Category: Lazy Reading

Some deep dives here; take your time today.

• The ZedRipper: Part 1.  16 cores, 83 MHz.  (via)
• Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.
• Links of the 2010s.  There’s a lot here.
• 3 Wyrd Things: Robin the Fog.  Listen to Catch 22-20, on that page; a skipping recording that skips with the right timing to create coherent music.
• Two malicious Python libraries caught stealing SSH and GPG keys.  (via)
• DNote, self-hosted personal note saving.
• Unreleased Infocom Game Unearthed (from 1986).
• “The Unbeatable Deck of Ronan Shin” by Kiyash Monsef.  (via)
• Think App Updates Suck? Try Upgrading a Programming Language.  Every language gets to find this out.
• Freebies.  Oddball desktops, etc.  (via)
• Vim 8.2 is out.  (via)
• Andy Baio Uses This.  Linked cause he’s a superior link source.
• What I want for CES.
• It’s a good idea to label all of the drives in your desktop.

Accidental theme this week: terminals.

• Teletext’s creative legacy.  (via)
• Related: Teletext, the font.  (via)
• The Plain Text Project.  (Thanks, Benn Collver.)
• TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers.
• IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display.  An answer to the recently-linked-here “80×25” post, and perhaps the definitive answer on terminal size.  Also: sound delay lines are bonkers.
• The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver™.
• 26th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2019) winners.  (via)
• New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth).
• New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance is Nigh.
• Unlocked Recordings, via the recent Music Modernization Act.  This is one of the many reasons to donate to the Internet Archive.  (via)
• Migrationator: Open source tool to help migrate away from Google.  (via)
• Big Pile of Vim-like.  (via)
• It was 20 years ago today.  4 years ahead of me.

Your odd pile of GIFs for the week: more Jan Svankmajer animations than I’ve ever seen in one place.  (via)

I’m going with high-concept material this week.  If you have time for some thinking today, you’ll enjoy the links.

• Sounds recreated from pictures, a video and an album.  Making sounds exist that were never recorded – a sort of time travel.  (via)
• Transformative Tools for Thought.  (via)
• A primer on hardware security keys, which I recommend.  (via)
• SIMjacking, a new term to me.  (also via)
• A history of procedural text.
• To Go Green, the Energy Industry Goes Open Source.
• Yes I do want LEDs and Bluetooth in my d20s.
• Various IF crowdfunds.
• The Information is Beautiful Award Winners 2019.  (via)
• Don Libes’ Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool.  (via)
• Understanding and repairing the power supply from a 1969 analog computer.  So pretty!
• 64 Bits ought to be enough for anybody.  (via)
• Notes on Ambient Privacy.  (via)
• Command and Conquer, a retrospective.  Part of what defined RTS games.  (via)
• Sunless Skies, a review.  Not defining a genre, but a mood.  (also via)

Small computers is the accidental theme this week.

• Remembering the TRS-80.
• 80s Corporate Airbrush-High Tech.  Eighties!  (via)
• My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge.  What could yours be?  You could have a website, not just a social media identity, and be much better off for it.  (via)
• Beaker Browser, a peer-to-peer browser.  (via)
• Good signoffs.  (via)
• Open Library book sponsorships.  (via)
• ASCIIdent.  All-ASCII characters, open world game.  (via)
• are.na, a site I am repeatedly stumbling into.  A sort of blogging platform/visual recorder?  I have only just started to look, but it seems like a good place to record an aesthetic, sort of like ffffound was, once.
• The Teletext Archaeologist – A visual and interactive teletext history.  (via)
• Pocket Popcorn Computer.  (via)
• Review of Pinebook Pro.  The hardware notes are most relevant, not the Linux whateverness.  (via)
• Ditching Event Platforms for the IndieWeb.  (via)
• The Invention of Forth.  (via)
• Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating.
• Neovim and the state of text editor art in 2019.  First explanation of “why NeoVim” that I’ve seen.  (via)
• Emacs: Fury Road.  (via)

Happy birthday to my father, today.

