Lazy Reading – Page 28 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2015/08/162015/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2015/08/16

My links are haphazard – but that shouldn’t get in the way of reading.

The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphical Adventure Design.
makefiletutorial.com. Unfortunately probably gmake-specific, but still a good idea. (via)
Postmortem of an outage caused while rebooting the (EVE Online) universe. (also via)
There are still game releases for the Amiga 500. (via)
Awesome Emacs. Emacs add-ons that people deem worth trying. (via swildner)
A Weekend at KansasFest, the Sleepaway Camp for Apple II Fanatics. (via)
Tricks to play with vim.
Unions as a solution to stack ranking in tech companies. Not sure if that’s the answer, but most people just take fat paychecks and ignore the problem. (via I lost it, sorry)
The new Devil’s Dictionary. To see quotes from the original, search for “Bierce” in /usr/src/games/fortune/datfiles/fortunes . (via many places)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Bird and Moon.

2015/08/092015/08/08

Lazy Reading for 2015/08/09

There’s some meaty reading this week, so get settled in and start clicking.

Haunted Machines An Origin Story. I love this sort of intersection of ideas. (via)
Our Friends, the Bots. (via previous)
Futures of Text. Why wasn’t this ever done at the command line, too? (via previous)
Cybernetic Serendipity.
The Verge’s Web Sucks. A followup to “The Mobile Web Sucks” that I linked to previously.
How Does Level Generation Work In Brogue? The animated gifs work very well here.
Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100. (via)
The Itanium processor, parts 2, 3, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Here’s part 1 if you missed it last week. Windows-centric, but probably still interesting for the hardware.
Ever wonder why they used “that key”? (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Pronunciation guide for UNIX. (via)
Forgotten Quests from the golden age of adventure games.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a comics series where different comics artists start a story, then hands the story off to a different writer and artist for each issue after that. I’ve been getting individual issues as they make them, and I want more people to subscribe, so they can get enough cash to print the last few issues. (Independent comics is a hard business.) Order the complete series, for yourself or as a unique present for a smaller person.

2015/08/022015/07/29

Lazy Reading for 2015/08/02

Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.

Unix Meets Prime Numbers.
The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up.
Google INTERCAL Style Guide. (via)
Before Spelunky and FTL, There Was Only ASCII. “Procedural Death Labyrinths” sounds fun. (via)
How Pinterest simplified, compartmentalised and scattered the web.
“actually a hat“.
GMO biology transformed by “Inventor of Email”. There’s a reason that last part is in quotes.
What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day. A 6-month interview. (via)
Running TSS/8 on the DEC PiDP-8/i and SIMH. It’s not just a software simulation; it’s a Raspberry Pi inside a PDP-8 shell. The front panel actually works. (thanks, Remy van Elst!)

Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. (via an internet cult.) Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English. Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation. That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.

2015/07/262015/07/24

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/26

Short list this week – no particular reason.

Profiling your file systems.
Amiga Reloaded – A new Amiga motherboard using original MOS/CSG chips.
Caves of Qud, a roguelike that even simulates greenscreen.
And here’s 700 more roguelikes in a torrent.
Web Design: the First 100 Years. (via multiple)
The Mobile Web Sucks. Lots of good pull quotes here. (via)
The story behind the world’s most ‘Elite’ computer escape key.

2015/07/192015/07/18

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/19

No theme, though I’ve been thinking about IPv6 lately. Mostly in a “oh man all that PLC equipment at work can barely do IPv4 this won’t be easy” sort of way.

The Art of Monitoring. Accidentally pretty reports. (via)
IPv6 usage projections. IPv6 usage is finally taking off. (via)
Legacy IP. (same source as previous)
Related: ARIN is down to just /24s for allocation.
I’m sure everyone’s heard of the Oculus, but this Wearality thing looks a lot more affordable. (via, via)
Stuff in Space. The neat part is that it’s in realtime. Search for “iss” and the one marked ZARYA, as far as I can tell, is the International Space Station. There’s people in there right now! (also via)
“Ah, finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it” (via)
TEMLIB, a SPARC v8 in software. (via)
The Web We Have to Save. There are people whose entire online presence and business exists only on the ‘free’ platforms of other companies. That would worry me. (via)
Three Dead Protocols. I like how the unironic enthusiasm comes through. Also haha, butts and sl pranks. (via)
Announcing Apple IIgs System 6.0.2. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Dr. Fun comic archives.

