This Wednesday, Jim Brown presents on QEMU at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting. Go, if you are near, but RSVP first so you can get in. It should be streamed too.
Happy new year! I have some history gems in here – not archival material but people that made history, speaking again, now.
- A TI-99 programmer resurfaces. (via Paul Ivanov, thanks)
- Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit – The History of the BSD Daemon. The original artist, Phil Foglio, is still making excellent comics. (video, via)
- Technical Marvels, Part 9: Program-Controlled Musical Picture Clocks. Novel to me. (via)
- Developing a public-interest training commons of books. (via)
- Not BSDTalk, but talk(1) on BSD. Follow the thread.
- Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository. I remember reading this but not linking this. (via this long thread)
- An oral history of AutoDesk. (via)
- What an Atari workstation might have looked like.
- Apropos for the new year: BSDCan 2025 call for papers.
- MNT laptops are neat, but they also do… earrings? (via)
- Research of RAM data remanence times. (via)
- Public Domain Day at the Internet Archive.
- And at the Public Domain Review.
- QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, in 3 days. RSVP needed if you are going, which I recommend.
This is going to seem minor, but it’s been annoying for a zillion years, and now it’s fixed: mail(1) now reflows text properly after a screen resize.
If you use TrueCrypt / tcplay, dm-crypt, or /dev/crypto on DragonFly, Michael Neumann wants to know.
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)
Terminal thoughts this week.
- Century-Scale Storage. “The RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe,” (via)
- “Rules” that terminal programs follow. (via)
- Text-based tools I’m using on my FreeBSD laptop.
- Related: chawan, a TUI-based web browser. (via)
- Sort of related empty musing: could Ladybird have a text mode?
- Resurrection, Journal of the Computer Conservation Society. Yay a flowchart! (also via)
- The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC.
- TRMNL, a sorta-standalone e-ink display. (via)
- Anti-Schmutz Phone Port Plug. I use a needle which is probably a bad idea.
- RFC 35140: The Do-Not-Stab flag in the HTTP Header. (via)
I could use a recommendation for a good, cheap registrar to use for domain names; I use gandi and the price has been creeping up. Any suggestions?
- Next NYCBUG: QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, 2025-01-08. QEMU is far more influential than I expected.
- For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. (via)
- The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023).
- A physical save button.
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (1978) vs Spanner (2012). (via)
- SCCS roach motel. A pretty exhaustive description of SCCS and the weave format.
- Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer.
- Public domain works done for NASA. (via previous)
- The Biggest Shell Programs in the World. You want to look and also look away. (via)
Unofficial theme: synthesizers!
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- How to Build a Chess Engine and Fail. (via)
- cablesoft. Finally, a ‘computers are bad’ story where I experienced (some of) the history described.
- Jon Makes Beats. Seeing synthesizers and samplers in use. (via)
- More synthesizer stuff: the Orchid. (via)
- Even more: Music Thing Modular Workshop System. (via)
- Using (only) a Linux terminal for my personal computing in 2024.
- more tales of the unscreenshotable.
- AI-powered Self Service Checkouts.
- Why pipes sometimes get “stuck”: buffering. (via)
- Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web. (via)
- Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. Tabletop RPG history. (via)
- A Margaret Hamilton’s worth of printed code. (via)
- What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. (also via)
Your video experience of the week: Hundreds of Beavers. This was played in a theater in my town months ago and I missed it. I should have gone to see it on the big screen, but here it is on YouTube. (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)
Links are from a wide range of sources this week; it’s often a good idea to follow the (via) tags to find even more.
- NYCBUG meets 12/4 at the usual time, for lightning talks.
- Maximizing Time For Reading. (via)
- Half-Life 2 20th anniversary. Documentaries like this are sort of about the game but also an inside track on software development case studies. (See also Psychodyssey)
- Asterogue. (via)
- Procedural text and tabletop roleplaying. Speaking of roguelikes…
- The missing text focused programming environment. Makes me think of Smalltalk.
- IMG_0416. (via)
- MyNoise. (via)
- CW&T, a design studio. (via)
- Keep It Simple Tools. (via)
This week’s music: Thank You, Dream Girl. (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.
