Lazy Reading – Page 29 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2015/03/222015/03/21

Lazy Reading for 2015/03/22

As you read this, I am probably watching a storage processor reboot.

Another worthy cause for donation/sponsorship: the Network Time Foundation.
Really making sure the data’s gone. (via)
Sirius, for talking to computers like all the big companies are doing – but open source! (via many places)
Smart City.
“Everybody“. The section on a car rebooting gave me pause.
int3.cc, hardware hacking. (via)
USB Type C.
y = -x^3.
The Worst Internet Things. Seems like a cheesy list, but these things are really quite awful. (via)
The Humble Roguelike Bundle. Dunno if any of it runs on BSD… but that is far more likely these days.
17 years of curl. Same developer the whole time, which is neat. fetch(1) is 18.75 years old, for contrast. (via)
The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers. (via)
Single-page non-Javascript web apps, a proposal. (via)
A software engineer’s role traversal. Linking for the end part: Ask your employer not for free food, but for the chance to create something that lasts outside of your employer’s operations.

I’d love to see fewer developers demanding superficial perks, and more of them asking to have more time to contribute to the open source products we use, mentor young developers, and learning more about the space they occupy. All of those result in us growing as developers in more than just our coding skills.

Your unrelated link of the week: National Corndog Day. Has audio. (via)

2015/03/152015/03/15

Lazy Reading for 2015/03/15

Happy (almost) St. Patrick’s Day! An excuse in the U.S. to wear green things and drink beer.

VimGolf. (via Rolinh on #dragonflybsd)
Operating system research – 16 years perspective. (via)
A bad day for your network infrastructure.
Unix best practices.
8 Unix networking commands and what they tell you.
Open computing progress. (via)
Extracting content without the hassle.
gvim-to-xcolors.
A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge. I remember Visicalc. (via)
Google Code is shutting down. There’s DragonFly Summer of Code stuff in there.
Oxford is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace’s birth. (via)
What’s your great-great-great-grandmother’s maiden name?

2015/03/082015/03/07

Lazy Reading for 2015/03/08

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.

2015/03/012015/02/28

Lazy Reading for 2015/03/01

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.

2015/02/222015/02/21

Lazy Reading for 2015/02/22

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.

2015/02/152015/02/14

Lazy Reading for 2015/02/15

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)

2015/02/082015/02/06

Lazy Reading for 2015/02/08

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)

2015/02/012015/01/31

Lazy Reading for 2015/02/01

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)

2015/01/252015/01/24

Lazy Reading for 2015/01/25

All over the spectrum this week.

The Story of the Intel 4004. (via)
Why Perl Didn’t Win. Some methods that could be useful for the BSDs here. (via)
uBlock, a less-resource-intensive version of AdBlock. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Emacs user at work. (via alexh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Librem 15, “A Free/Libre Software Laptop”. Blobless. (via Mike)
How to cheat at the future. Something I need to address for this very Digest. (via)
What does {some strange unix command name} stand for? (via)
Your entire PC in a mouse. (via)
So I bought a mechanical keyboard.
Emacs is my new window manager. (via)
m-x start-them-early.
Slackbot bot. (via)
List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources. (via)
Open Hardware Random Number Generator. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
The Hemingwrite. Looks like a TRS-80. (via)
The Emularity.

Your unrelated link of the week: Skymall, 2007.

2015/01/182015/01/17

Lazy Reading for 2015/01/18

Not sure how I ended up with so many interesting conference links. There’s some substantial reading here too, so clear your schedule.

A long-overdue update of the Cluetrain Manifesto. (via)
AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started. (via)
Secure Secure Shell. (via)
Hacking a Gameboy with a speedrun bot to program new games. It’s hard to wrap my brain around. (via)
Operating System development in Rust.
Speaking of which, Rust just reached 1.0A. (via)
Improving your PuTTY connections.
The Intel Compute stick looks fun.
RIPE70 is in Amsterdam in March; the Call for Papers is out.
NANOG 63 is in Texas at the start of February; registration and the agenda are up.
Vintage Computer Fest East 10 is in April in New Jersey. It’s hands-on – you get to run the old computers! (via)
CiE 2015, a cross-disciple conference in late June in Bucharest, also may interest you. (via)
The Millennial Literalist.
Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. (via)
Event Notify Test Runner, or entr. Runs arbitrary commands when a file changes. It was also talked about at the NYCBUG meeting that just happened.
Moving Beyond TCP/IP.
This program is the equivalent of ENIAC. Really! They’re both for calculating ballistics. (also via)
The Tears of Donald Knuth. (via multiple places)
When The Sky Is Falling. DDOS mitigation, in slides. (via)
The Morris Worm, as a physical artifact.

2015/01/112015/01/11

Lazy Reading for 2015/01/11

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.

2015/01/042015/01/04

Lazy Reading for 2015/01/04

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)

2014/12/282014/12/26

Lazy Reading for 2014/12/28

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)

2014/12/212014/12/19

Lazy Reading for 2014/12/21

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.

2014/12/142014/12/13

Lazy Reading for 2014/12/14

Minimal link text this week. It just happened that way.

random in the wild
Best Unix time-savers
Where apps end and the system begins.
The password? You changed it, right?
Live network attack map. (via)
Playing with my son.
At the computer farm. (via)
Typography in sci-fi: Alien. (via)
Turing Complete User. (via)
XLennart. XBill + systemd (via IRC)
OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t. (via)
FOSSASIA, March 13-15, 2015, Singapore. (new to me)
Nethack: the best game of all time? I still like Angband more. (via)
moreutils, additional Unix-style utilities. (via)
Plan9Front. (indirectly via)
Wang Calculators. Neat physical wiring and even Nixie tubes! (via)
Fixing a computer with the right type of string. (via)
Previous, a NeXT emulator. I like the name. (via)
From the previous source, lighting a NeXT cube on fire.
“Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s Operating System” (via)

2014/12/072014/12/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/12/07

Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!

