Month: July 2022

No mini-theme this week, just a mix.

• No leap second this year.
• BUY NOW, the BeOS screensaver.  (via)
• The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 1, day 2, day 5, done!
• An SPA alternative.  (via)
• The History of User Interfaces.  Linked for the screenshots.  (via)
• Status Update on LS1028A Open Hardware CPU Module.  Mntre is serious about that open hardware thing.  (via)
• Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.2.  FVWM disguised as CDE.  (via)
• Enginomics.
• Digital dice towers built in beautiful retro cases.
• The Codecs of Streams Past.  Linked cause reading about RealVideo and Silverlight gave me painful flashbacks.
• Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet.  (via)

Old machines week.

• An excellent payphone project.
• The Goriest Fight Scenes from The Iliad, Pt. 1.  I enjoyed those books for a reason.
• A tiny Pinball Fantasies table – Intro.
• Crypto Ancienne 2.0 now brings TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things (except BeOS).  Linked for the screenshots.
• The Commodore 64 Smartwatch can now sync with your Commodore 64 desktop.  Not a sentence I expected to type.
• In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard Issue 1 – PDF Released.  I just found my copy of the Peridot the other day, which was a fun read.
• Macintosh Common Lisp.  (via)
• Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development.  For example, this very blog.
• Sweet Mars inspired theme for WindowMaker.
• Writing and Running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus.  Somewhat bonkers.

I think I cover all the popular Lazy Reading topics: old computers, RPGs, graphs…

• Doom on Doom.
• An explanation of phone firmware using the PinePhone as the base example.
• Watches that don’t tell time.  (via)
• The Impact of Open Connectivity.
• Your Adventure Ends Here, blogging ‘playthroughs’ of choose-your-adventure books.  (via)
• Rewilding PowerPoint.
• Supertab for vim.
• god damnit adrian stop it.
• @defensecharts.  I have encountered some of these in the wild.
• The Lost Tron Arcade Documents.  (via)
• CP/M is (more) officially open source.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Better Living Through Synthesizers.

The “Weird Coding Experiment…” link is a good one.

• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I).  The ‘effective strategy’ part makes sense to me.
• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II).
• Give Up GitHub – Software Freedom Conservancy.  (via)
• Walkmellotron, combining the best features of the Mellotron and the Walkman.
• The Old Computer Challenge V2: back to RTC.
• Retrospective: Wizardry.  I never played this; always Ultima.
• 1970s desktop email notifier.
• SourceHut is committed to making IRC better.  IRC generally has the same learning curve (and power) as vi.
• Microsoft To Ban Commercial Open Source from App Store.  I can’t tell if this is misinterpreted panic or Microsoft attempting to stop open source from being a paying job.
• The modifiers vs. the keepers.  I think 3-shift keyboards should make a return.  (via)
• Weird Coding Experiment: A Virtual Retro PC… that plays Sierra games!?  If you want a retro computer and don’t have room in the house.  (via)
• Upscaling Sierra graphics. (same source as last)

Whee!

• Mesopotamia, a nice online version of a museum exhibit.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games bonus article: Amnesia.
• MNT Pocket Reform, the smaller version of something I’ve linked before.
• The least friendly keyboard ever, but certainly interesting.
• The Internet as a Public Good.
• GitHub Copilot and open source laundering.  This applies to AI art too.
• A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt).  Linked cause I wondered out loud “why that change, in version 36?”
• Dangit, Git!?   (via)
• A strategy to defeat AI chessbots.
• The Dwarf Fortress Development Plan.  Some of this sounds more like writing an epic novel than a game, which is good!   They have a dirt-simple Patreon, too, and graphics are on the way?  All news to me.
• Plan 9 was almost a music disk, too.  (via)

Your unrelated cartoon of the week: Mega.