Category: Lazy Reading

There are some stealth links here to much more reading, if you look carefully.

• mepo, Open Street Map data app.  I didn’t think something like OSM could be built collectively but I am glad to be wrong.  (via)
• I will pay you cash to delete your npm module.
• What is not portable.
• IBM 5110 Emulator.  IBM’s first “portable”.  (also via)
• Orgdown – a New Lightweight Markup Standard for Text Documents.  I just like the portmanteau.  (via)
• Jumping in at the Deep End – On Starting Reading a Series Halfway Through.  I did this for Finder, and I think it was more enjoyable for me.
• Johnny Decimal.  Not a bad idea.  (via)
• Every business process secretly wants to fail.
• IFComp 2021 Results.
• Human Non-Universals, or: Make Your Own Vancian Culture ™.  Makes more sense if you’ve read Jack Vance.  Which you should, he’s in Appendix N.
• The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again.  (via)
• A good gift guide.  Remember my perpetual suggestions too.

No mini-theme this week.

• Cracking the Adventure Time Cipher.  (via)
• The Tildeverse Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup server is fixed.  There’s a tilde DCSS server?
• I Have No TV.  Gobs of documentaries.  (via)
• Concert Roulette.  (also via)
• Building WireGate: A WireGuard front to detect compromised keys.  (via)
• T700 Crowdfunding.  More Thinkpad life extension.  (via)
• Tiny Emus.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2013: A Family Supper and 2014: 80 Days.
• Homebrew Game Characteristics.
• Plain Text Project Tools Roundup November 17, 2021.
• One of these JPEGs is not like the other.
• Pirijan Uses This.  A different style UT answer than I’ve seen before.
• Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit.  (video, via)
• Cambridge, another falling-blocks game.  Check the Other Notable Games links at the end. (via)

This is a good mix this week.

• Can Data Die?  Tracking the Lenna Image.  I’ve linked to other stories about this image before.  (lost the source link, sorry)
• A Close Look at a Spinlock.
• The Monstrosity Email Has Become.  (via)
• FURBY MODULE – A Synthesizer Module That Houses A Furby.  The synth itself is worth a look.  (via)
• The inside story of the outside investigation of SoftRAM 95.
• Oh, great, there’s a year 2028 problem too.  (via)
• The history of writing in 1.5 hours.
• Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations.
• Faces of Open Source.  Doug McIlroy looks like Otto Mentalis from Psychonauts 2.  Coincidence?  (via)
• Fermentabot 1.0 and a data-collecting version.
• New Brothers Quay film on the way.  (via)
• Tindie, a maker market site.  Interesting niche products.  Found via this story.

No minitheme this week.

• userland: a book about the command line for humans.  Indirectly, a description of how flexible a shell really is.  (via)
• More x220 hacking.  It is of course less useful over time.  (both via)
• Modifying my Gaggia Classic Espresso machine.  Simple upgrades help too.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2012: Howling Dogs.  Porpentine!
• Companies and their stewardship of open source projects.
• Your SMART drive database of attribute meanings needs regular updates.
• Kino Cult.  Good films and BADFILMS.  (via)
• AI Weirdness, oddball AI results.  (via, via)
• Floppy emulators.  More used than you may realize.  (via)
• Software Folklore.  I’ve linked to some of these stories before.  (via)
• Obsessive keyboard building.  Sorry, it’s a Twitter thread.  (via)
• Forgotten Image Formats.

I need a D&D tag.

• The World of Outdoor Survival.  A reconstruction of the original D&D environment.  (via)
• Speaking of the original D&D…  (via)
• How X Window Managers Work, And How To Write One (Part I).  (via)
• Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator.  (via)
• ClockWork DevTerm.  For portable Dwarf Fortress.  (via)
• PowerPC notebook Prototypes Updates and next Talks – October 2021.  (via)
• Cosmic Conquest (1982) – A resurrection of a realtime strategy game written in Forth.  (via)
• How brutalist design is taking over the internet.  (via)
• Better Perl: Four list processing best practices with map, grep, and more.  (via)
• I am ambivalent about this joke/keyboard.  (via)
• TinkerDifferent.  (via)

Spooky Reading!

