Category: Lazy Reading

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)

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)

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.

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)

This is the Lazy Reading mix I like – some history, some commentary.

• How to make your Unix prompts more useful and interesting.
• An exploration of the mtr utility.
• Sweet 16: The 6502 Dream Machine. (via)
• SMS cards: The technology inside IBM’s 1960s mainframes.  (via)
• Vim is a Game.  (via)
• DoS by lightbulb.  (via)
• Public vs. private cloud.
• Euclid’s algorithm in the Shell.  (via)
• The Joys of Unix – Cryptolog in 1978  (via)
• The Web’s Grain.
• The day the rabbits died.
• How many IP addresses can a DNS query return?  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Perfect cup of tea renders all other tea pointless.  A sloppy joke, so let me share these recipes for masala chai and hobnobs instead.  I’m hungry.

 

The temperatures climbed up to almost not freezing this week!  It feels so warm.

• exa, a modern replacement for ls.  I like the website.  (via)
• Value of windowing is questioned.  (via)
• Good PuTTY defaults for a happy SSH’ing life  (via)
• The History of Graphic Design and Computational Form.  Long, with many excellent examples.  (via)
• Stirring Tea.  (via)
• What Blogging Has Become.  Think of this site.  (via)
• All My Blogs Are Dead.  Why I self-host whenever possible.  (via)
• Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.  Wrong, in 1995.  (via)
• Futures of Text.  (via)
• The Sierpinski triangle page to end most Sierpinski triangle pages.  (via, including the link text)
• GPG and Me (via many places)
• Trinity, KDE3 continued.
• MATE, Gnome2 continued.
• What laptop to [sic] you use?
• “…then came Cisco, and the rest is history”: a ‘history friendly’ model of the Local Area Networking industry.  Why there’s so many “Cisco shops”.  (PDF, via)
• Chinese DNS Poisoning.  It’s China, which means Chinese Government DNS Poisoning.  (more)  (via)
• How to be an open source gardener.  Excellent, excellent advice.  (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: The Chemistry of Cookies.

Lots of in-depth reading this week.  Put on something warm/drink something warm (especially if you are in the northeast US) and start reading.

• Making a C64/C65 compatible computer in an FPGA.  (via)
• Joe Chip’s problem was never his door.  (via)
• A Whole New World.  (via, via)
• CORE 2015, the magazine from the Computer History Museum.  (PDF)
• Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch.
• Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software, a paper.  (via)
• Chart of similar operations with sed and awk.  (via)
• A Tale of Two Zippers.  (via)
• 10 fancy zsh tricks you may not know… and Six hacks for less(1).
• “Why are there so many goddamn package managers?”  (via)
• The Last of the Typewriter Men.  (via)
• Where to buy amazing tea online.  Maybe a bit pretentious.
• It’s a UNIX system.  I know this.  (via)

Your unrelated quote of the week:

“If we had Smart Dogs right now, they’d have screens instead of ears, and they wouldn’t be able to bark in a somewhat indecipherable but yet still full of meaning way, they’d just have a whole bunch of notification icons that would come out of their butt and would all be red circles with numbers in them.”

Your unrelated link of the week: Drone over Niagara Falls.  That’s about 70 miles from here; I’ve been there many times.  That may give you an idea of the snow buildup/cold level here recently.

Being home sick in the middle of the week gave me a head start on all these links.

• Tea – Instead of Coffee.  Some cheap purchasing links in the comments.
• The Obfuscated Fibonacci; Or, a Curious Connection in Computation.  (via)
• BASIC Computer Games, 1978.  I loved this book, and especially the illustrations.  (via)
• A comment link from the previous story led me to DiscoRunner.com, a “multi-dialect BASIC interpreter”.
• Brands are not your friends.
• The Classic Super Star Trek Game. (via)
• Modern C, a PDF.  (via)
• Learning to love the command line.  (via)
• Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide.  (via)
• Stop Playing Monopoly With Your Kids.
• The last twenty years building the web no-one asked for in two wireframes.  (via)
• The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale.  (via)
• osh, the V6 UNIX sh.  (via)
• Fractal Flowchart.  (via)
• Pterosaur, Vim within Firefox text fields.  Not new, but I like the screencast example.
• Has modern Linux lost its way?  Another variation on the “Linux is a mess compared to any BSD” argument – not that I’m discounting it.  (via)
• Cosma.org’s computer preservation page.  (via)

I’m… not sure what happened this week.  I read the same amount of material, went through my RSS feeds, and this is the only stuff that looked linkable.  Sorry!

