Category: Lazy Reading

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.

Mini-theme: maintenance.

• Rethinking Repair.  (PDF, via)
• Maintenance and Care.  Same topic, but with interesting pictures.  (also via)
• Ise Jingu and the pyramid of enabling technologies.  About process knowledge.
• AnyDice, dice probability calculator.  (via)
• PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its.
• 50 Years of Text Games: Intermission.  A little behind-the-scenes.
• Ethernet network cables can go bad over time, with odd symptoms.
• The Age of Software: An introduction.
• New Old Game: Gravi-o-roids!
• Research First.
• Bonkers app compatibility work.  (via)
• DMGPlus.  Runs Doom?
• Hardware Memory Models.

Mini-theme: music.  Or at least, audio.

• A Definitive History of House.  (via)
• BBC Micro/Acorn Playback.  Audio tracks of cassette tape programs for that platform.  (also via)
• Sequencer64.  (via)
• d100 reasons your wizard had to drop out of academia.
• A Vim Guide For Veteran Users.
• Revisiting my emacs and Vim/nvi post.
• How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet.
• A Supercut of Supercuts.  Long but good.
• RGBFAQ.  How computer graphics has developed; recommended.
• Feed Us Weird Things: Artists On Their Favourite Squarepusher Music.
• Gaslighting Your Boss: Creative Experiments in Digital Sabotage.
• Those last 4 links: via.
• Drag and drop bashrc prompt generator.  (via)
• Web 1.1: Building The New Old Web.  (via)
• Big Blue’s big adventure [origins of the Thinkpad design].  (via)
• AT&T’s ’60s Modem That Won’t Die.  (via)
• The parallel universe of FireWire hubs.

There are some fun diversions this week.

• • Redux 001: BuzzPhrasing.
  • Modern Unix tools.  (via)
  • From the comments on the last source: xutil and Visidata.
  • PNG and JPG explainers.  (via)
  • Clearly a mini VT100 is required for a mini PDP-8.
  • A “life clock” that could outlive you thanks to solar power and e-ink.
  • Wrist mounted cyberdeck with expansion modules.  Really!
  • 50 Years of Text Games: 1994: The Playground and 1995: Patchwork Girl.
  • 100 walk cycles.
  • Adding a ChaCha Cipher to Precursor’s TRNG.  Followup.
  • URLs: It’s complicated…
  • ARTSEY, a one-hand keyboard.  (via)
  • Building telemetry for tea aka Tealemetry.  (also via)
  • Shaker Dice and Edge Labelings.   Oddest dice ever.

I am sorely tempted to buy one of those there Flippers.

• Internet Histories, Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2021.  (via)
• World’s first commercial flight simulator. (via)
• The Flipper Zero.  (via)
• The Age of Software: An Introduction.
• Monitoring the Health of Precursor’s TRNGs and Upgrading Precursor’s TRNG.
• Decoding the signal from 1988 Videophone.  (via)
• Basic Fantasy Role Playing Game. Not just talking about it, but you can download it.
• Science Fiction Novels for Economists.  (via several places)
• Hyperbolic Text.
• The Timeline of Information Technology.  (via)
• The Tyranny of Time.  Using a specific vocabulary, but good facts.  (via)
• Surprising shared word etymologies.  (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Chronicling Yautja’s Decade-Long Quest to Merge Sludge and Grindcore.

A short but oddball batch of links this week.

• Ambigram StyleGAN faces.  Somewhat disturbing but well explained.  (via)
• How Developers Choose Names.  (also via)
• Perl / Unix One-liner Cage Match, Part 1 and Part 2.  (via)
• rpg-cli: Your filesystem as a dungeon!  Did I link this already?  (via)
• Electric Ink Analysis.  Product review as category review.
• Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity & Origins.  Video.  (via)
• RetroForth investigation.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1992: Silverwolf.
• More 6502 Updates.
• Problems with video recreations of classic pinball.
• Gun book.  (via)
• Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the movie, which I am sure I have mentioned before.
• A New Session.  A telnet-only magazine.  (via)

 

Normally I’d throw this into the Lazy Reading section, but it’s happening Thursday and that would be too late: Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari (and Chuck E. Cheese) is doing a live Q&A Thursday in conjunction with ICHEG.

