Category: Lazy Reading

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)

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.