Author: Justin Sherrill

I had Covid in February, which made me sit still long enough to find all these links way ahead of time.

• “I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH”  Linked for the links within.  (via)
• Max Brückner’s Polyhedra (1900).  I’d enjoy constructing these.
• Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets).  (via)
• Download the whole IF Archive.
• Gathering Structures.  ‘Lightning talks’ can be fun.
• Okay, Color Spaces.  CIE XYZ is new to me.  That rhymes!  (via)
• Images are just videos with a single frame.  A Sora quote that is intensely wrong, and I have a decades-old argument against it,  The rest of that article is spot-on, too.
• Huffman Codes – How Do They Work?  (via)
• Ahab’s Leg Dilemma: Part 1.  (via)
• A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us.  Does this mean the Hail Mary Cloud finally petered out?
• British Cryptids: The Ramflaggie Of Argyll.  The point is not the story it tells but the style it uses; this is a modern video.  (via)
• Create for Yourself.  Own your work, and own where it is located, or else it will eventually be lost.

Mini-theme: collections of media.

• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023.
• ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories.  (via)
• NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available!  There’s now a Wii port, which is neat.  (via)
• The Salmar Construction, a 1970s “large music synthesis engine”.  (via)
• The miracle of the commons.  Principles that apply to open source projects.  (via)
• Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist.
• An RNG that runs in your brain.
• Lost infosec battles.
• The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive.  (via)
• This message does not exist.
• Computational Poems.  (via)
• At long last: the MWL Title Index.
• A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Omni: Souvenir.

Deep dives week.  I was on the road almost all week for my main job so a bit sparse.

• Dave Mills, the guy who created NTP (and possibly FTP or at least one of the earliest versions) died recently.  Here’s some history / anecdotes.  (via)
• Single-service sites are getting very specific.  (via)
• Origin story of the Digital logo, which is not Helvetica.  (via)
• Tom Harned wrote up DragonFly on a Thinkpad 480.
• web-adventures.org.  (via)
•  The “Cheap” Web.  (also via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Send my former coworker to baking school.  He thinks more intensely about bread and how to make it, than anyone you’ve ever met.  I’m not exaggerating.  Help him out; it’ll make his day.

I have been on the road so it’s a short week.  The links are more cheery, though.

• Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens.
• The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
• The Dobbstown Mirror.  I subscribe; it’s a treat in the mail
• Ship of Theseus on Wikipedia is a Ship of Theseus.  (via)
• Crusty, the Indestructible Mac.  (via)
• Reboi, I suppose the 2020s version of a MAME Cabinet.
• The Book 8088.  I almost think it’s a prank?
• Inside .git.  (via)

I’ve got some real gems this week.

• MULTIPLY – A BOOK ABOUT CALCULATORS.  Discussion of the open source tools used to process it.  (via)
• diagram.website, or An Internet Map.  Lots of links there.  (via)
• Googling symptoms of the flu.
• Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request.  AI, a customizable spam tool.  (via)
• What was ISDN?  Analog lines completely going away makes me nervous.
• The biggest problem with selling print books is the software.  A nice Print on Demand summary in there.
• ou sont les blogs d’antan?  Lots of links to other esoteric blogs in there.  (via)
• Fast NetBSD booting, which led me to smolBSD.
• DSA removal from SSH.  Matters most if you are running an very outdated system.
• Modern Commodore 64 motherboards.
• Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics.  Applies to DragonFly too.
• Hardening an OpenBSD Workstation.

Your unrelated extended music of the week: Bill Laswell featuring DJ Rob Swift – Reanimation.  Which of course reminds me that Rob Gets Busy.  If you like that, here’s a crazy amount of beat juggling, at its best when it creates new music and rhythms.  (via)

Mini-theme is about building the Internet without platforms, or at least without ones designed to extract revenue from you.

• Please, Own Your RSS Links.
• “I’m ChatGPT.”
• Vintage Calculator Designs, 1968-1983.
• Why do I know shell, and how can you?
• Banner Depot 2000.  (via)
• Damaged Earth Catalog.  More links.  (also via)
• Multiplayer Mandelbrot.
• Barely Minimum.
• TeX == blech.
• Standard Ebooks and classic web tech.  (via)
• Floppy Disk Fever.

Your difficult music link of the week: There Will Never Be Another Harry Partch.

Merry almost Christmas!

• Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read.  (via)
• An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities.  The birth of fuzzing.  (PDF, via via)
• Copyright law is living in the past.  A good explanation of music copyright oddities.
• ARCC opens for login tomorrow.  Buy a ticket as a present to yourself.
• The UX of delivering parcels.  Reminds me of the long-ago Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research.  (via)
• Val Town.  (via)
• Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet.  I endorse this.  (via)
• The sound of Wikipedia.  Bells for additions, string plucks for removals, pitch to indicate size of edit.  (via)
• Early Computer Art by Barbara Nessim.  (also via)
• EuroBSDCon is happening in Dublin in September 2024.  (via)
• A vt100 compatibility question that led to talk about termcap hacking and printer shenanigans.   (follow all those links)