NYCBUG is having a streaming-only event at 6:45 PM eastern tonight, with Jim Brown presenting on QEMU. Go, if you are near a computer. Also join IRC on #nycbug on Libera, too.
I don’t have a good link for the SDF item; their mailing list doesn’t appear to have a public archive, or I haven’t found it. SSH will get you there faster anyway.
- DragonFly: git: rtld – do not allow both dynamic DTV index and static TLS offset. Useful if p5-DBD-mysql is failing for you.
- inetd and daemons, a 4 part series.
- Moving my FreeBSD laptop to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6. Linked cause I just handled a newer X1 recently; might replace my ancient x220. More links in article.
- You can now play WUMPUS and OREGON TRAIL on the sigma-9 instance at sdf.org.
- Technical Marvels, Part 8: Historical Surveying Instruments. (via)
- Next NYC*BUG: 2024-11-06 @ 17:45 EST “Life with a FreeBSD Laptop” by Brian Reynolds. RSVP if you are going, so you can get in the facility.
- What Are The Civilian Applications?
- Building a game with the Real Engine. A heck of a lot of work but the results will be unique. (via)
- revealing the fediverse’s gifts. (via)
- Paper types ranked by likelihood of paper cuts.
- Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old.
- Broughlike.
All over the place this week.
- DragonFly: Replace gnu diff, diff3, and sdiff with BSD versions.
- RSA DSA challenged (again)
- Peripheral Component Interconnect.
- Lillian Schwartz and an early UNIX… mobile?. (via)
- Fall mystery games. Linked for the second game reviewed.
- HTML for People.
- The Conspiracy Capitaliser.
- Periodical 20 — Localized Computing,
- Psychogeographic Review. Indirectly via the last link.
- Trevor Flowers rebuilds: the Memex and Alto. Also via previous.
- The IPv6 Transition. (via)
BSD mini-theme.
- Histories of the Greater West. Charts! Graphs! Excellent use of character encoding!
- Cabinet of curiosities: A bunch of cryptographic protocol oddities. (via)
- Trebuchet for sale. (via)
- The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk. (via)
- The uConsole, as recommended by you! Specifically this.
- Filtered for time and false memory. Conspiracy theory, but fun.
- Open-AMP: My OpenBSD Alternative to Devilbox/XAMPP.
- EuroBSDcon 2024 in Dublin, Ireland: some notes after the conference.
- OpenBSD Webzine 18.
- Roguelike Celebration 2024 is happening now. See the merch and the Steam sale,
- Plasma6 and FreeBSD 14. Probably applies somewhat to other BSDs.
- Commoning. I opened 7 more tabs following up on what I read in that article, so it must be useful.
- 3rd Annual International Crisp Sandwich Day, this week on the 25th.
Accidental theme: terminal colors.
- What happens to “.io” TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? (via)
- Aesthetic Command Lines.
- Terminal colours are tricky. (via)
- TerminalTinder. (via)
- Wulfwald Bundle of Holding. OD&D compatible and Anglo-Saxon themed.
- awktober, and 30 days of it. (via)
- Unicode shenanigans: Martine écrit en UTF-8. (via)
- A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase.
- Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information. (via)
- echo “You’re not in the editor, Bernie.”
- Flyer Screens.
- ipmi.
No theme this week.
- Filtered for home robots, fast and slow. I’d buy many of these if they were commercially available.
- Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea. Breakdown of a breakdown in trust.
- Roguelike Celebration 2024 full schedule.
- Visual guide to SSH tunneling and port forwarding. (via)
- Bell Systems Letters and Memos. (via)
- Bell Systems Technical Journals, 1922-1996. (via)
- Related: units(1) exists because of a 24-hour AT&T library.
- Why “Run Your Own Mail Server” is not in Amazon’s Kindle store. Monopsony described.
- Guided By Vices.
- 30 year anniversary of trip hop. (via)
- When the Mismanagerial Class Destroys Great Companies. I agree about the zombification bit at the end. (via)
- Departure Mono. I can hear the greenbar Tektronix printer running, just looking at this.
Next NYCBUG meeting is Wednesday night, and you need to RSVP if you’re going to be there in person. It sounds like there’s going to be a nice roundup of EuroBSDCon experiences and also the video … team? squad? support.