Category: Lazy Reading

Hardware is the mini-theme this week, I think.

• Open source job with a cool title: Director Of Product, Disinformation at Wikimedia.
• Boring title but huge impact: Software engineer for BIND 9.
• Elite – the annotated source.  Quite readable, even if you don’t know assembly.  (via)
• Glitch techniques.  (via)
• Hacking a gopher client into the Alpha Micro.  I don’t even recognize the computer!  (via)
• Built To Last.  A story about COBOL.  (via)
• ScummVm now runs Colossal Cave Adventure.  (via)
• Open@RIT.  There’s a name you should recognize on the advisory board.
• David Fletcher’s photogrammetry models of London.  (via)
• Playing chess by email.  Used to happen by snail mail!
• Guided Tour of the Precursor Motherboard.  Followup from last week.  It has a self-destruct mode – seriously!
• How to multiply currents: Inside a counterfeit analog multiplier.  Linked for the cool analog computer picture.
• Roguelike Celebration T-shirts.
• Admiral Grace Hopper also drew.  (via)

More in-depth reads this week.

• Introducing Precursor.  This is neat.
• The unrealized potential of federation.
• 250M hard drive, 1979.
• X-COM, an in-depth history.
• Bergling’s Art Alphabets.
• The 20 greatest home computers – ranked!  Your opinion on this is probably already set.  (via)
• Software, maintenance, and me.
• Computer graphics circa 1981, a film.  (via)
• “I’ve narrowed down my open application list, and only half are editors!“
• The mystery of the malformed command-line flags.
• Behind the Scenes Footage of Mortal Kombat.  Nostalgia factor for some readers, I bet.
• Oleg Dolya Uses This.  Linked cause I didn’t realize the person behind Medieval Fantasy City Generator  and Pixel Dungeon was the same guy.
• Vintage Is The New Old.  New things for old computers.  I love the concentrated markets for very specific generations of hardware.  (via)

Your unrelated musical link of the week: The best Electronic music on Bandcamp, August 2020.

A bit of this is overflow from last week.

• RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users.  (via)
• Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner.  (via)
• Spacewar! vs Spacewar.
• FVWM3 1.0 is released.  (via)
• Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters.  (via)
• Talking about an open book protocol.
• A collection of imaginary software.  (via)
• High Score: Retro Video Game Sound Generator.  (via)
• Skeletons in the closet. I grew up running through the back rooms of this museum; I have a good story about smashing into the Triceratops pictured on this page.  (via)
• I’m now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows).
• Recent additions to my Infocom collection.
• We need physical audio kill switches.
• Writing system software: code comments.  More in-depth analysis of just comments than you may ever have seen.  (via)

No mini-theme; I’m balanced!

• The Selectric Typewriter.  Belongs to a very specific time.  (via)
• DIY Single-Chip 2D Retro Game Console.  The controller is the console.  (via) 
• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats 2020 Q2.  (via)
• Vim-like Layer for Xorg and Wayland.  (via)
• EmacsConf 2020 Call for Proposals.  Balanced coverage.  (via)
• Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches.  (via)
• Brothers Quay Day.  (via)
• ROBLOX is a MUD: The history of virtual worlds, MUDs & MMORPGs.  (via)
• The Golden Age of computer user groups.  (via)
• A nuclear powered laser to melt a tunnel from NYC to London, a serious proposal.  (via)
• Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-ons?  (via)
• Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e.  D&D. (via)
• Chairigami, all-cardboard furniture.  Not the first time I have seen this idea, but well-implemented.  (also via)
• Mixed-radix fractions in Bengali.
• Embrace, extend, and finally extinguish – Microsoft plays their hand.  AKA, use sourcehut over github.
• OSDI goes annual.  Yes, there’s that much operating system research happening after decades.  That makes me happy.
• The first 4 hours of MTV.  Argh nostalgia for a better and worse time.  (via)

No accidental theme this week.

• Princess Bride + Oracle.  You will laugh if you recognize all the components.
• The Infinity Modules Player: Never Turn Off Your Amiga Again.
• aboutfeeds.com.  (via, via)
• Inside a counterfeit 8086 processor.  I’ve seen faked capacitors, too.
• Best “Business-Grade” Laptop.
• In search of the perfect pocket device.  (via)
• ‘use this power wisely’: Big list of http static server one-liners.  (via)
• Donald Knuth’s email regime.  (via)
• Dependency.
• MacSnap RAM Upgrade for Macintosh 512Ke.
• Tech hardware fails, as written in 2012.
• How Game Titles Work.
• Donglevision.

Unofficial theme this week is open source project contribution.