• ALL HAIL LORD ENKI.  It’s like a giant version of Lazy Reading; I hope you have some reading time set aside.  (via)
• 80×25.
• Lesser Known Coding Fonts.  (via)
• Niche Museums.   You may be happily surprised to find one of these near you.  (via)
• Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in New York. A casual look appears to show an antist that works in tandem with robots to produce art. (via)
• Apple I Emulator as a Shader.  How could I not link this?  (via)
• Terminal Phase: building a space shooter that runs in your terminal.  (via)
• Take Take Take: Rethinking How I Consume Free and Open Source Software.  (via)
• Tabs or spaces for indentation? Statistics on 3.8 million Perl files created in 24 years.  (via)
• Riana Pfefferkorn Uses This.  Always interesting to see the personal computer setup for someone strongly focused on security.
• FANGo.  If you can’t not participate, you get to at least not conform.
• Newstweek: note that this is from 2011.
• three.js.  3 dimensions on the web.  This would be sheer magic to 1998 me.  (via)
• 200 word RPG challenge.  Complete by the time you read this.  (via)
• 80×25.
• RSS-Bridge.  Creates feeds from walled gardens.  (via)
• Today in Hoffman Lenses.
• Formally modeling database migrations.
• The Greatest OSR Blog Posts Known to Man.

Your unrelated music link of the week: The Wyrding Module: Typhonic Neural Tantra.  (via multiple places)

Covering lots of ground this week.

• youshouldhaveseenthis.com.  Common meme language.  (via)
• youshouldhaveALSOseenthis.com.  More.
• How political events affect the files on your computer – timezone files, in this case.
• Fraidycat, sort of like an RSS reader but it takes in everything.  Watch this project; I am a big fan of Tiny Tiny RSS, but this is a much more accessible approach.
• Space Cruiser Orion for the console.
• So much for games on Linux.  Related, and I can sympathize.
• Major Mode for Reading EPUBs in Emacs.  This will be handy for someone.  (via)
• Homebrew Cray-1A.  How have I not linked this yet?  (via)
• Vim Splits and Vim tmux Navigator, two approaches to the same idea.  (via)
• Announcing sshign.  Similar to gpg but less painful, I assume.  (via)
• Build your own X.  (via)
• A visit to the Large Scale Systems Museum.  Every picture is pretty.
• I’m Officially Part of the IndieWeb.  Continuation from last week’s small theme.  (via)
• sql-murder-mystery.  It’s exactly what it sounds like.  (also via)
• Team 6502.  (via)
• Internet Synthesis Protocol.  Good MIDI is actually good.  You can probably recognize crap MIDI music, but there’s been entire albums built using MIDI where you may not realize it.
• Tangential to that: I think Zappa’s released more albums posthumously than when he was alive.
• New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Orodruin: Ruins Of Eternity.  Tolkien-ish doom metal.

Lots of variety this week; I’m happy with this link batch.

• Categories: models of models.  Pleasingly abstract.  (via)
• The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood.  Linked so that someone who never read Achewood can now go through its entire archive.  (via)
• The End of Oz.  Read this if you read any/all of the many, many Land of Oz books when young.  (via)
• Modding, Vim, i3, and Efficiency.  (via)
• I’ve made a rotary dial number input, because why not?  (via)
• Coffee Is Hard.  (via)
• The Best Cast Iron Skillet.  Secret tip from someone who has been using them for decades: treat them poorly, don’t spend money, they’ll be great.  It’s a chunk of iron.
• The Computer as a Communication Device.  I did not realize the role Hawaii played in causing packet communication.
• Computer Files Are Going Extinct.  (via)
• Betrayal At Krondor.
• I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too.  (via)
• You know, we might as well just run every network service over HTTPS/2 and build another six layers on top of that to appease the OSI 7-layer burrito guys.  Linked mostly for that sentence.
• The lines of code that changed everything.

Your unrelated music of the week: The Mysterious Professor 950’s Otherworldly Beat Tapes.

A mix of complaints, history, and odd technical items.  The usual!

• Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets.  (via)
• Managing passwords using ed and gpg2.  Because: no tempfile.
• Adding redirection to the gopher protocol.
• How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last?  Readers of a certain age will remember how PGP was briefly export controlled; also remember that history rhymes.  (via)
• How my application ran away and called home from Redmond.  (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
• Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about audio.  (via)
• The tiniest FatMac.  (really a console and an emulator, but that’s fine.)
• Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual.  (via)
• 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs.  This is not the throwaway joke it sounds like.  (via)
• ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision.  Chessboards are natural placemarkers.  (via)
• Wackaging, a trend I hope will end.  (via)
• The Fantasy of Opting Out.  (via)
• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019.  (via)
• James Mickens’ Tenure Announcement.  It is exactly as wonderful as you would think.  (via)

Pre-posted in advance cause once again working through the weekend.