2015/07/122015/07/12

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/12

This is Thoughtful Consideration week.

The Anti-Mac Interface. The future of interfaces is in some ways the opposite of good interface design circa 1986. (via)
What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers? The resemblance to a classical MUD is not a surprise when you think about it. (via)
The Harmful Consequences of Postel’s Maxim. I see this more as the 2.0 problem, which I don’t yet have a good link to describe. (via)
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Four
CCCamp 2015 preordering is open. (via)
Calvin and Markov. Markov chains are simple but fun. (via)
On Port 80. Platforms that run on user content, but aren’t controlled by users, go downhill over time. It’s a repeating pattern. (via and via)
A floppy drive with a survival mechanism. (via)
keepachangelog.com. (via)
The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive. (via)
Post-memes. (via)
The 2015 Postel Network Operator’s Scholarship is open, with entertaining selection criteria.
Warcraft 3 in a browser. (via)
The ARMiga Project. (via)
The minimig-mist, also a recreated Amiga. (via previous link)
Go garbage collection. It’s humor, not real. (via profmakx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Your unrelated game link of the week: Compare Javascript frameworks by playing the same game (well, game mechanism) in each: Breakouts. (via)

2015/07/052015/07/03

Lazy Reading for 2015/07/05

I don’t know why I’ve been finding so many roguelike links lately, but it’s to our benefit.

The Open Container Project. No mention of a BSD. I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad.
Random Numbers in the original Doom. Is that true? That seems a bit crazy. (via)
The NANOG65 call for presentations is out.
More falsehoods programmers believe about time. A followup to a previous link.
@Play 82: The Talks of the International Roguelike Developers Conference US, 2015. Some fascinating links/talks on video there.
Stick to 64-bit counters.
LIFE IS TERRIBLE: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WEB – James Mickens. I don’t think I saw/linked to this one before. Why is a Microsoft researcher one of the funniest nerd people online? (via)
The first port of UNIX. (PDF, via)
Vim Colors (via)
Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem. (via)
Cold brew tea.
From TextMate to Vim. (via)
Shortest network cable evar. I once had a coworker confuse inches (“) and feet (‘) when ordering, so we ended up with a box of 200 6-inch Ethernet cables. (via)

2015/06/282015/06/29

Lazy Reading for 2015/06/28

I came up with a whole bunch of links at the last minute despite traveling and being sick. I’m dedicated to your idle reading!

In defence of curl | sudo bash –. Not really in defense because nobody’s that crazy. (via)
Leap “smearing”.
HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike. (via)
Hack RUN. A… greenscreenlike?
30 years of Amiga. Coming up in about a month. (via)
“Why Agile, Lean and Six Sigma must die …” (via)
You probably already saw “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks“, but there’s already a t-shirt. (via)
Finding the needles.
If We’ve Won, Why Are We Still Explaining Open Source? (via)
hhighlighter, syntax coloring for the output of other programs.
UNIX Recovery Legend. (via) There’s more documents of similar vintage to look at.
“The Hacker’s Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”. While I hadn’t read this before now, I’ve been doing a similar pattern for some months now, and I’ve lost 30 lbs/13.5 kg.
The Curta Calculator. A neat bit of machinery that I’ve never seen.
Retro Thinkpad idea. I would buy this, for the keyboard alone.

Your off-topic link of the week: you have about a week to pay $35 to not die when the Earth is destroyed on July 5th. It’s the 18th time the world has almost ended, so it has to work out one of these times.

2015/06/212015/06/18

Lazy Reading for 2015/06/21

I had to do this early, too, so the link count is a bit low this week. Sorry!

From the abacus to smartphone: The evolution of mobile and portable computers, a book by Evan Koblentz. (via)
A/UX – The Long View. OS X in 1998. I wish I had been able to try this. (via)
Monsters and Manuals, another RPG thinkblog.
The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament. (via)
Linux is not gnu/linux. Linking because it’s a bit off the deep end. (via)
Why I dislike systemd. (via)
OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135 [Command 135 initiated] Numbers stations are one of those deep-dive things. (via)
Meet Processing, the Lingua Franca of Creative Coding. (via)
mdast-man: Compile markdown to man pages (roff) So often, the open source solution to something is not to produce more or better quality output, but to instead rearrange the tools for doing so. (via)

2015/06/142015/06/13

Lazy Reading for 2015/06/14

‘Historic information week’ is this week’s accidental theme.