• The UX of LEGO Interface Panels.  Far more in-depth than you may expect.  (via)
• Online text to diagram tools.  More comprehensive than you may expect.  (via)
• tech brain.  (via)
• Embrace the Complexity, related to the previous link.  (via)
• “Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.”  (via)
• I want to contribute to your project, how do I start?
• The Sifter, a searchable database of historical cookbooks.  Huge in scope and not designed to extract money; very different from many projects today.  (via)
• Mumford’s treasure map.  Math via squiggles.  (via)
• Random Coinage Generator, and a d100 table of ways to open secret doors.  (via)
• An Amiga Sampler 30 Years Later.  (via)
• Retracing the Roland Sound in Hip-Hop.  (via)
• Superhero League of Hoboken.  Meretzky, post-Infocom.

I started this last Sunday.

• IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude.
• We’re a long way from the halcyon days of ASCII-only text.
• The 48 Laws of PowerPoint.
• Putting some extra ‘obvious’ information into our temperature alerts.
• Conventions for Command Line Options.  Does not mention that short options were classic Unix, while GNU went long.
• 25 Years of OU – 2000: Open Source Teaching Project.  (via)
• Critical Digital Infrastructure Research.  Something people don’t think about… and then you get OpenSSL and Heartbleed, etc.  (also via)
• Perfect Edition: A lightweight, responsive web e-book template.  (via)
• ZSA Moonlander: A next-generation ergonomic keyboard.  I like the thumb switches.  (via)
• Similar: Sinc Split Mechanical Keyboard Build Log.  (via)
• Trademarking Infocom, again, part one and part two.  A followup to the reverse-engineering job post I linked last week.
• The SQL Murder Mystery.  (via)
• RIPscrip, something I never encountered before.
• 10 year long Civ II game, from 8 years ago.  (via)
• Helicopter crash tests.  (via)
• Play the history of Microsoft Flight Simulator.  (via)

Preposted early; I’m traveling during the week so I have to throw all my extra tabs in quick.

• Computer graphic history at the Pixar Online Library.  Goes back to the 80s.  (via)
• thecookie.website.
• Cigarettes, Space Invaders and the birth of the game watch.  (via)
• Synergy, multicomputer mouse and keyboard.  (via)
• Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship.
• Essays on programming I think about a lot.
• The evolution of a Scheme programmer.  (via)
• On Liberating My Smartwatch From Cloud Services.
• A Better Cheatsheet.
• A virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron. I’m sorry.  (via)

Accidental topic: old-school games.

• Assignment 45, A Harry Flynn Adventure (1981).  Interesting cause it’s a magazine article with the program source, something you don’t see much past the mid-80s.
• Advanced Vim Workflows.  (via)
• Historical Games.  (via)
• PunyInform, Inform 6 for 8-bit computers.  (also via)
• Specification Writer job at Infocom LLC.  “part of a clean room reverse engineering project”
• Modern Board Game Research.  (via)
• Medieval Fantasy City Generator.  I linked to an earlier version years ago.  (via)
• IoDT The Internet of Dead Things Institute.  (via)
• Laura Michet Uses This.  Look at her custom SABER68 keyboard.
• March 2nd, 1943.  A reminder: accurate dates in the past are bonkers hard.
• Running servers and Fred Brooks on transforming programs to products.  Linked cause The Mythical Man-Month was right.
• AI Dungeon: Dragon mode.  (via)

I was a bit low on links last week; I made up for it this week.

• Mega Tiny Time Watch.  (via)
• Commander 16.  (via)
• Turning a £400 BBC Micro (1981) into a $40,000 disc writer (1987).  (via)
• study tip: quiz yourself in vim.
• Netpbm Animation Showcase.  You’ve probably used netpbm without knowing it.
• Don’t use food delivery apps; call restaurants direct.
• The Frink Is Good, the Unit Is Evil.
• Stephen Strowes Uses This.  “Network Measurement Researcher”.
• A Near-Ultrasound (NUS) Data Link.
• Should the Monster Play Fair?: Reception of Artificial Intelligence in Alien: Isolation.  (via)
• jklp: a 36-key ergonomic keyboard.  (via)
• Grinding Coffee with a TinyFPGA Board.  Last sentence is the most important.  (via)
• Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub.
• Perpetual motion machine compilation.  (via)
• The Open Book; build your own e-reader.  (via)

I need to always preview these posts, cause cutting and pasting text sometimes brings along formatting elements not visible in the editor, but play heck with the actual layout.

• D&D Map Sketcher.  (via)
• Web desktops.  (via multiple places)
• Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective.  (via)
• What Ever Happened To Hearing Aid Beige?
• 120,000pt Helvetica.  (via)
• Sloanstarter.
• Related: Robin Sloan’s delicious and expensive olive oil.
• Long Egg Production.  It’s in German, so I can’t tell what this is.
• Historic Tale Construction Kit.  (Thanks, Ben Collver)

Some retrocomputing as a mini-theme this week.