• BBSes: Partying Online Like It’s 1989.  (via)
• The 25th Interactive Fiction Competition is Open.
• After Dark has been ported to Twitter.
• Text Rendering Hates You.  (via)
• A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer.  Wonderful pictures, as always.
• Feast of Legends.  A RPG from the Wendy’s fast food chain.  It’s a legit PDF rulebook, and looks like a D&D-style product, but everything is themed to match Wendy’s food.  It’s bizarre.  (via)
• This to That, answering how to glue two different substances together.  Really!  (via)
• Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts, a long read about reading.
• Springer’s History of Computing series.  Seriously in-depth; this is research, not light entertainment.  (via)
• How to remove a part of a video using ffmpeg.
• “Night of the Lepus” was based on a book?  Excellent use of the interrobang, and also you should see this movie.
• Reminiscences on 5.25″ floppy drives of the early 1980’s.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Scratch.  I saw this in the theater a while ago, and I didn’t realize the whole thing was on Youtube.  It’s turntablism at its peak.  (via)

You may be able to tell one of my link sources changed RSS feeds, so I had some catchup to do this week.

• What is “DCC SEND startkeylogger”?  (via)
• Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case.  (via)
• Imaging Floppies.  (via)
• Just Delete Me.  (via)
• ReMarkable review.  Has anyone used one of these recently?
• Explanations, about X and beyond.  (via)
• Recent News in Narrative Games.
• What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre and When games grow and time passes.
• It’s almost XScreenSaver in clock form.
• Bits vs. Things.
• Gastropod facts.  I greatly enjoy this podcast.
• Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer.  Worth it for the pictures alone.
• Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe.

Lots of link diversity this week.

• GPS – A Hollywood Actress, a Player Piano, and Hip-Hop.  (via)
• Percy Ludgate, the missing link between Babbage’s machine and everything else.
• The Light Phone 2.  I don’t know how good or bad it will be, but with an e-ink screen, the battery life must be spectacular.  (via)
• The Gongfather’s Almanac, for Dungeon Crawl Classics.  (via)
• 251 words you can spell with a calculator and hex colors that are also words.  (both via)
• Instagram Hates The Internet.  The company made a conscious decision to break hyperlinking.
• The Turkish lira’s currency code is an unexpected source of problems with computer programmers.
• ASCII table and history.  Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?  (via)
• Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk.  (I think via)
• Chaosnet for Unix.  Pre-Ethernet, for Lisp machines.  (via)
• tine – a modern clone of the Amiga ED display editor.  (via)
• corpypastas.
• The Vim-Inspired Editor with a Linguistic Twist.  Kakoune.  (via)
• Syncstop, hardware USB data block.
• The Strange Alchemy of D&D’s Genre Emulation.  Note to self: find Jack Vance books.
• What Remains Technical Breakdown.  A new NES game, including physical media.  (via)

Way eclectic this week.  Enjoy!  I will be working, as I haven’t had a day off in 3 weeks – but don’t be too sorry for me, I chose this.  The magic of pre-scheduling posts fixes it.

• A new version of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music – you will find something new and interesting, guaranteed.  (via)
• Every Noise At Once, related.
• Social Reunion Tour.  I always liked Tumblr.
• Innovation vs. Preservation.
• New Adventures in DNSSEC and DANE.  (via)
• Bluetooth d20.
• Turning off DOT in FireFox.
• Phoneswarm, archived.  (via)
• Today in “IP Over Avian Carriers” news:  So that’s where 44100hz came from.
• Project-wide search in Vim.  (scroll down)
• The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, Revisited.
• Old School Bloggers.  I could be one of them.
• In praise of xlogo.  (via)
• Click, whir, ping: the lost sounds of loading video games.  (via)
• Anime Floppies.  (via)

Your unrelated music post: The Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp: August 2019.

I’m covering all my areas of interest this week, or nearly so.

• Famous computer history quotes, some probably new to you.
• The Bit Player, a movie about Claude Shannon, and a review of it.
• A new Cyriak video, Breakfast.  Another attempt to describe fractal infinity, I think.  (via)
• D&D plus Shakespeare.  (via)
• The Design of Dungeons and Dragons.  Talking about the books themselves, not the game.  (via)
• Noise Machines, including the nonrepeating sound of a data center.  (via)
• Oddball analog smartphones.
• Voyager 1 and 2 are still talking, still active, and possibly the highest-latency communication problem possible.   (via)
• Old video game advertisements.  (via)
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely.  Lots of great pull quotes in this.
• Tumblr, the Day After.  As a counterpoint to the last link, WordPress and Tumblr are two social networks that do not financially depend on either damaging privacy or encouraging outrage.
• Waldenponding, a term new to me.
• Paul Ford Uses This.  I’ve linked to his excellent writing before.
• Chesses, variations on chess.  Immediately understandable, and playable if you have a second player right there.  (via)