• Empowering People … and Their Things.
• Stillfleet, a tabletop game with space hulks.  Not Space Hulk, though.  The character generator is fun.  (via)
• The slab and the permacomputer.
• We were the unpaid janitors of a bloated tech monopoly.
• Casio IRC.  (via)
• Vintage computer pictures.  (also via)
• You use more open source software than you think.
• To Boldly Go Where No Internet Protocol Has Gone Before.  Of course Vint Cerf dresses that well, and here’s the poster he’s holding.  (via)
• Repetition, In Four Parts.  Linked cause of the regex explanation.
• The First Modern Drum Machine.  (via)
• Juncture, for visual essays.  Created originally to talk about plants, of all things.  (via)
• 50 Watts, and 50 Watt Books.  (via)
• The ENIAC Monte Carlo program from 1947 on a poster.  The first stored instruction program ever.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2011: Nested.
• Space probe software bug.  17 years to Y2038.
• Skip songs by looking.

Your unrelated music of the week: OV / ER / LO / AD from the Kleptones.  The last two are linked but not yet released, so if they don’t work yet, come back in a week.

All over the place this week.

• Arthur-PC – a HD64180 based computer.  Hardcore.
• ADOBE SUCKS (SCROTUM).  Adobe product alternatives.  Bookmark it cause you won’t remember the URL and searching for the phrase… Well, guess. (via)
• 8BIT, a documentary.  (via)
• Useful Unknown Websites, Reddit, and Useful Unknown Websites, MetaFilter.  (partially via)
• SheepFilms.  (via)
• L0phtCrack.  A name from the past.   (via)
• The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated.  (via)
• Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh.  (via)
• Tune Tracker Command Center.  Haiku under the hood.  (via)
• Hypertext tools from the 80s.  Good followup links at the end too.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2010: Digital: A Love Story.
• “unexpected hunter activity“
• What we can learn from “_why”, the long lost open source developer.
• ScummVM is 20, and I don’t even know all the games it supports.  (via)

Mini-theme: old hardware or new terminals, you pick.

• Tim Van Damme Uses This.  More detail on keyboard setup than I expected.
• The 100 MHz 6502.  (via)
• Mac SE/30 odyssey.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 6.02 out now.
• Writing a simple arcade game in Lisp.  (via)
• Warp Terminal Emulator Review.  Linked mostly to show how the shell/terminal is still evolving.  (via)
• The Return of the Unix Shell.  Related to previous idea.  (via)
• The Insane Innovation of TI Calculator Hobbyists.  (via)
• Vim Anti-Patterns That Cause Beginners to :Quit.  (via)
• Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 1.3 released.  Mostly linked for the name.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2008: Violet and 2009: Fallen London.

This is a good week for variety.

• The original Utah Teapot, which you’ve surely seen.
• Myst (2020).  I forget that the original was Hypercard.
• A plenitude of alchemical domains.  Linked for flowcharts.
• Log, a robotic abacus of life.
• Bespoke Synth.  (via)
• Vintage Ad Browser and Cover Browser.  (via)
• No one can be told what the cookie policy is. You have to see it for yourself.
• Ten Days of Steve Ditko.  (via)
• Rewilding Your Attention.  Of course I agree.  (via)
• The 31st First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony.
• How to write a text editor for a 31 year old computer.  (via)
• The code worked differently when the moon was full.  (via)
• musikcube, a terminal music player and library manager.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2006: Dwarf Fortress.  Yes.

I am still not catching up to my RSS feeds but that’s OK, still plenty to read.

• Neglected Books.  Fun for the covers, never mind the books.  (via)
• 1950s Bakelite Podcast Player.  I always liked this concept, whatever the shell.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2004: The Fire Tower and 2005: Shades of Doom.  Yes, that second one is exactly what you suspect.
• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating an EPUB with Pandoc.
• Land of Lisp’s Orc Battle, ported to Forth.  (via)
• 1980s computer controls GRPS heat and AC.  (via)
• How to sneak the Windows 95 credits screen into the build without anybody noticing.
• The Incredible KIMplement 0.2b: a KIM-1 emulator for the Commodore 64 (and the Superkim).
• visurf, a web browser based on NetSurf.
• The script kiddies have come to Gemini.
• How to fix hiring?

Classic Lazy Reading weirdness.