• Download files listed in a http index with wget.  Eventually you will need this.
• A Conversation With the Mysterious Dubstep Sensation Hannibal Rex.
• Stretching the c64 Palette.  (via)
• Announcing Perl 7.  (via)
• Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor.  (also via)
• Bluetooth (sound) latency is astonishingly bad.  50ms is all it takes.  (via)
• On Contact Tracing and Hardware Tokens.  This would be the right guy to evaluate this.
• modernish, a shell library?  I am not sure what to call it.  (via)
• General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS.
• NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software.  (via)
• Real VT102 emulation with MAME.  (via)
• Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration.  (via)
• Linux Kernel Is Still Seeing Driver Work for the Macintosh II.  Of course this isn’t surprising to a BSD person.  (via)
• A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2.  (via)
• No lack of documentation.  Linked for the image, and for the note that Twitter threads are bad for information storage.  Don’t do it.

Your unrelated music of the week: Skratch Bastid.  (via)

Minor computer history theme this week.

• Odeon theaters in LEGO.
• The guy who created the View-Master also was the first to figure out plastic trash cans.
• Home Computer Cultures and Society Before the Internet Age.  (via)
• roguelike celebration 2020 is happening virtually.
• The Gigatron, a no-microprocessor retrocomputer.  Available as a solder-yourself kit.
• The Smithsonian’s Computer Oral History Collection.  Grace Hopper, others, recorded.  (via)
• The ACM has free access to its books for the next few days; go now, before it ends.  See the source post for this for some ideas on what to read.
• A special item in that list, the Antikythera Mechanism.  I had never seen recreations of the device before.  (via)
• The Return of the 90s Web.
• Comments on that last link.
• 5 days with the MX Ergo.  I link these things just for the X notes.
• Speaking of which, Input events on X have an old world and a new world.
• The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk.  The one thing from Xerox PARC that didn’t take over the world.  (via)
• Recent Database Tech.  (via)
• The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM.

It’s teeny models week.  I am reaching outside my normal topics this week, too.

• Typology of LEGO Computers.  (via)
• Last Pole, the remnant of an international network.  (via)
• Tactical Computer Terminal.  Probably super-heavy, too.
• Political Compasses in Odd Topologies.  No, they don’t make sense, but I love graphs.  (via)
• Old computers made of paper.  (via)
• DIY Adafruit projects.  (via)
• Power Outage.  The PowerPC transition for Apple.  Topical for the long-rumored ARM move.
• Haiku R1/beta2 has been released.  Related to the processor discussion in that Power Outage article, through BeOS.  (via)
• Interaction Design.
• Reclaiming Keynes.  I am not necessarily Keynesian.  (via)
• Algonuts.  Peanuts via StyleGAN2.  See the about page for a good discussion of what this sort of reproduction means.  (also via)
• Exploded Fatmac.
• Bring That Beat Back, a book review.  (via)
• An Occult Psychogeography of Hawksmoor’s London Churches.  From Hell is one of the best comics ever, and I say that because of the artist.  (via)
• Heck, most everything from Top Shelf is good.
• The Small Web.  (via)

Hardware as the informal theme this week.

• Browse Minimally.  You know what I like most about lynx or links?  Lack of side effects.
• Ditch the Thinkpad, Save the Keyboard.
• Pulse Motor Runs on Wacky Power Sources.  Potato.
• PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000.  As the page says, “ultra-rare”.  (Thanks, Erik Blomberg)
• Naming the Net: The Domain Name System, 1983-1990.  (via)
• Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America.  Free ebook for the next month; lots of history in there.  (via)
• The tz database vs astrological records.  Not really “versus”, but strange to think how exacting this nonscience can be.
• The Shareware Scene, Part 4: DOOM.  I remember this.  Seismic!
• The surprising persistence of RSA keys in SSH.
• Structuring and Formatting Your Plain Text Files (Without a Markup Language)
• How to use tmux to create a multi-pane Linux terminal window.  Does not have to be Linux, of course.
• The Lovecraftian Bundle.

This week’s Lazy Reading supported, kindly, by Tse Gratis volunteering a bunch of links.

• OpenVMS: Rollout of V9.0 and Beyond.  Still going?  (via)
• Compiling for the Z-machine version 3.
• <blink>
• What sort of SSH keys our users use or have listed in their authorized keys files.  An anthropological survey, in a way.
• Big Box Collection.  Software boxes.  (via)
• Buy Your Own Nuclear Reactor Control System.  (via)
• Obscure PDFs.  Surely there are gems in here.  (via)
• Like for instance “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
  The Unix Legacy“.  By Rob Pike in 2001.
• Roam Research.
• Desk setup from the guy who created i3.  (via)
• How I would put voice control in everything.  Sensible!  (via)
• History of UNIX Manpages.  (via)
• The Tse Gratis section:
  • 100 Lines of C, in a Closet.
  • Minimalist HTML.
  • Open source tools for sailing off-grid.
  • The world in which IPv6 was a good design.
  • aArray.