Category: Lazy Reading

Old-school week, at least more than normal.

• Principia Apocrypha: Principles of Old School RPGs.
• Now that computers have more than 4MB of memory, can we get seconds on the taskbar?
• Obsidian.md.  (via)
• waxy.org turns 20.
• MNT Reform, an ARM laptop with open hardware.  (via)
• Those HTML Attributes You Never Use.  (via)
• Minskytron Refurbished.
• Inside the Apple-1’s shift-register memory.  Photos!
• “Let’s go find out!“
• Dreamhold, an introduction to interactive fiction.  (via)
• The Early History of Smalltalk (1993).  The corporate shell of Xerox, where Smalltalk and PARC came from, is just a few miles from me.  (via)

 

The music edge cases story is great.

• Revisiting the INMOS Transputer.  (via)
• Replicate Filesystem with Rsync.
• Spammers in the Public Cloud, Protected by SPF.
• Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music.  (via)
• Tonight we’re gonna log on like it’s 1979 (Telenet, Dialcom and The Source).
• Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board.  Great photos.
• Six One Sentence Monsters and Six More One Sentence Monsters.
• A Web Around the World, Part 7: Computers On the Wire.  I may have missed some recent parts of this.
• Puzzle dossiers and boxes, 2022.
• Old School Essentials, classic D&D revisited.  (via)
• Tetrageddon.  (via)
• Library of Short Stories.  (also via)
• Storytelling.  Early sequential art.

 

A historical focus this week but then again that’s not uncommon.

• Great Moments in Taxonomy. Several links to follow.
• Team Tsathogga / City of Spires setting primer, for Severed Fane.
• Dungeons and Desktops, a history of computer RPGs.  (via)
• The Elusive Shift, early D&D from wargaming to roleplay.  (also via)
• Bent? is an alive, unstable Japanese noise box.  (via)
• Infinite Mac, an instant-booting Quadra in your browser.  I got system7.app to crash playing Marathon so that is accurate.
• Spacewar! is 60 Today!
• Why the fascination with retrocomputing?  (via)
• The Tao of Acme.  (via)
• Retro Lite CM4: a Compute Module 4 gaming console.  (via)
• Webinar –  Ethernet’s Emergence from Xerox PARC: 1975-1980.  These are not historians, but the actual people who created and implemented it.  (via)

I thought I was going to be short this week, and then started cleaning out old open browser tabs…

• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever used.
• Note taking in Emacs with howm.
• Eponymous Laws Part I: Laws of the Internet.  (via)
• TORI Nixie Calculator.  Every maker buzzword in a single product.
• Preserving more of the history of logic programming (especially source code).  (via)
• Related: softwarepreservation.org.
• Stevie Wonder and His Dream Machines.  Related to all the synth links I post.  (via)
• The Art of the For… Next Loop.  (via)
• TZDB and some challenges of long data.  (via)
• In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard – KickStarter Launch.
• Wi-Fi Memories.
• Lumon.
• Majestic Fantasy, old school D&D.
• Swords and Wizardry, same.
• WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment.  (via)
• cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display.  (via)

 

Mini-theme: 4-part writeups.

• Comas Channel.  Food manufacturing; somewhat hypnotic.  (via)
• Yocto boot2qt for the Seeed reTerminal (Qt 6).  (via)
• Electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos has a website.  (indirectly via)
• A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls.
• Recent narrative games: winter 2021 edition.
• [Review] Rackham Vale (and the Four Eras of OSR Publishing).  Linked for the indie RPG publishing history, which has mostly passed me by.
• 22 years of Emacs.  (via)
• SGI320/540 Visual Workstations.  An extremely specific site.  (via)
• Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal.  (via)
• The Cube Rule of Food Identification.  (via)
• Four Tiny Essays On SF/F.  (via)
• Hard Drive History.
• Mouse Museum.  (via)

If you were hoping for a mini-theme of synthesizers, you are in luck.

• Chonky Palmtop.
• What’s your favorite vim shortcut/hack
• My New Old Apple Macintosh SE/30 Computer.  (via)
• Emulating Vintage Mac Compilers.  (via)
• The problem of keeping track of hardlinks as you traverse a directory tree.  Linked cause this was a pain for HAMMER2, too.
• Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition).
• Becoming Universal: A New History of Modern Computing.  (via)
• The Sinclair QL.  (also via)
• The Casio QA-100, a simulated synth/sequencer.  (via)
• The Casio MT-40/MT-41 and sleng teng riddim, the start of dancehall.  (via)
• Original Jungle Samples.  (via)
• Making Portishead’s “Dummy”: The Production Experiments of a Trip-Hop Classic.  (via)
• An Improvement on the Pomodoro Technique.
• All desktop calculators are wrong, so I had to build my own.  (via)

This was done early; there’s been a lot of interesting reads on the feeds, so to speak.

