DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

Tab cleanout!

• How computers remained unpatented.  (via)
• 50 years of New Worlds magazine, archived.  (via)
• THE CYBERIZER, Mk.2.
• Cyberdelia 2024 – look at the D20 and 2D16 drink menus for fun.
• Small Internet protocol roundup.  (via)
• You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now For The Daily Tasks.
• Programming the Convergent WorkSlate’s spreadsheet microcassette future.  An 80s spreadsheet tablet.
• ten years ago i let people fuck up my 8-bit art.
• Eadgar of Poe, ‘Þe Hræfn’.  þ is pronounced ‘th’ if it helps.
• The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine.  (via)
• The agony and the ecstasy of, um, hardware products.

After the initial notes, this is a week to dedicate some time to reading; these are more intense than usual.

• Sept 4 NYC*BUG: GEFS: The Long road to Production Use, Ori Bernstein.  Go if you are near, and there are plans to stream if you are not near.
• Speaking of streaming, the NYCBUG group has done a significant amount of work on streaming open-source meetings; now you can contribute (tax-advantaged) to it.
• OK, now for the reading bits.
• The Tic-Tac-Toe Mysteries of Xerloc O’Xolmes.
• In Which Graphic Novels Are Optimized for Portability.
• Dinosaur’s Pen, old tech media images.  (via)
• No apps no masters.
• Fight On! Returns.
• The rich history of ham radio culture.
• Steampunk strandbeest.
• SSH has become our universal (Unix) external access protocol.
• Generating Mazes.  (via)
• The Dying Computer Museum.  A good reason to pay attention to the Computer History Museum, SDF’s Interim Computer Museum, or the not-enough-people-know-it iCHEG.
• Vibing With Some Tunes and a Retro Wave Slideshow on the Apple IIe.  Synthwave already has early Apple visual associations; this seems like a perfect match.

Odd hardware week.

• Repository Statistics.  That’s way more package repos than I expected.  (via)
• The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins.  (via)
• A short history of the 909 in 16 songs.  (via)
• DMARC Vendors.  (via)
• Sign up to support the Interim Computer Museum.
• … because you can actually use the exhibits.
• Technical Marvels, Part 5: Chess Automatons.
• asciiker, a game that is vaguely roguelike but also 3D – right-click and rotate.  (via)
• When does The Phantom Tollbooth take place?
• minuteman missile communications.
• Sensorwatch, put a tiny computer in your Casio wristwatch.  (via)
• Michael W. Lucas’s next book might be It’s Always DNS.
• Indirectly related, Full-featured email server running OpenBSD
• E-ink digit clock.
• Replacing postfix with dma + auth, easy.
• Betrayal is the Internet’s business model.
• New Brothers Quay film on the way.  No trailer, darnit.  (via)
• “Weird Al” Yankovic – Polkamania!  I am pretty sure it starts with a Cyriak animation.  (via)

I am attempting to clear my link backlog but not succeeding.

• Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game.  (via)
• From boiling lead and black art.  Veers into UNIX history at the end.  (via)
• A Look Back at StripWare.
• Escaping the software tar pit: model clashes and how to avoid them.  (via)
• The Programmer Productivity Myth.
• Plan 9 ported to SPARC over a few days.
• More engineering case studies to dive into.
• You can see when Great Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar by typing ‘cal 9 1752’.  Just cause time is messy, it’s different for other countries.
• Also, time goes faster on the moon.  That’s not a figure of speech.
• Video of Michael W. Lucas’s recent presentation on Run Your Own Mail Server at NYCBUG.
• State of Text Rendering 2024.  (via)
• Esquire’s 75 best sci-fi books of all time.  Feels clickbaity, but a good list for finding books you may not have read yet.  (via)