• Can the Subaltern Speak?, radical augmented gaze.  Not really augmented but definitely aesthetic.
• The System Reference Document for D&D, I think version 3.5?  Here’s v5 which might be better.
• More Tomy Tutor homebrew.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2003: The Kingdom of Loathing.
• A visualization of the logos of 5,837 metal bands, grouped by theme, similarity, font, and “13 Dimensions of Doom”.
• SIGCIS 2021 is coming up and is entirely online.
• Spine Desk Lamp.  Could be real if you wanted.
• Game of Life patterns.  (via)
• Three Wifi meters.
• “the most consequential figures in the tech world…”  (via)
• Suzanne Ciani Creates The Soundtrack For A Pinball Machine.  (via)
• Barnsworthburning, a directory.

Your unrelated music link for the week: The Bug – Skeng.  I’ve heard this a million times, but never the whole thing until now.

There’s a toy/game mini-theme this week.

• Optimizing the Nethack 4.3 Save System.  (via)
• Plua revisited: Lua for PalmOS (and resurrecting plua2c).  Niche but neat.
• The Commodore Plus/4, 3-Plus-1 and computer literacy.
• Being sure about things.
• Venn diagrams and humor.
• “The Good Games“, a playlist showing influential 1980s games.  I’ve played almost every one, and the mechanisms hold up today.  (Thanks, Sasha)
• The Dance Music Archive.  If you were at a particular age at a particular place, you will like this.  I was neither but it’s still fun.  (via)
• Systems Thinking.  (via)
• TZExplorer, for exploring the time zone file.  (via)
• Raspberry Pi glasses and Sidekick.
• All the computer history and science books you should read.
• Herbie Hancock demonstrates a synthesizer on Sesame Street in 1983.  (via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2021 – the speakers.  Tickets available.
• Remaking Vintage Computer Toys.

Somehow I still have 20 tabs open…  I need to clean out harder.

• A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN.  (via)
• Building a random Aeropress recipe generator for my search engine.
• 20 Years of Haiku.  (via)
• MAD GOD.
• The IBM 1401 datacenter simulator – experience 1960’s mainframe programming.  (via)
• The Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Challenge Rating system is deranged.
• My sleeper PC… curse!
• It’s Time to Retire the CSV.  (via)
• A 6 byte Commodore 64 Demo and C64 Coding Under (Many) Constraints.
• Living the Beta Life.
• The xterm terminal emulator can do a lot more than just display text.
• Learning that Vim has insert mode keystrokes that do special things.
• Vieb – Vim bindings for the web by design.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2001: The Beast and 2002: Screen.

A BSD followup: today’s SEMIBUG presentation from Peter Hansteen is at this Jitsi link, in about 5 hours from this post.

• Comics Laureate Recommended Reading List.  (via)
• The truth about semver.
• Undead Dinosaur Generator.
• atari64: Commodore 64 OS running on Atari 8-bit hardware.  (via)
• Announcing RetroChallenge 2021/10.  (via)
• TLDs — Putting the ‘.fun’ in the top of the DNS.
• Cracking into the Sun Ray General Dynamics-Tadpole M1400.  Odd hardware, though not the oddest Tadpole made.
• Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance.  I am not sure but it seems like Facebook reinvented a wheel.  (via)
• ZIL tidbits and Inform 6 dev news.
• “the only planet where 100% of Linux systems have working sound is Mars.“
• This Clifford Stoll interview made me realize he’s the author of The Cuckoo’s Egg, a good book about Cold War hacking, and the creator of ACME Klein Bottles.  I’ve mentioned both before separately without connecting the dots.  (via)
• Trevor Owens Uses This.  The first ever Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress.
• Minimal Computing, via the previous link.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 2000: Galatea.
• Introducing the PineNote.  (via)

Mini-theme: C64, I guess?

• The Rise of the Small Internet.  Gopher and Gemini.  (via)
• The Old Computer Challenge: Start, Day 1, Day 3, Day 6, Day 7, and conclusion.
• Personal Computing On An Amiga In 2021.  Another person taking up the challenge.  (via)
• Related: Commodore 64 “Mod of the Year” (2015).  (via)
• The Tao of Unicode Sparklines.  Someday I will find the right use case for these.  (via)
• The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy.  (via)
• Empty npm package ‘-‘ has over 700,000 downloads.  (via)
• the alternative limb project.  (via)
• 700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built.  (via)
• From previous source comments: emergent effects in complex game systems and also Dwarf Fortress Bugs.
• Daicon IV Opening Animation.  From 1983 with copyright violations galore.  (via)
• Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal.  (via)
• A Tour of the Fuchsia Operating System.  (via)

Physical parts and their history is the mini-theme.