• This Industry Is Still Completely Ridiculous.  (via)
• Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix.  (via)
• .bashrc generator.  (via)
• The next Internet is TV.  (via)
• Robot Supercut.  Kinda clickbaity, but I like the footage.  (via)
• GnuPG needed funding, got funding.  (via)

 

Happy Groundhog Day!

• Early Copy Protection on the Apple ][.  (via)
• If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It.  I’ve linked to other stories on these computers before.  (via)
• Never Trust a Corporation to do a Library’s job.
• A homebuilt MOS 6502 based microcomputer system.  For those of you who thought the Hemingwrite link was interesting last week.  Plus, is the 6502 the best chip ever for homebuilding?  It sure crops up a lot.  (via)
• The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge.  (via)
• “Pretty much everything AOL touches dies.”  I link to it because I once worked for Time Warner.
• “Networking for Systems Administrators” is now available on Kindle.
• Long Live Grim Fandango.  (via)
• The Queen of Code.  (via)
• The Media Archaeology Lab.  (via)
• Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk.  I agree that there’s less tools available these days.  (via)
• Do you like capacitors?
• tectur.io. Startup “inspiration”.  (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: The showreel of Nick Denboer, AKA Smearballs.  (also via)

Historical links are the accidental theme this week.

• RFC Reader.  For those uncomfortable with plaintext?  (via)
• The truth about C & Unix history.  An oldie but goodie.  (via)
• After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly.  There’s something coming together, though.
• Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper.  (via)
• 1980s sci-fi show openings.  No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got.  (via)
• Who named Silicon Valley?  (via)
• Unix people cards.  (via)
• Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club.  (via)
• The Cryptographic Doom Principle.  A clear explanation.  (via)
• TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item.  Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
• Ping stories.  I’ve linked to other versions before.  (via)
• The history of grep.  (via)
• The little book about OS development.  (via)
• Decentralize All the Things!  (via)
• That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun.  Also this truth.
• His site is destroyallsoftware.com.  I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
• Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup.  My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud.  I wish more people did this.
• Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.

My end of year vacation is over tomorrow, darnit.

• My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake.
• The Old New Thing 2014 link clearance.
• This sentence proves it is The Future.
• Another hidden computer/exposure surface.  (via)
• Preserving arcade games.  (via)
• The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island.  (via)
• The Internet version of ‘empty calories‘.  (via)
• Quake on an oscilloscope: A technical report.  (via)
• From Gongkai to open source.  I don’t totally agree, but it’s compelling.
• Virtualizing an operating system to run a text editor.  (via)
• On the curl | sh pattern.  (via)
• geektyper.com.  A modern ‘boss key’.  (via)
• A Microsoft-centric developer switches into open source.  (via)
• Why aren’t we using SSH for everything?  (via)

 

Last of the year!

• Glitches: A kind of history.  (via)
• Speaking of glitches: Breaking Madden is still going.
• First Commits.  (via)
• Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer.  (via)
• The SoftSel Hot List for 1986.
• Steel Mill Hacked.  How long until having operations disconnected from the Internet becomes a sign of quality for a business?  (via)
• Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator.  (via)
• The Infocom virtual machine, made flesh silicon.  (via)
• DOSBox in the browser.  “…watching a miracle with every boot.”  (via)
• Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty (via)
• The Future: A Cat Litter Box and DRM.  “Internet of Things you can’t own”.  (via multiple places)
• When Security Goes Right.  This is how problems should be handled.
• Images of Math, a tumblr.  (via)
• Two eras of the Internet: pull and push.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: UpDog, a revolutionary communications platform.  (via)

 

I am slightly confused about which day it is.

• Dinosaur’s Pen, excellent old technology pictures.  (via)
• Ultima Ratio Regum, a roguelike walking simulator in development.  Currently Windows-only.
• 2014 Cacowards winners.  These will probably run on most any BSD with a Doom port.  (via)
• Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale.  All the management issues were in the browser.  (via)
• The 12 days of Unix.
• “the artifacts of any media format define its aesthetic like a cultural permalink”  (via)
• Origins of the Tablet.  (via)
• Hybrid Water Computer.  (also via)
• Computers are People, Too.  1982 computer graphics and Disney.  (via many places)
• USBdriveby.  Maybe gumming up the data parts of your USB ports isn’t such a bad idea.  (via)
• Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever.  A video.  (via)
• Why I don’t like hackathons, by Alex Bayley aged 39 1/2.  What he describes is very different than the BSD hackathons I’ve known of.  (via)
• Useful syadmin tools.  Here’s a gift list…
• Learning Unix.