Category: Books

No mini-theme.

• The day the IoT died.  “they are future-proofing us as a consumer for them, not the things they sell us”.  (via, via)
• More Cyberdecks should have CRTs instead of LCDs.
• DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd edition is out.
• Predicting developments in real world conflict from patterns of failed logins.
• XScreenSaver 6.03 is out.
• Usenet over NNCP.  NNCP is new to me.  (via)
• Obsolete technologies that will baffle future generations.  All of these were present at the same time just 20 years ago.  (via)
• Map of Reddit and wilderness.land.  (Both via)
• VIM – Minimal Setup Explained.  (via)
• Winamp 2 reimplemented for the browser.  (via)
• Vmail.  Vole mail.  (via)

Some looks backward to prior links, but in a good way.

• Beatportal’s Definitive Guide to Techno.  (via)
• Which reminds me of eternal favorite Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
• Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong.  There’s a whole chapter about this in the most in-depth regex book I ever read.
• ifconfig.co.  Fetch that site for your plain text IP, plus other features.  (via)
• How does Go know time.Now?  (via)
• When Hackers Were Heroes.  A worthwhile history read / book review.  (via)
• Map ruler overlays in Cogmind.  Linked for the quality demonstration animations.
• AFFINITIES, public domain images bound.
• Gossamer Network, an exploration of very specific data visualizations through a website.  (via)
• Generative Unfoldings, computer art.  (also via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1983: Suspended and 1984: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• Even the footnotes have footnotes.
• research!rsc: Unix Viruses.  Linked for the history.  (via)
• Picking an operating based on feel.

I haven’t had many posts this past week because of a mix of work then holidays. but there’s always Lazy Reading.

• My favorite essays of life advice.
• Lode Runner.
• “just don’t use any non-essential cookies“
• Cemetery of Soviet computers.  Gotta reinstall STALKER.  (via)
• “Tell me you work in tech without telling me you work in tech.”  (via)
• Social shell games.
• Web Conversation From the Other Side.  Followup from last week.
• A Book Like Foo: Powerful Book Recommendations.  (via)
• Smalltalk Zoo: Stories and simulations around the evolution of Smalltalk.  (via)
• Christmas Demos.
• Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM 5170 PC/AT, part 1 and part 2.
• New Montague Portal novel: “Drinking Heavy Water”.

Completed Tuesday, in an effort to reduce tab count in my browser.

• • A few tips about the command cd.
  • FOSS laptops and subpar displays.  Battery life is I think the hidden reason for this.
  • How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History.  “A century ago, nobody, not even a science fiction writer, predicted that someone would take a photo of a parking lot to remember where they’d left their car.”  (via)
  • Ideas Embodied in Metal: Babbage’s Engines Dismembered and Remembered.  Chunks of the Babbage Differential Engine still exist, from 120+ years ago.  So does Babbage’s brain, apparently.  (via)
  • DOOM via pregnancy test screen.  (via)
  • Vim as an IDE (VimConf 2020 Talk)  (via)
  • Starship, the cross-shell prompt.  (via)
  • “Damn your blood”: Swearing in early modern English.  (via)
  • Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?  A comic about public domain, of course free to download.  (via)
  • The Door Problem, or explaining what a game designer does.  (via)
  • moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.  (via)
  • Internet Ascendant, Part 1: Exponential Growth.  Everything in this series is pleasant to read.
  • Winamp Skin Museum.  (via)
  • Bullfrog after Populous.  Mentions underappreciated game Syndicate.
  • Walk Cycles.  (via)
  • The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday.  (via)

I went esoteric this week, and it was fun!

• 7 habits of effective text editing.  (video, via)
• My divergence from ‘proper’ Vim by not using and exploring features.
• 7 versatile Vim commands that are easy to memorize.  (via)
• Arwes: Futuristic Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk Graphical User Interface Framework for Web Apps.  It really is that.  (via)
• Asciimatics – create full-screen text UIs on any platform.  (via)
• How not to name variables.
• “Imperial is lit, but Metric is liter”…  Linked for the measurement graph.
• An archive of a different type.  I did not know this existed, but I hoped it existed, if that makes sense.(via)
• Kernel Mode Linux : Execute user processes in kernel mode.  Hey, remember Windows NT and how a video error could bring it all down?  (via)
• Model and Prototype of VMS Using the Mach 3.0 Kernel.  2 dead ends make a new dead end.  (PDF, via)
• High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure.  Free book.  (via)

Emacs and Vim content; I feel like I should always have one with the other.

• Tiny arcade stuffed in an NES controller.
• Text Radio: Realtime written interviews hosted in Google Docs.  (via)
• Making Emacs popular again.  (via)
• Termshark: a terminal UI for tshark, inspired by Wireshark.  (via)
• An emotional trip to the 80’s: Developing Games for the Speccy.  (via)
• The story behind Cryo and Westwood’s 16-bit Dune games.  There’s a lot of period-specific imagery in that link that’s fun to look at.  (via)
• Vim as a Markdown Editor.  (via)
• Film restored from 1888.  (via)
• Synth links at things magazine.
• I Turned a 1920’s Typewriter into an EDM Drum Machine.  (via)
• Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks.  (via)
• 90 Days With The Pinebook Pro.  (via)
• SSH Tunnel – Local, Remote and Dynamic Port Forwarding.  (via)
• We are complicit in our employer’s deeds.
• Text Adventures.  (via)
• Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases.  (via)
• Bug Stories.  (via)
• The case of the mysterious –help directory.
• Library JSON – A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads and
• Related: TRACKING READING.

I could not come up with a good roguelike link this week, but I am hitting many of my other usual targets.

• Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal.  Right up my alley.  (via)
• Clocking a 6502 to 15GHz (!).  Lode Runner would go too fast!
• Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim.  (via)
• John Conway died.  Known for Game of Life, but responsible for much, much more – read his published work.  (via)
• Related: Hackaday Game of Life projects.
• Smalltalk-80 on VAX/VMS.  (via)
• 3mux, terminal multiplexer inspired by i3.  I like the animated image; better than a thousand-word README.  (via)
• “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open.   MWL nonfiction, worth it.
• “git sync murder” status.  MWL fiction, also worth it.
• Tree diagrams in computer science and other fields.  Links for you to read, or to find books to read.
• The Hinman Collator, a mechanical version of diff(1).  (via)
• THE SECRET LIFE OF MACHINES: The Videos.  Cartoons!  (also via)
• Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, the paper version of Roam Research.  That is the sort of link pairing I love to do for Lazy Reading.
• In weird coincidence, here’s that word again: creating and linking zettelkasten notes in vim.
• Gnomes.  “Most everyone hates gnomes.”
• CommunityRule.  There’s a mapping here onto open source projects.