Category: Lazy Reading

Literally most of the tabs I have open right now, in front of you.

• The Definitive Guide to the Doctor Who Theme Music.  (via, via)
• Sinister Sounds of the Solar System.  (also via)
• Well There’s Your Problem Podcast.  Actually stills and audio about engineering disasters.  (via)
• Woodpecker dubstep.
• Softbody Tetris, Fuzzy Edition.
• A Visual History of Internet (IPv4) Address Allocations.  (via)
• The JavaScript Ecosystem.
• Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator.  (video, via)
• Why I Teach vim.  (via)
• Vimcal.  Not totally sure why Vim is in the name but what the heck.  (via)
• My Obsession with Chess.  Incidentally, McCloud’s Understanding Comics has an excellent explanation of closure that goes far beyond comics.   (via)
• Pinafore, for Mastodon instances.
• What is a System-on-Chip (SoC), and Why Do We Care if They are Open Source?
• The Backbone: Conclusion.  Story of the Internet.

Surely some of these are repeats?

• CSVs: The good, the bad, and the ugly.  (via)
• This seems like a good form factor.
• present: ‘a terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects’.  (via)
• A book about books bound in human skin.  (via)
• Rare Alphonse Mucha illustrations.  I saw some of his work close up recently.
• 20 double-edged potions for the ingenious adventurer.
• Miscellany ? 89: 2020, year of the asterisk.
• The Video Game Source Project.  (via)
• Exploding Whale, remastered in 4K.   (via)
• computecuter.com.  Exactly what it sounds like.
• Return to Plan 9.  (via)
• Computer Unit 1979.  (via)
• Text Editors III: Emacs.
• Thinking out loud about Vim.  Equal time.
• Efficient text editing on a PDP-10.  I link, others get into it: I’m so happy!

There’s some good reading/projects linked in here, so if you have free time, this can keep you busy.

• Psion Series 3 palmtop EReader.  That’s 25 year old hardware?
• BBC’s In Our Time podcast on Alan Turing.  (via)
• 808303.studio.  Surely I’ve linked this already?  (via)
• The Museum of Obsolete Media.  (thanks, swildner)
• The 100 best fantasy books of all time.  I thought it was another corny listicle, but on the other hand I’ve loved every book I’ve read on that list, and there’s a lot more I didn’t know about.  (via)
• 15 Sci-Fi Books That Forever Shaped The Genre.  Ditto.  (also via)
• The Web Key Directory, based on this.  I need to use it.  My source link for this works as a sort of how-to.
• Unraveling the JPEG.  (via)
• New Nixie tube manufacturing.
• dimensions.com – reference drawings for everything.  (via)
• Configuring Windows for key-based SSH access.  For reference.
• A curated non-violent games list.

Your unrelated music of the week: KUTMAH: Isolation Tapes v.006.  There’s a lot more good music from this person.

 

Change your clocks, depending on what time zone you are in.

• Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User.
• I did not realize org mode has its own website.  (via)
• a truly naked, brutalist html quine.  (via)
• Bookmark alignment chart.  (scroll to end)
• What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It?  (via)
• List of Generative Art and Live Coding Tools.  (via)
• Results from 20 years of experiments summarized.  Food experiments, done by a scientist.  (via)
• Writing a Book with Unix.  (via)
• Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is and covers.
• Telemelt, group console playing simulator.  (via)
• I Solved British Square.
• Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public.
• Stereoscopic computing: converting Quake and Doom.

 

Two shopping months until Christmas!

• I’ll take “problems we solved correctly in the 80s” for $100, Alex.
• Come Internet With Me: Zettelkasten method.
• Building a computer in Conway’s game of life.  (via)
• MONOSPACE, less than 1kb of code.  (via)
• archive.assembly.org, so many short films, related to the last link.
• The HTML5 accelerator card.
• Basic Unix Tools – dd.
• Why I Chose Emacs as My New Text Editor.  (via)
• Replacing FreshRSS With Miniflux.  (via)
• SSH 2FA with Google Authenticator and Yubikey.  (via)
• 2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online for Anyone to Read.  i.e. USENET.  (via)
• introducing the i.webthings directory.  Find some spare time before following that link; there’s a lot there.

I guess history is a micro-theme?

• Think Twice Dice.  (via)
• Happy Birthday, Ethernet.  Still interoperable, 40 years later.  (via)
• How we ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6), on our home-built CPU with our home-built C compiler.  Sorta UNIX.  (via)
• “Myst” demake for Apple II.  (via)
• Ars Electronic 2017.  Follow the art links.
• Spamtoberfest.
• Related, Hacktoberfest needs to stop.
• IFComp 2020 games are up.
• Transport Tycoon.
• New Object Storage Protocol Could Mean the End for POSIX.   (thanks, Matthew C)
• Retry Mock Toys, Or, model rockets are fun.
• The Digital Future of Tabletop Games.  (via)
• Dispatch 09 — Synthetic Reality & The Metaverse.  (also via)
• A Nixie Tube Watch.  Exactly as clunky as it sounds.
• Welcome to your Bland. (via)

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)