Don’t panic and keep forking Debian. It leads to devuan.org. For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not. (via)
Advent Planet. Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
On file formats, very briefly. I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read. (via)
Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via) 6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
Bumper Sticker Computer Science. More “epigrams”. Some dated, some excellent. (PDF, via)
ParkyTowers thin clients. Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game. See Softalk link below too. (via)
Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
Grand St. short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide. (PDF, via) Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
The strange world of computer-generated novels. (via)
Why my book can be downloaded for free.
Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI. (via)
The Softalk Apple Project .
Unix: tricks with history.
Clip Art is dead. Awww.
RowHammer. Ugh. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.

2014/11/302014/11/28

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/30

I’m going with links to some old-school crazy-hard projects this week. No simple hacks, these.

Mysteries of the unix kind.
Nerdy trivia about Unix time_t. (via)
PDP-11/04 – Restoration. (via) Very nice pictures.
Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. Plan 9. (all via)
Linux on Obsolete Displays Project Page. (via)
USB Power Issues. That is definitely a hardware problem.
Know Your UNIX System Administrator – A Field Guide. (via)
Fitness machines for big data.
It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source.
Historic Computer Images. Hosted by the U.S. military.
EDSAC, the (only?) computer from the 1940s, is being rebuilt. No keyboard, no monitor.
God’s Lonely Programmer. (via)
Some light reading on lock-free programming.
A Rare Peek into the Massive Scale of AWS. Their capitalization, not mine. (via)
Metastable failure state. (also via)
Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software. (via)
Remote work: an engineering leader’s perspective. These articles never seem to note how open source developers fit this mold. (via)

2014/11/232014/11/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/23

Lots to read this week.

The Open Source Financial Developers Association has a very complete calendar of open source events around NYC. (via)
Google Code-in 2014 has announced its mentoring orgs.
Also, Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
Facebook’s New Data Center Is Bad News for Cisco. Somewhat free of technical data, but I do like the idea of more software-defined networking. (via)
NSA vs. encryption, 40 years ago. (via)
schmutz. Ah, the joys of Unicode. (via)
Sort of related: this is just mean. (via IRC, I think)
SSHelper. I’m going to buy a new phone just so I can use this. I want my handheld computer to actually be a computer, darnit. This is from the guy who created Apple Writer, of all things. (also via)
List of Physical Visualizations. (via)
After Docker. Docker and similar items appear to be an attempt to change an operating system from a place where you work to a thin wrapping around a program you run. Dunno if I like that. (via)
Barbie, computer engineer, which has created more responses.
A brief history of graphics. Video game graphics, specifically.
The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion. Similar. (via)
I like the concept behind “Let’s Encrypt“, though I quibble with the tools selected. (via)
A video about the Internet in 1995. (via)
“With varying degrees, everyone has this drawer in their house.“
IFComp winners will provide a great deal of reading/playing time.

Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014. I grew up there and now live not too far away. That’s really not that much snow for the area; it’s just that it fell so quickly.

2014/11/162014/11/16

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/16

Snow snow snow!

DoomRL, a Doom roguelike. From Hasso Tepper, who correctly pointed out I haven’t been linking enough roguelike material lately.
Unix: Catching up with Unix errors.
True Stuff: Build Your Own Propeller Car. Not so much about the car as about the building part.
Making Internet Local. A deep dive into what everyone calls ‘mesh networking’ and what that really means.
“The alternative Windows Store” I guess sounds better than win64 package manager. Anyway, the idea of a ports collection is becoming universal.
Command-line Unix-style note taker.
Sample the Amen Break. Hey, a Squarepusher video gets in there. (via)
Receiving NOAA Weather Images with SDR. Sounds fun to build, though I know I won’t get to it. (via)
What is the URL to your technical blog? More things to read there.
New Found Sounds, early synthesizers. (also via)
XScreenSaver 5.31. “To make this work I had to add a UTF8 parser to my VT100 implementation”
100-year-old mechanical computer. It does Fourier analysis. (via)
A bread-slicing machine. Looks dangerous and useful. (via)
Stupid Hackathon. (via)

Unrelated link of the week: Lenny Kravitz – Fly Away (lyrics) Watch to the end. “just like a dragonfly” (via)

2014/11/092014/11/09

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/09

For some reason, more historical links this week than usual.

Thinking Forth. It sounds to be – though I haven’t read it yet – one of those books that transcends the target language. (via)
Fuzix, a “new” OS. (They should just try something else small, like RetroBSD.) (via)
The Best Small Computer in the World – 1968. (pdf, via)
Vim after 11 years. (via)
Terms of Service. I have other comics from the artist. (via)
Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure.
A brief history of spam and email crypto, from a former GMail worker.
Kerberos Papers and Documentation (via)
Amazon Echo, which continues the long trend of companies reinventing existing open source projects and making them creepier.
Or making lovable things annoying. Seriously, phone alerts and “where are you?” alerts from a teddy bear? I hate it when people pepper me with that. (via)
Noisy dead satellites. (via)
Old UNIX releases/source
Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network. I just barely remember seeing this hardware in the wild, so to speak. It was awful. (via)
The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing (via) Lose some time on this one.
Forth in the USSR. (PDF, via)

Unrelated link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a print comic in a limited series. Many stories, many artists. I’ve been getting the issues and it’s a lot of fun. Here’s an interview with the person coordinating the whole thing.