DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

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)

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.