Oddball finds week.

• explain.dalibo.com, a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE explainer.  (via)
• Hifi Wasteland I: 100 Year Old Quick Silver Cloud, the sound of a vacuum tube decaying.
• Zosya, modern games for Spectrum ZX machines, I think?  (via)
• The different types of modern (2021) SSH keys (and some opinions).
• Related: Understanding OpenSSH’s various options around keys and key algorithms.
• Pinebook Pro review.
• Cracking a 35 year old Macintosh Game.  (via)
• Reviving a Dead Macintosh Classic, from the same place.
• System76 announced an open source mechanical keyboard “Launch”.  (via)
• The Graphics Gremlin: a Retro ISA Video Card.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1991: Trade Wars 2002.
• Handheld ePaper map.
• Roguelike Celebration 2021 open for submissions.

Your unrelated video of the week: “treat the human face like a graphic equaliser for breakbeat“.  Hypnotic.  (via)

This is a good link week; several deep dives.

• 50 Years of Text Games: 1990: LambdaMOO.  Still running!
• How to write release notes.
• Sharing Secrets.
• Designing Winterbloom’s Big Honking Button.  (via)
• Which leads me to Eurorack.
• Pinebook Pro first impressions.  (via)
• Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes.  (via)
• Associations: Penrose Tiling and toilet paper.
• Using Xterm to Navigate the Huge Color Space.  A deep dive.  (via)
• A Brief Introduction to Esoteric Languages.  Surely you know some of these by now?
• Why C is so influential.  Video.
• The blessing of the leading zero.
• SIGGRAPH 2021: Technical papers preview trailer.

 

 

Nostalgia mini-theme this week, or maybe “classical”?

• The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons.  Talking about Appendix N.  (via)
• tmp.out vol. 1.  Not a common sort of site nowadays.  (via)
• BASIC 10-liners for Atari.  Also no longer common.  (also via)
• Haiku activity report – March and April 2021.
• PalmOS on x86: API porting.  (via)
• Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh.  (via)
• Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster.  A good example of cost externalization.
• The fate of Imgur.
• The question of how to do non-annoying multi-factor authentication for SSH.  Not the answer, just the question.
• Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1987: Plundered Hearts.
• My Palm LiveDrive! and Palm LifeDrive in a Windows 2000 QEMU VM.

Fun reads, none too heavy.

• Colin’s Bear Animation, Revisited.
• Switched-On… hits and misses.  Also a meme, in vinyl.
• The Endless Acid Banger.  Makes me think of StarCon 2.  (via)
• Calendso, self-hosted Calendly alternative.  (via)
• Text Adventures: Past, Semiconditionally Modified Past, and Present.  (via)
• The Web Design Museum.  (via)
• Old Book Illustrations.  Exactly what it is titled.  (via)
• An Oral History of Street Fighter II.  (via)
• reHackable/awesome-reMarkable.  (via)
• The First PC to Die, Ever.   Player Character, 50 years ago. (via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2021 will be virtual.
• Yayagram.  (via)

 

Maybe hardware hacks is the sub-theme this week.

• Bluetooth, based on this guy.
• Walkie-talkies that work over IP but without a network.
• Yay!  Web Curios is back!
• Percy Ludgate talk, upcoming.
• WiFiStation: A WiFi interface for the Cidco MailStation.  Reliably bonkers.
• Palm PDA nostalgia on its way!
• What I learned of the VOIP hacker scene by setting up a SIP Honeypot.  Ongoing for years.  (via)
• Step Inside the Miniature Worlds of Tatsuya Tanaka.  (via)
• Squeezebox Keyboard.  Also bonkers.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1986: Uncle Roger.
• geminiquickst.art.  (via)
• Trying out learning more Vim on demand.
• The best version of the Unix Magic poster.  (via)