Category: Lazy Reading

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)

Some nice in-depth reading awaits you below.

• Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup.  A filtered list rather than a Github document, finally.  (via)
• The Magician’s Library.  (via)
• The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme.  Many of these links I’ve had previously – or wish I had.  This will eat some hours.  (via many places)
• IF talks at Flights of Foundry, happening now.
• The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike.  (via)
• Wendy Carlos demonstrates her Moog Synthesizer in 1970.  Linked for the lesson and for just looking at the equipment.  (via)
• Related: The 40 greatest synth sounds of all time, No 40: Wendy Carlos – A Clockwork Orange.  Kinda hard to see the rest of the series, but interesting to see what a synth lesson looks like now: screenshots.  (via)
• The Overedge Catalog: New Types of Research Organizations.
• Mac Chimes of Death.  The car crash was a crowd-pleaser.  (via)
• Everything VPN Is New Again.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1985: A Mind Forever Voyaging.

I lost the origin of some of these links this week; too many tabs open.  Sorry!

• Moog System 55, so many analog controls!  (via)
• Mike Beauchamp Projects.  I like the clock.  (via)
• Shrink, Reduce, and Implode: The Legacy Zip Compression Methods.  (via)
• The complete guide for open sourcing video games.
• A Gemini (and Atom and RSS) feed reader.
• Golem and My Other Seven Computer-Generated Books in Print.
• Don’t End The Week With Nothing.
• Anarchism in Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy.
• Equa! by James Chip.  Tabletop RPG as a set of equations.  This will scratch someone’s very particular itch.  (via)
• Recognizing and rectifying your mistakes as an engineering leader.  If you aren’t too sick of talking heads.
• Designing calculator apps.
• Internet routing can now vary based on things you wouldn’t expect, or ports matter for routing, not just destination.
• Different views of what are basic and advanced Vim features.  A questions for every time I link a Vim tutorial.
• Is the Psion 5 still usable in 2017?  (video, via)
• Turn your iPhone into a 90s pocket organiser.  (also via)
• Hacker Simulator.

Your unrelated music of the week: The Best Beat Tapes on Bandcamp: March 2021.

No theme this week cause I really did touch all the themes.

• The Smallest Keyboard.  to smol
• About Deformin’ In The Rain.
• Spaceship builder.  (via)
• Saying goodbye to my Commodore 64.  Linked cause of the hardware mods.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1981: His Majesty’s Ship “Impetuous” and 1982: The Hobbit.  I never encountered these games, but they are better than I would have expected for the time.
• Diagrams for Penrose Tiles.  (via)
• When you have too much memory for SheepShaver.
• Cursed Keyboard Image.
• System Shock, a deep dive.
• Phonoptic Readers, pattern-based optical sounds.
• Souped-Up Gopher.  (via)
• Dungeons and Directories.  (via)

Mini theme this week: sound.

• Leave it to the phone companies to make simple ideas complex.
• Mini weather station with e-ink display.   A good use case.
• The Data Sonification Archive.  Data represented by sound.
• BOTTLED AUTHORS: The predigital dream of the audiobook.
• The Pixel Vision 8, for 8-bit games.
• Loop Hero, a roguelike where you build the map too?  (via)
• Kepler was once so wrong that he was right.
• List of split keyboards.  (via) 
• Resurrecting Fortran.  (via)
• The first(?) negative leap second might come in 2031.
• The Emoji That Nearly Weren’t.  (via)
• Remember optical disk caddies?  Ugh.
• How to Think Bayes.  This underpins what most people call “AI”.
• Rebuilding James Bond’s Apple IIc – A Software Forgery.  (via)
• Newsreader, free font for longer-form reading.  (via)

Double links is the sub-theme today.

• PLATO Adventure (1979).  Adventure/Zork was everywhere.
• Plus an incomplete guide.
• Wing Commander III.  The graphics have aged remarkably well.
• Lotus 1-2-3 at arbitrary terminal sizes.  (via)
• Similar: Troubleshooting my Commodore 128’s 80-column mode, part one.
• Trainspotting, A story of trains, computers, and two images.  (also via)
• And then: Mystery Solved.
• Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life.  (via)
• My Life in E-ink.  (via)
• Oh, the intellectual property rights you’ll extend.  Copyright and the problems that come with its overextension.  (via)
• Sorta related: Internet Archive Infrastructure, a video.  (via)
• A Vim Guide for Advanced Users.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1980: MUD.  Oh, it’s getting good.
• Over the weekend: Commodore 128DCR keyboard extension, updates to Be-Power.  Linked to remind me to find a gopher client.
• TEXT ADVENTURES.  A description of Twine.  (via)

 

Long shot question: Are any of you in France and able to get this chocolate mold directly at a lower price?  Valrhona doesn’t sell square molds into the US market.

• Just one more turn: Dragon’s Lair. A quarter eater, as I called it when that mattered.
• Laura Jedeed Uses This. Not your normal tech equipment descriptions.
• Split Keyboards Gallery. (via)
• Troubleshooting a Commodore 1541 disk drive.
• Retr0brighting my Commodore 128 keyboard.
• Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller. Linked for pictures as usual.
• Electronic Plastic, electronic games. (via)
• Link: Taking This Serially and also What signal a RJ-45 serial connection is (probably) missing.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1979: The Cave of Time.
• In Defense of Interactive Graphics. (via)
• XScreenSaver version 6 beta 2. Eh, also a BSD link.
• The Sound of Fractals & Photographs. Not an article about it, but actually the sound. (video, via)
• Mixdown’s Greatest Drum Machines Of All Time: Part One. There’s more past that. (via)