Category: BSD

This week, extended commentary on the links.

• Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links.  “Even today, thirty years after Jerry and David, I still visit bookmarked webpages that maintain human-curated lists of links.”  You can guess my opinion of that.
• Higher Intellect, a huge repository of documents of the sort you’d find squirreled away on the Internet in the late 90’s.  There’s a PHRACK section, for instance, or nice copies of US WW2 posters..  (via)
• Defeating Mouse Lint.  Mechanical mice only existed for a specific period in time, and probably never will again.
• The Tomb of Horrors.  I had heard of this ‘impossible’ D&D module but never actually tried it.
• how-to.computer.  This is the 2020s versions of old homesteading guides.  Can you self-host too much?  I think not.  (via)
• LaTeX for Complete Novices.  Nobody ever seems excited about LaTeX but people always report “I did a ton of work with it without issue”.  (via)
• The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing.  There’s some great quotable bits in this but my favorite is “The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. “
• The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder.  Even if it was a blunder, the effects would have been limited by the lack of consumer Internet.  (via)
• LibreOffice Substitutes.  Something here to try for everyone.
• Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet.  I haven’t read it yet, but I find the idea of software platforms that doesn’t exist to disintermediate users and extract revenue intriguing.
• Two important things: the longest domain name I’ve seen yet, and the Kickstarter for Run Your Own Mailserver, an important technical book and also because SMTP is becoming hard to do at any scale other than “huge”.   (via)
• I signed up for the aforementioned Kickstarter as should you; note there’s a Signed Useless EBook edition.  Don’t buy it, just be entertained by the concept.