Why traceroute uses UDP and not ICMP.
W. Richard Stevens, a list of works. The previous traceroute link came from there, and there’s a lot more gems in those links.
I agree with this description of web apps.
grepcidr2, for finding networks within a given CIDR range.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications, a book. The Sendmail chapter may be interesting, given that Sendmail is wrapped up in the history of Unix and the Internet. Also, it notes that ‘syslog’ exists as a sendmail side project that kept going. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
What is Code? From Paul Ford. Long, but excellent. (via several places)
Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible. (via)
The Manuscripts of E.W. Dijkstra. This is just one of the excellent links hidden in the previous story.
It’s the Future. The web page creation process has become complicated.(via)
Yes, A video game contributed to Unix Development. (via)
Finding Your Groups.
Unix is not an acceptable Unix. The “one thing well” part of Unix tools is frequently misunderstood, perhaps on purpose. This is one of those. (via)
Age, Pleasing Apple, and Trying To Climb Out of the Hole. Getting old, running your own business, and programming, is all together a daunting prospect.
The Apple Collector. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Fully Computerized.

2015/06/072015/06/06

Lazy Reading for 2015/06/07

This week is more eclectic than usual.

How to boost your Vim productivity. As usual, the comments on the link location are nearly more useful than the target story. (via)
Telegrams: still possible, even desirable, and legally binding. (via)
An in-depth explanation of host names from Matthias Rampke on the DragonFly users@ list.
PreTTY Screenshots. (via)
The ultimate guide to analog control panels in sci-fi movies. (via)
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Three
“TIS-100, a game about rewriting corrupted code to fix a fictional ’80s computer.“
On Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design. (via)
Goblinpunch, an endless supply of D&D-ish RPG ideas. (also via)
VoIP honeypot results.
The Underhanded C Contest winners. (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: Stairway to Stardom. 1980s public access TV performances. Highlights one, two, and three. (via private list.)

2015/05/312015/05/29

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/31

Emulation is this week’s accidental topic.

MAME and the New Emulation Reality. (via)
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open. (via)
Venture capital vs. community capital. An interesting view of history. (via)
Introduction to Keyboard Programming. (via)
#define __ENABEL_EPSPERAMENTLE_TAPDOLE_ORATORS (comment from this article.)
Apple][ in Javascript. Also, Apple][ in Javascript. Two different presentation styles, both fun. (both via)
Math Blaster Copy Protection. (via)
Rogue in Space.
Einstein, a NewtonOS emulator. (via)
SSH client suggestions.
Radio hams do battle with ‘Russian Woodpecker’ (1982). There’s a lot of analog ghosts out there. (via)
An incomplete list of words that are now startups. (via)
“If something isn’t on the web … I find it hard to get excited about it.” (also via)
The SIGCIS Workshop 2015 call for papers is out.

Your comics link of the week: Behold! The Dinosaurs!

2015/05/242015/05/23

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/24

I guess the accidental theme this week is Unix.

The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid. From 1981, which says something. (via)
Terminal: Beyond Ctrl + A and Ctrl + E. Linked because I needed to know what the nondestructive version of Ctrl-U was. (Ctrl-A)
Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem. I’ve been considering a static generator for this site, for similar reasons. (via)
How to name things: the hardest problem in programming. A dry topic talked about in a very human way. (via)
Floppy Drive Organ.
Cold Weather, Gogol And The Rise Of The Russian Samovar. I don’t need one, but I’ve always thought samovars are interesting.
Unix Shells: Bash, Fish, Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh. (via)
When Poll is Better than Interrupt. (PDF, via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution (via)
Backblaze hard drive stats for 2015Q1. (via)
Crystals and computer viruses. (via)
Inadvertent collection.
Bash history format.
Vim Tips For Intermediate Users. (via)
Why isn’t our fax working? (Hint: a power issue.) (via)
The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: svblm. Found via a link to Infinideer and Forest Ambassador.

2015/05/172015/05/16

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/17

Get clicking!

