mod.  (via)
• Found at previous link: Macintosh Plus Exploded View shirt.
• The Internet Can’t Discover.
• Comics That Resemble The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Album Cover.  Swipes swipes swipes.
• A Closer Look at the Tanmatsu.  My recurring fantasy of doing everything at a terminal somehow.
• Sorta related: Some Terminal Frustrations.

Your unrelated violent claymation fantasy movie link of the week: The Dead Need No Chairs.

Got all the types this week.

• Semi Social / Streaming hardware test session for NYCBUG, this Wednesday.
• 2025 IGF nominees, quick takes.
• Five Centuries of Board Games.
• Plan 9 inspired programs.  (via)
• The Monospace Web.  Looks nice.  (via)
• ELIZA followup.  Hopefully you get the joke.
• Dragonsweeper.  (via)
• The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again.
• Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy.
• The truth about proprietary protocols.
• Which leads me to Pixelfed and Loops.
• Or, y’know, Tumblr.
• FACT 2025, which has a great speaker lineup.  (via)
• The expanded Raiding the 20th Century turns twenty.  “all copyright-infringement”.
• Narcissystem.
• Beginning Framework.
• Up Rye Zine.

 

Nice mix this week.

• Traveller Reading.
• Your Comics Will Love You Back!  (via)
• The Ghosts in the Machine.  Don’t use Spotify.  Cancel your account, if you have one.  Nothing else will cause change.  (via multiple)
• My Favorite Weird Little Apps.  (via)
• Field Companions.  (via)
• In an unconfigured Vim, I want to do ‘:set paste’ right away.  Reminder to self; muscle memory won’t change to accommodate anything else.
• How Multi-User Dungeons Taught Me To Code.  Having a goal makes it much easier to learn to code.  (via)
• Generative AI is for the idea guys.  The ratio of idea to implementation at every place I’ve ever worked is like 1000:1.
• Y2K, again.  It’ll be a problem 13, 25, and 75 years from now.   Don’t forget GPS week number rollover while considering fundamental date problems.
• Public Domain Day 2025.  The Dashiell Hammett books are good if you have not read them yet.
• Happy Public Domain Day 2025.  Same topic, but it has specific links to good stuff.

Cleared half my tabs and none of my inbox…  I think I’ll get started on next week’s Lazy Reading right now.

• Every Single Noise In The World.  (via)
• Domain Naming.  (also via)
• A Guide to Commodore PETs.  I love the shape.
• Frequently asked questions about signal handling in C.
• Half-Life on the Digital Antiquarian.
• LinkedIn to Hell.  (via)
• At Dawn We Ate Sugar Smacks: Wargaming Newbies Tackle the Monster of Monsters.  A horrifying person writing a funny essay.  (via)
• UFO50.  (via)
• Anime Mechanics.  (via)
• Starting with Classic Traveller.
• Smartphone Runs Home Server.
• Ridding my home network of IP addresses.  Personal complaint: Github gists: better than social media for public documents, but not much.  (via)

No theme but some new-to-me topics.

• Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming.  (via)
• The Monstrome.   A Monster Manual.
• FriendlyStack Reminder, a hardware implementation of Post-It Notes.
• Tetris Forever, a game and a documentary at the same time.   (via)
• Like pizza, the first version of Tetris you encounter is probably the one you will consider the best.  It’s the old Mac version for me.
• SPAG: Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games.  Back issues.  (via)
• Starbattle.  A sort of inverted Minesweeper.
• Beckn Protocol.  (via)
• The Usenet Feed Size exploded to 475TB.  Continuous Usenet traffic would burn out server disks every month, years ago when I worked for Road Runner – and that is when traffic was measured in GB.(via)

I might have cleared my open computer-related tabs for once!

• The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832.  Open access book; order a physical copy if you enjoy it.  (via)
• A Brief History of Cyrix.
• Totalisator, mechanical racetrack/betting computers I had never heard of.  (video, via)
• A Craving for Calculation.   Linked for the of-a-time feel of the pictures.
• Infinite Mac: Macintosh Garden Library.  (via)
• tvcon, a Knight TV emulator.  Try ‘tvcon -2BCS  -c000002 bitzone.sdf.org‘.  (from a nonpublic list)
• The Internet Gopher from Minnesota.
• Spell checking in Vim.
• Self-hosted web browser bookmarks syncing.
• Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023.
• Grim Fandango.

This is a settle-in-and-read list.

• eink.cam.  (via)
• Keyboard size guide.  I never knew the names.  (via)
• Why Don’t We Read Like We Used To?  Linked for noting how people read only headlines.  Like for this very Digest.
• Current challenges in free software and open source development.  Slides here.  Thanks Paul for sending.
• TI-99/4A Star Trek Theme Song.  From the recent Chicago TI-99/4A
  User Group‘s Annual Chicago TI International World Faire.  Also thanks to Paul.
• SourceType Index.  So many tiny rabbit holes to go down; this will eat some time to read.  (via)
• Via the previous link, UN-11, a Selectric-style font that dare I say I like more than Helvetica?
• Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone.  (via)
• Colophon.  He’s been blogging longer than I have.
• The Beyond and Leviathan, coming very soon.  Two excellent authors.