There’s some gift ideas in here.

• The  Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute.  Styles and time periods.  (via)
• d20 Orbs.
• Robot Arm Clock.  Entertainingly dumb.  (via)
• postmarketOS, an indirect explanation.
• SerenityOS, an indirect explanation.
• Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time.  (via)
• Related and same source: r/selfhosted.
• Have Vint Cerf tell you about how he and others built the Internet.
• The Ether, an anti-radio.  This seems like a good Christmas present to me.  (via)
• This can’t work out well.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2015: Lifeline, 2016: The Freshman, and 2017: Universal Paperclips.
• The Analog Thing.  (via)

There are some stealth links here to much more reading, if you look carefully.

• mepo, Open Street Map data app.  I didn’t think something like OSM could be built collectively but I am glad to be wrong.  (via)
• I will pay you cash to delete your npm module.
• What is not portable.
• IBM 5110 Emulator.  IBM’s first “portable”.  (also via)
• Orgdown – a New Lightweight Markup Standard for Text Documents.  I just like the portmanteau.  (via)
• Jumping in at the Deep End – On Starting Reading a Series Halfway Through.  I did this for Finder, and I think it was more enjoyable for me.
• Johnny Decimal.  Not a bad idea.  (via)
• Every business process secretly wants to fail.
• IFComp 2021 Results.
• Human Non-Universals, or: Make Your Own Vancian Culture ™.  Makes more sense if you’ve read Jack Vance.  Which you should, he’s in Appendix N.
• The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again.  (via)
• A good gift guide.  Remember my perpetual suggestions too.

No mini-theme this week.

• Cracking the Adventure Time Cipher.  (via)
• The Tildeverse Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup server is fixed.  There’s a tilde DCSS server?
• I Have No TV.  Gobs of documentaries.  (via)
• Concert Roulette.  (also via)
• Building WireGate: A WireGuard front to detect compromised keys.  (via)
• T700 Crowdfunding.  More Thinkpad life extension.  (via)
• Tiny Emus.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2013: A Family Supper and 2014: 80 Days.
• Homebrew Game Characteristics.
• Plain Text Project Tools Roundup November 17, 2021.
• One of these JPEGs is not like the other.
• Pirijan Uses This.  A different style UT answer than I’ve seen before.
• Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit.  (video, via)
• Cambridge, another falling-blocks game.  Check the Other Notable Games links at the end. (via)

This is a good mix this week.

• Can Data Die?  Tracking the Lenna Image.  I’ve linked to other stories about this image before.  (lost the source link, sorry)
• A Close Look at a Spinlock.
• The Monstrosity Email Has Become.  (via)
• FURBY MODULE – A Synthesizer Module That Houses A Furby.  The synth itself is worth a look.  (via)
• The inside story of the outside investigation of SoftRAM 95.
• Oh, great, there’s a year 2028 problem too.  (via)
• The history of writing in 1.5 hours.
• Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations.
• Faces of Open Source.  Doug McIlroy looks like Otto Mentalis from Psychonauts 2.  Coincidence?  (via)
• Fermentabot 1.0 and a data-collecting version.
• New Brothers Quay film on the way.  (via)
• Tindie, a maker market site.  Interesting niche products.  Found via this story.