The Rise and Fall of Japan’s PC-98. I always wondered what PC-98 was. (pdf, via)
Beyond the PDP-11: Processor support for a memory-safe C abstract machine. Written this year, despite the title. (pdf, via)
Gonix – Unix tools written in Go. (via)
Without Systemd (via several places)
Your cyberpunk games are dangerous.
Web Mandlebrot. (via)
Which SSD should you buy?
A Tmux crash course: tips and tweaks. Different from the last tmux crash course I posted. (via)
Drinking Myself To Permadeath In Brogue.
Eventually everyone hates computers. (via)
wego, command-line based weather report – with ASCII graphics!
The programming talent myth. (via)
A Tiny Orchestra in the Living Room. I like the graphics. Also, I am nostalgic for the smell of audio equipment. (via)
On the Taxonomy of Spaceships. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Finished page at the Toronto Comic Jam. I missed TCAF this year, dangit. It is awesome. (via)

2015/05/102015/05/08

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/10

Accidentally very roguelike this week.

It’s ALWAYS DNS!
scroll, a console game that is also a pager. (via)
Reenix: Implementing a Unix-Like Operating System in Rust (PDF, via)
Yet another Dwarf Fortress story.
Rogue’s Item ID in Too Much Yet Not Enough Detail. Mentions the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide Appendix N, which despite having that book for most of my life, I hadn’t noticed. Time to read!
And I accidentally found that tor.com has already gone through these books and written about them.
One of the least well-known books on that Appendix N list is The Face In The Frost. Possibly my favorite book ever; look for it.
Hipsterhammer, Warhammer 40k musings. I haven’t played a minatures game in years. Blame computers. (All three links via)
The theme continues: phantasia(8), a Tolkien-influenced game I didn’t even realize came preinstalled on DragonFly and probably most other BSDs.
90’s electronics in animated GIF form. (via)
Prochronisms. (via)
FPS Toilet Museum. I love that the Internet can still enable single-minded things like this. (via)
git push –force (linked for the image)
5 Unusual Unix Commands for Cinco De Mayo
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Two
PathPicker – dump output containing filepaths into it, get a file selection dialog. It’s a command line utility. (via)

2015/05/032015/05/03

Lazy Reading for 2015/05/03

I started sparse because this was a busy week, but I’ve still got a pretty good amount of reading for you.

Comparing code layout. Not the code, but the visual arrangement. This could certainly be explored further.
Schemaverse, a space strategy game implemented entirely within PostgreSQL. (via)
The Cray 2 Computer System. (pdf, via)
How to Operate the Apple II Plus. (via)
“Analog“. (via)
noTCP. (via)
My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
distribution, for ASCII histograms. I can think of many times this would have been useful.
Disinformation Visualisation: How to Lie with Datavis. (via)
How to pronounce hexadecimal. Not the word itself, but the numbers derived. Don’t actually do this. (via)
Penrose binning. (via)
Also, Go by Example. Linked because I like the description for it at the source.
The Words the Media Industry Prefers. The narrative made me laugh. (via)

2015/04/262015/04/24

Lazy Reading for 2015/04/26

We’re already 2/3 of the way to Christmas!

UNIX history book recommendations.
Networking for System Administrators, a BSD-friendly book I was slightly involved with, reviewed on Slashdot.
How UNIX system administration is like filing your taxes.
The history of computer data storage, in pictures. (via)
Ops books. How much of Github is not-code? (via)
The Heirloom Laptop’s Custom Wood Composite.
BrowserHack: NetHack ported to the web. (via)
Text adventure speed runs. (via)
People who could really break the Internet. (via)
This, everytime someone says “the cloud” (via)
The Forgotten Ones: Unisys SCAMP-D Mainframe. Linking to it because that’s where “Master Control Program” came from. (via)
Textblade. Sounds neat; I’d want to see it in action. (via)
The Philco 2000 Model 212’s retirement party. (via)
Good UNIX (History) books / material ?
Copper vs. fiber. (via)
Used Thinkpad Buyer’s Guide. (via)

Your unrelated tea links of the week: Do you even steep? The actual title is different, but I like that part of the link more. (Thanks, Jeff Ramnani) Also: Tea With Strangers. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, it’s not in my city. (via)

2015/04/192015/04/16

Lazy Reading for 2015/04/19

Spillover from last week, even.