• Ask Tilde: What small internet protocols do you like?
• 2022 IGF nominees: on history, intimate and/or personal, miscellaneous, fireworks.
• Animation Storage, animations from the 60s-70s.  (via)
• Aleister Crowley, sysadmin.
• A Web Around the World, Part 3: …Try, Try Again, and Part 4: From Telegraphy to Telephony.
• Year 2038 problem is still alive and well.  (via)
• Yarchive, a lot of archived USENET.  There are some gems in the computer section, like this.  (via)
• The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language.   Easier to debug, less memory control.  (PDF, via)
• The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB).
• Precursor: From Boot to Root.
• Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy.  (PDF, via)
• Ubuntu limits the console kernel log level even on servers.  I’d rather have noise than missing info.
• Refurb weekend: Texas Instruments Silent 700 Model 745 teletype.
• 50 Years of Text Games: HUTSPIEL and Dr. Dorothy Clark.

 

 

No mini-theme this week.

• lofi generator.  Pleasant, though it says something that it can be autogenerated.  (via)
• Animated Engines.  (also via)
• Real Spaceships.  Interesting but I can’t take a chonky shuttle seriously.  (via, via)
• Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint.  Not the book itself, but a list of the resources used for the book, all of which are useful.
• Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now.  (via)
• Reed-alert: five years later.
• Tedium on self-hosting / cloud service replacement.  A good article.
• Vintage Computer Festival East (NJ) is in-person, February 26th.
• Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported.  (via)
• SheepSforza: the SheepShaver Power Mac emulator for OpenPOWER.  (via)
• Ketchup mayo mustard.
• Manicules.
• The Influence of Roguelike Visuals.

Old hardware is the mini-theme.

• RAIN PSP, a homebrew 80s-style laptop.
• Cosmic Background Radiation Dice.  Of course a nixie display.
• The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2021.  (via)\
• ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories: Seeking Submissions and Pitches!  (via)
• Video game preservation  vs copyright.  I’m still not sure who owns Castle Wolfenstein.   (via)
• CR+LF has a long history.   (via)
• GitHub – ViolenceWorks/VT-69.  Possibly vapor but looks neat.  (via)
• PC booting from a vinyl record (turn volume down).  (via)
• DNSSEC Mastery, second edition, creeping out.
• My retrocomputer projects, Q1 2022.
• Epitaph to Laptops.

Mini-theme: music.

• Retrocomputing can be more than games.
• The PinePhone keyboard case.  PDA nostalgia.
• Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode.  Linked cause The Mythical Man-Month talks about the 360 and I never had a picture in my head to connect.
• The Whimsical Web.  (via)
• (Non-)Human, AI Reproducing Absence.
• Sendxmpp as a Replacement for Mail(1).  Odd but I can’t say why.  (via)
• The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back.  (via)
• Chuck Moore’s Creations (Forth and ColorForth).  (via)
• Writing better release notes.  Points 3, 5, and 6 are important.
• “A Political History of X” – Keith Packard (LCA 2020).  (via)
• Dialing Up.  All modem sounds.  (via)
• Track, a vector music visualizer.  (via)
• John Peel Roulette.  Eclectic forever.  (also via)

 

No theme; nicely eclectic.

• 3D-printable void switches.  Nicely documented.
• Successfully Crowdfunded Product Designs of 2021.  Interesting to see what makes it.  (via)
• Related: poke around core77.com for a bit.
• The 40 Greatest Synth Sounds of All Time.  Ugh, I linked to a listicle.
• A Web Around the World, Part 1: Signals Down a Wire and Part 2: If At First You Don’t Succeed…  Early, early telecoms.
• OpenQuest System Resource Document.  D100 gaming is a new term to me.  (via)
• 1977 computer office.  The rest of Watergate Living is entertaining, or awful depending on how you feel about the 1970s.  (via)
• The Making of Lode Runner.  (via)
• Bud Plant’s Incredible Catalog.  Anything able to survive Amazon’s impact has got to be good.
• Mycroft Mark II, a better choice than Alexa. (via)
• Processing: the Software that Shaped Creative Coding.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Tom Baker saying “bread”.  (via)

Mini-theme: computer error.

• Astronomy community shapes their own destiny with Astropy.
• Debugging behind the Iron Curtain.  (via)
• Reddit stories on crazy bugs.
• A History of Modern Computer Crashing.
• Subcutanean, a book that changes the story every time it’s printed.
• In practice, there are two types of window managers in modern X.
• Figuring out how Amiga 500 RAM expansion projects work.
• Working “Teeny-Tiny Turntable”.
• Sorta related: Is Old Music Killing New Music?
• 22 indie games to look forward to in 2022.  (via)
• prior-art-dept.: OWL Guide, early hypertext, and “replacing” the Web.