• The earth is speeding up recently.  Literally, 2028 may  be less than a year long.
• Sam and Max Hit the Road, an in-depth history.  The original 1990s comics origin is noteworthy.  (reminded via)
• hi analysis.
• Amazon + Kindle means less books for all of us.
• AIRAMP: Bringing Winamp Into The Real World!
• LED Pocketwatch.
• Ways of reading without the influence of community.
• Signal Boost Bots And Manipulated Trending Content (about halfway down the page.  Spam mechanisms as involuntary attention-boosters.
• History of the Kensington security slot.  Chances are you are sitting about 2 feet away from one right now.
• How the IBM PC won then lost the personal computer market.  (via)
• Why and How you should start using Onion Networking.  (via)
• “Paleo PNGs”.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1998: Photopia and 1999: King of Dragon Pass.
• A 5,400 character typewriter.  Pre-Unicode, obviously.  Check the source link for some neat historic pictures on other topics.

Your unrelated music of the week: Jalang.

Mini-theme, barely: music.

• The Framework Laptop,   Customizable parts, and pick-your-own ports.  (via pikrzyszt on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Plaintext Distro.  As in Distributor of zines.  (via)
• Decoded: OpenTTD.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1997: Achaea.  I never heard of this but it’s huge in scope.
• Playdate reviews.  Quirky is not the right word but I want to say it.
• The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station.  (via)
• Never Enough Rhodes.  (via)
• The Tyranny of Spreadsheets.  (via)
• Are we really engineers?, We are not special, and What engineering can teach (and learn) from us.  A series of essays on software engineering.
• The DesQtop.  (via)
• A collection of the worst volume control UIs.  (via)
• Hot failover after 3 decades in space.  (via)
• The best antivirus joke.  (via)
• The best Wolfram Alpha joke.  (also via)
• EXTREME RECORD COLLECTING: CONFESSIONS OF AN ANALOG VINYL SNOB.  I hate to admit it but I have experienced this with first-generation analog recordings vs hearing their later digital versions. (via)

No mini-theme this week.

• This bizarre bit of merchandise is a visible sign: shirts are being autoproduced with robots and text recognition these days.
• Using Keybow to build custom keyboard functions.
• PiStorm – Keeping the Amiga alive.  An emulated hardware CPU.  I struggle to describe this; it’s blurring the line between hardware and software.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1996: So Far.
• The Print Shop Club.  Probably of interest if you actually used the original software.  (via)
• Embedded soap usage transmitters.  Interesting for the conditions – no power, lots of moisture.  Also oddly orwellian.  (via)
• The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp.  (via)
• Anatomy of the EICAR Antivirus Test File.
• A History of Regular Expressions and Artificial Intelligence.  No, wait, this is interesting.  Come back!
• Fontshare.  Free fonts that don’t suck.  (via)
• Connecting a Real IBM 3270 Terminal to an Emulated Mainframe with OEC.  (via)
• SQL LIMIT versus FETCH FIRST ROWS.  I did not know this.
• Simple scripts I made over time.  I like the latency meter.
• Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator.  In-depth.

The one good use of social media: jokes on an obscure theme.  (via)

RPG subtheme this week.

• MICROS~1 launches automated license-laundering system.  Incendiary.
• The Internet Is Rotting.  (via)
• Architecture of LISP Machines.  (via)
• The Thermal Printer Project: How I Print Events.
• Probably Bad RPG ideas.  (via)
• Full Throttle, a deep dive into the Lucasfilm game.
• 808 Cube.  (via)
• The Greatest Regex Trick Ever.  (via)
• Vim is actually worth it.  (via)
• Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and some tips and tricks.  (via)
• Uxn is a portable 8-bit virtual computer.  Specifically designed to survive platform death, which is a new idea to me.  (via)
• Entish is a declarative Datalog-like language implemented in Typescript.  Language and RPGs, truly together at last.  (via)
• Food for thought concerning MegaDungeons.
• The tiny gang of web outfits that don’t compete on their spying abilities.  Bookmark these.