Big Changes at USENIX LISA in the last 5-10 Years.
Open Source won, so what’s next?
“The lack of diversity in the Valley isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic one.” If you doubt the hive mind of Silicon Valley, look at We Put A Chip In It. (via)
The Story of the ZX Spectrum in Pixels (volumes 1 & 2)
Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet’s Least Favorite Tool. Linked because they have a screenshot of Snowcraft. (via)
Found in previous link: Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad? Of course, I loaded that page and got a full-page overlay advertising video, so maybe news websites are the new restaurant websites.
FreeDOS on your camera. That’s two mysteries: Why FreeDOS? Why still have a separate camera? (via)
How a bridge full of zombies reminded me of the great possibility of games. I love this sort of discovery in games. (via)
Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? (via)
Mushroom Cultivation Revisited. (via)
The Zero, One, Infinity Disease. First comment on the source link is good too.
Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments. (via)
since.

Your unrelated video links of the week: 80s nostalgia is happening now that there’s a generation young enough to not have experienced it. You can have the 1980s as a parody, or as the real, unmitigated awfulness.

2015/04/122015/04/10

Lazy Reading for 2015/04/12

Without meaning to, I’ve broken into full-on computer nostalgia this week. Don’t know how it happened, but at least the links are interesting.

Tiling by squares. I hope you like math. (via)
“whatever it is, it’s already over“, which led me to “The planned unplanned outage“.
The NMFECC Cray Time-Sharing System (1985) [pdf] (via)
Programming Languages in 2014. (via)
A history of the Amiga – The demo scene (2013) (via) The links in the source article are best.
8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators. (via)
BeOS Demo Video (1998) (via) I miss BeOS.
The Full History of Board Games. (via)
Turning the Arduino Uno into an Apple II. (via) Notes how awesome the 6502 processor was.
The Apple ][ Watch. Holy crap, this is cool. It wouldn’t be easy to duplicate, but so very worth doing. (via)
An object of infinite length but finite volume. (via)
Modern alternatives to PuTTY?
Dealing with key-based authentication on Windows with Putty
How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union. The source for this story has more interesting link material.
Can someone explain containers to me?
Glass Hands (Violent Motion, 2). “(I’m still holding out for a director’s cut of Iron Man where Tony Stark struggles for an hour to place a screen protector on his faceplate without trapping any dust under the plastic, but I’m not holding my breath.)“
What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand? For the readers that don’t have English as their first language. Or maybe those that do. (via)
The Task Continuity Model. Incidentally describes my method of building up articles for this very Digest. (via)

Your unrelated tea link of the week: The man who drank too much iced tea. He wasn’t drinking that much, which makes me a bit worried about my own hot tea consumption. (via)

Your unrelated psychedelic rock video of the week: Lightning Bolt’s The Metal East. If you find the art interesting, start looking for Fort Thunder comics. (via)

2015/03/292015/03/27

Lazy Reading for 2015/03/29

Pre-assembled over the week, since I have an odd weekend schedule this week. On the plus side, there’s lots to click here.

How to Be a Good Open Source Community Member. (via)
Reliable Cron across the Planet. (via)
How to irritate people away from your website, example 1 and example 2. I hate being repeatedly asked to sign up for a newsletter I’m already on. Also, this.
“If you build your business on top of someone else’s system, eventually they’re going to notice.“
Explorable Explanations. I’ve seen at least one of them before and it really stuck with me. (via)
“Gee, this is a lot of microfiche material. Better build my own high-volume scanner!” (via)
Also at that last link: DECbox, BlinkenBone, and other projects.
How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web. The author says “It’s very slow”, but so was everything back then. (via)
The HP-01, found indirectly through the last link. Think of that when next reading about wearables.
The Days They Changed The Gauge. Heck of an outage window. (via)
What’s the oldest/weirdest thing you’ve found on your network? An ancient Catalyst switch, running inside an enclosure 1400 ft underground, crammed between a wooden structure and a rock wall. I have a picture of the space.
Slack is quietly, unintentionally killing IRC. Not scientifically studied, and anything dependent on a single company and not a standard can have longevity problems. (via I lost track, sorry)
sslh, two services on one port, for when most everything gets blocked. (via NANOG)
UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use — 1982, Bell Laboratories. (via)
The Shut-In Economy, or how to dedicate your life to a workplace. Also, how to ignore the temping nature of all these new jobs. (via)
O’Reilly’s running a Top 25 sale.
Andrew W.K. is the Kibo (see site) of Instagram: his name + nosebleed is all it takes. (via)

Unrelated link of the week: Tea. Contains strong language.