Your unrelated personal frustration of the week: Legacy G Suite will no longer be free.   I need to figure out a self hosting solution.

That BBS link is possibly going to eat a zillion hours of your life.  Fair warning.

• Programming in 1987 Versus Today.  (via)
• late 1980s Czech video games.  (via)
• The Best Comics of 2021.
• Cursed.  It gets worse the longer you look at it.
• Haiku Contract Report: December 2021.  Linked cause I am unsure if X11 compatibility is good or bad for an ecosystem.
• World’s First Single Chip Apple II Boots.  (via)
• Public libraries are better than Google.  Sounds reactionary, but I just realized my last 3 real work conundrums were solved by library books.  (via)
• BBSing in the Snow Is the Best Way to Login.
• which led me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
• CathodeTV, like time travel to late night US TV circa 1979.  (via)

Mini-theme this week: small hardware projects.

• Casio watch + ARM.
• RPG Maker: History & Games.  (via)
• Please don’t use Discord for FOSS projects.  Cause then someone else owns your conversation, and the conversation is part of the project.
• Welcoming Recorded Music to the Public Domain.
• TinyNES: An open hardware NES using the original 6502-derived chips.  It’s cute!  (via)
• Get Your Classic Macintosh Online & More! RaSCSI Review and Tutorial.  Also aggressively cute!  (via)
• 202?
• Open Source Security Process Wishlist.
• Stampadia, print and play roguelike.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2020: Scents & Semiosis.  This is the last game in the series, and here’s a post about what’s next.
• The Gift of It’s Your Problem Now.   I don’t agree with the political analogy, but there are good points.
• On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV.

I almost scheduled this post for 2021/01/02.

• Zolatron 64 – first PCBs.  I like that while the common market for processors is unfortunately only Intel or Apple, small-scale new platforms have become possible on a relatively trivial budget.  (via)
• Make ping audible.  Turn up the volume and you can tell when you plug in the correct cable in another room.
• Sustainable creativity in a world without copyright.  I am sympathetic but it confuses work-for-hire terms with copyright.
• Welcoming Recorded Music to the Public Domain.  Speaking of copyright…
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2019: A.I. Dungeon.  The penultimate chapter.
• Monitoring the vintage server room (and reverse-engineering USB sensors).  I need to set up some temperature sensors too.
• Embarrassing product names created: Windows CE.
• Introduction to the Sam Text Editor.  Your non-Emacs/non-vi link of the day.  (via)
• Software can just never be done it seems.
• mkrl/misbrands: The world’s most hated IT stickers.  The original misconception, 20 years old.  I hate this, I love this.  (via)
• A followup:  I went back to the Ether device I linked a few weeks ago; it seems worth buying just because it’s so different.  Following links to stores that sell it took me down a rabbit hole of analog interfaces on audio equipment.  Note that every store “sells” with a shot of the dials, cause it’s so fun to see.

I am definitely doing very much nothing today.

• Bandcamp: The Chaos Bazaar.  Very in-depth analysis of the different business models between Bandcamp and Spotify.  Also: Bandcamp may be the biggest physical music media seller in the world?  (via)
• Searzall Pro.  I have the original and it works great, so here’s your chance to get a rather unique device.  The creators have a podcast which I enjoy in part because unlike many podcasts they talk fast enough.
• 34 at 34 for v5.34: Modern Perl features for Perl’s birthday.  (via)
• The Raspberry Pi 400 as a couch game machine.  Have I linked to that hardware before?
• ElitePetite.
• A followup on the open source creators photos I think I linked to at some point.
• Zala Vacha.
• thewebisfucked.com.  (via)
• Scoundrel of the Year.  It’s the lack of imagination that bothers me.  (via many places)
• Summary of “Unix Administration Horror Stories” thread.  (via)
• Might and Magic, a history.
• NextSpace: NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux.  (via)
• GameDev News for 15 December 2021.  Linked for the links; lots to read from there.

Your unrelated music for the week: The Best Beat Tapes of 2021.

Guess which link this week is a business decision I am maybe considering…

• Weird: Generative art in Common Lisp.  More here from comments at source link.
• Print-your-own chocolate molds.
• All Sound Recordings Prior to 1923 Will Enter the US Public Domain in 2022.
• Related: An advent calendar of works becoming public domain in 2022.
• A list of links about fakery.
• In Praise of Glitches.  I feel …nostalgic? about uuencoding errors in rebuilt images.
• 50 years of Text Games: 2018: Weyrwood.
• Parceiro: An Extraordinary Upgrade for Amiga 1000 Users.
• Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain.

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)