Category: Lazy Reading

No mini-theme this week.

• Soft Electronics.  Linked for the physical designs.  (via)
• Magic Numbers.  What shaped the 1500 byte Ethernet MTU.
• Languages as Symbols.  (via)
• Odie Directory.  Found Google Docs turned into HTML.  (also via)
• NON-OBJECTIVE.  All sorts of neat clock faces. (also also via)
• Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History.  I worry that there will be so many knockoffs you can’t find originals.
• Another example of knockoffs overwhelming the originals.
• Emoji history: the missing years.  Thanks, Ben Collver.
• “using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture”  (via)
• Thumb Nation: How We Learned to Play With Our Fingers.  (via)
• Reversing Choplifter.  (via)

I’ve got an eclipse happening right over me tomorrow – hope it’s not cloudy!

• Playing Piano to Control My Smart Home.  MIDI could be considered an instruction set.
• Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted.  A case study from Harvard, not just an opinion piece.
• One hour of the thruster sound from the 1979 video game LUNAR LANDER.  Too many bits; sounds too modern.  (via)
• The Single File Philosophy.  (via)
• The Lost Worlds of Telnet.  Galactic Trader looks fun.  (via)
• Master of Magic – The Official Rob Hubbard Softography.  For C64 music history.  (via)
• Tiny undervalued hardware companions.  Remember this at Christmastime.
• The xz hack.  I think it does not affect any BSD, going by the structure as described.
• The First Appendix N.

I have been saving up posts from some long threads on the TUHS and COFF mailing lists, so you’re getting some esoteric history today.

• Every OS Sucks.  (Youtube, via)
• Aztec C, which I did not know existed.  (via)
• “romcc is a C compiler which produces binaries which do not rely on RAM, but
  instead only use CPU registers.“
• Ford, first commercial BSD UNIX client.  (via)
• Random facts about rand().
• Related: insults as random passphrases, a generator.  (via)
• paranoia, test your computer’s floating-point ability.  (via)
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know.  (via)
• Are We Watching The Internet Die?  “Habsburg AI”  (via)
• The Coherent operating system.  I’ve never heard of this before – a sort of clean-room UNIX.  (via)
• XigmaNAS, a horribly-named FreeNAS replacement.  (via)
• 20 Years of NYC*BUG and Can We Handle 20 More?  April 3rd.

Command line / history is I guess the mini-theme.

• ELIZA Effect, something important to remember about AI.  From a dinosaur blog of all places.
• The Art and History of Lettering Comics.  Authoritative work from a master in the field.  You have seen his work even if you do not realize it.  (via)
• State of the Terminal.  (via)
• The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock.  Links to interesting sources.
• Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way.  (via)
• Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast.  (via)
• Related: Structural Regular Expressions (PDF).  You may not be surprised to see it’s by the author of sam.  (via)
• Followup: video is up for the most recent NYCBUG event, “NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist“.
• Editing long commands in your shell.  (via)

I had Covid in February, which made me sit still long enough to find all these links way ahead of time.

• “I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH”  Linked for the links within.  (via)
• Max Brückner’s Polyhedra (1900).  I’d enjoy constructing these.
• Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets).  (via)
• Download the whole IF Archive.
• Gathering Structures.  ‘Lightning talks’ can be fun.
• Okay, Color Spaces.  CIE XYZ is new to me.  That rhymes!  (via)
• Images are just videos with a single frame.  A Sora quote that is intensely wrong, and I have a decades-old argument against it,  The rest of that article is spot-on, too.
• Huffman Codes – How Do They Work?  (via)
• Ahab’s Leg Dilemma: Part 1.  (via)
• A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us.  Does this mean the Hail Mary Cloud finally petered out?
• British Cryptids: The Ramflaggie Of Argyll.  The point is not the story it tells but the style it uses; this is a modern video.  (via)
• Create for Yourself.  Own your work, and own where it is located, or else it will eventually be lost.

Mini-theme: collections of media.

• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023.
• ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories.  (via)
• NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available!  There’s now a Wii port, which is neat.  (via)
• The Salmar Construction, a 1970s “large music synthesis engine”.  (via)
• The miracle of the commons.  Principles that apply to open source projects.  (via)
• Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist.
• An RNG that runs in your brain.
• Lost infosec battles.
• The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive.  (via)
• This message does not exist.
• Computational Poems.  (via)
• At long last: the MWL Title Index.
• A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Omni: Souvenir.

Deep dives week.  I was on the road almost all week for my main job so a bit sparse.

• Dave Mills, the guy who created NTP (and possibly FTP or at least one of the earliest versions) died recently.  Here’s some history / anecdotes.  (via)
• Single-service sites are getting very specific.  (via)
• Origin story of the Digital logo, which is not Helvetica.  (via)
• Tom Harned wrote up DragonFly on a Thinkpad 480.
• web-adventures.org.  (via)
•  The “Cheap” Web.  (also via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Send my former coworker to baking school.  He thinks more intensely about bread and how to make it, than anyone you’ve ever met.  I’m not exaggerating.  Help him out; it’ll make his day.