Category: Books

This is another one of those ‘wide variety’ weeks, so settle in; I am confident at least one of these links will grab you.

• ASCII: A Love Letter.  (via)
• Leveling Up.  There’s a book offer there.
• The Inside Story of Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor.  Written by one of the people involved.  (via)
• A survey of CPU caches.  (via)
• Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform.  (via)
• Vim after 15 Years.  (via)
• MNT Reform: DIY portable computer.  (via)
• Show HN: Vixl44 – Create pixel art inside your terminal using vim movements.  (via)
• Mastodon 2.0.  (via)
• F-Droid 1.0 released. (via)
• Screen Savers.  Screen savers are arguably unnecessary at this point, so they have become a sort of art form, separated from their original utility.  I like that.  (via)
• A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986.  (via)
• The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and rewriting a running GUI.  Read the comments.  (via)
• Alan Kay Demos the Original, PARC GUI from Rescued Disc.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Lynda Barry is the funk queen of the galaxy, a fantastic cartoonist, and now the best ever advice columnist.

I am all over this week.

• On Being Operationally Incompetent.  Harsh but true.  (via)
• Floating Point Visually Explained.  (via)
• Unapplied Linguistics.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics).  A free economics textbook, which I find oddly interesting both for the topic and because it’s a specific effort to produce a freely available comprehensive textbook.
• A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author.  (via)
• The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress.  Miiiight be able to run a BSD.  (via)
• The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981.  (via)
• Practical Self-Defense against the Scourge of Dot-Files.
• Computer – Journal of the IEEE Computer Society. Circa 1970s.
• Retro ThinkPad announcement.

This wrote itself a week ago.

• More dialing, more weirdness.
• The Internet On Dead Trees.  I remember a number of these products.
• If you’d like to pay too much for ancient Radio Shack electronics, now’s your chance!  (via)
• books chapter two, a followup to books chapter one which I thought I had linked before, but maybe not.  Anyway, the same numeric chapter from a number of text books, described.
• And I delayed long enough to add books chapter three.
• The Internet Phone.  Most inconvenient way to browse the Internet ever?  (via)
• Stopping the Internet of Noise.  RSS still works, and works well!  (via)
• Urban and suburban camouflage.
• Trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor.  (via)
• Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself. (via)
• Bashfill – art for your terminal.  (via)
• Skip grep, use awk.  (via)
• The origin of HTTP POST explained in a dinosaur comic.
• Not-butters.  (sorta via)
• IFComp 2017 is open.
• Get My Books Cheap.  Not me, Michael W. Lucas’s books – his fiction work, along with a number of other authors.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Animated Short Films.  An animator’s favorites, if the above list of links hasn’t kept you busy enough..

Accidental topic this week: text interfaces!

• PuTTY 0.69 has been released.  (via)
• Made by the same author: Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection.  Like Minesweeper times one thousand.  (via)
• Random ASCII spaceship generator.
• Telnet MapSCII.
• terminal emulators’ processing of escape sequences.  I’ve Ctrl-S’d myself a few times, I’ll admit.  (via)
• ZX Spectrum Next.  Actually contains a ZX chip.  (via)
• BSD author Michael W. Lucas is having a flash sale on his fiction.  It may be over by the time you read this.
• The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software.  A podcast episode, with some speakers I really like.  (via)
• Securing Telnet with SSL.  (via)
• Apple ][ clone and lawsuit history, some of which is new to me.

Your unrelated video of the week: DOUBLE KING.  (via multiple places)