Category: Lazy Reading

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.

I have been on the road so it’s a short week.  The links are more cheery, though.

• Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens.
• The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
• The Dobbstown Mirror.  I subscribe; it’s a treat in the mail
• Ship of Theseus on Wikipedia is a Ship of Theseus.  (via)
• Crusty, the Indestructible Mac.  (via)
• Reboi, I suppose the 2020s version of a MAME Cabinet.
• The Book 8088.  I almost think it’s a prank?
• Inside .git.  (via)

I’ve got some real gems this week.

• MULTIPLY – A BOOK ABOUT CALCULATORS.  Discussion of the open source tools used to process it.  (via)
• diagram.website, or An Internet Map.  Lots of links there.  (via)
• Googling symptoms of the flu.
• Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request.  AI, a customizable spam tool.  (via)
• What was ISDN?  Analog lines completely going away makes me nervous.
• The biggest problem with selling print books is the software.  A nice Print on Demand summary in there.
• ou sont les blogs d’antan?  Lots of links to other esoteric blogs in there.  (via)
• Fast NetBSD booting, which led me to smolBSD.
• DSA removal from SSH.  Matters most if you are running an very outdated system.
• Modern Commodore 64 motherboards.
• Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics.  Applies to DragonFly too.
• Hardening an OpenBSD Workstation.

Your unrelated extended music of the week: Bill Laswell featuring DJ Rob Swift – Reanimation.  Which of course reminds me that Rob Gets Busy.  If you like that, here’s a crazy amount of beat juggling, at its best when it creates new music and rhythms.  (via)

Mini-theme is about building the Internet without platforms, or at least without ones designed to extract revenue from you.

• Please, Own Your RSS Links.
• “I’m ChatGPT.”
• Vintage Calculator Designs, 1968-1983.
• Why do I know shell, and how can you?
• Banner Depot 2000.  (via)
• Damaged Earth Catalog.  More links.  (also via)
• Multiplayer Mandelbrot.
• Barely Minimum.
• TeX == blech.
• Standard Ebooks and classic web tech.  (via)
• Floppy Disk Fever.

Your difficult music link of the week: There Will Never Be Another Harry Partch.

Merry almost Christmas!

• Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read.  (via)
• An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities.  The birth of fuzzing.  (PDF, via via)
• Copyright law is living in the past.  A good explanation of music copyright oddities.
• ARCC opens for login tomorrow.  Buy a ticket as a present to yourself.
• The UX of delivering parcels.  Reminds me of the long-ago Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research.  (via)
• Val Town.  (via)
• Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet.  I endorse this.  (via)
• The sound of Wikipedia.  Bells for additions, string plucks for removals, pitch to indicate size of edit.  (via)
• Early Computer Art by Barbara Nessim.  (also via)
• EuroBSDCon is happening in Dublin in September 2024.  (via)
• A vt100 compatibility question that led to talk about termcap hacking and printer shenanigans.   (follow all those links)

No theme other than maybe interesting hardware.

• Four Kinds of Optimisation.
• Investigating why Steam started picking a random font.  I will always link Y2038 issues.  (via)
• Dragons Reviewed and Ranked.
• MNT Reform hardware hacking.  (via)
• My Useful Shell Functions.  (via)
• B3ta’s 404 error pages.
• The Spectrum of Openness.  The first good multidimensional explanation I’ve seen.
• WE 1981.  For Western Electric employees, with a shot of a crane lowering a new central office unit into place.  (via)
• VT320 Repair.  And terminal tetris.  (via)
• $500M Mars Rover Mistake.  The value is the way they dealt with it.  (via)

I missed last week because of a time crunch at 2 jobs, but at least I can make this week up.

• DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs.  (via)
• Mechanical Creations.  Sort of the opposite of the previous link.  (also via)
• Monaspace Fonts.  (via)
• Thank you for holding my duck.
• HTML Web Components: an example.
• mud resources.  (via)
• Not On Amazon.  (via)
• What font are you using now?
• Complex Simulation: Artifacts of a Russian spy.
• The Mediterranean Iron Omni-Spear.
• The Vim features that make me a Vim user instead of a Vi user.

More wide-ranging this week.

• Patrick Newman’s Software Engineering Management Checklist.  (via)
• Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture.  (via, via)
• Pool topology,  I mean yes but why?  (via)
• The difference in penalties in AD&D1 and D&D5.
• The Great Drone Ones.
• The Distractor.
• mii_emu: MII Apple //e Emulator for Linux.  Linked for the Total Replay screenshot.  (via)
• GET LAMP, which I know I  have linked before, but I was reminded.
• Fantasy Inspiration, Era by Era.  Books to read by time setting.
• Personal mail server issues.  (a good reason for this book.)

All history this week for some reason.

• IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard.  Pictures of original hardware.  (via)
• A bit of XENIX history.  (indirectly via)
• How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet.  (via)
• The Instruction Set Edition.
• Museum of Internet Artifacts.
• Remember “Reflections on Trusting Trust“?   40 years later it turns out Ken Thompson figured out how to backdoor the compiler and login.
• Enemies at the Gates.  About platforms and how they absorb value.
• Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture.  I had to explain to someone yesterday, unsuccessfully, how an open source SDK for a closed source project is useless.  (via)
• The print-on-demand version of 50 Years of Text Games is available.  It’s worth it.
• Making up a tabletop RPG.

Now this is mostly my backlog of RSS feed items.  Eventually I will catch up to everything…

• Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea.
• The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client.
• Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer.
• Bypassing Windows 11 Account Setup.  “generally when a vendor tries this hard to get you to do something, it’s not for a user-friendly reason.”
• Mouseless.  (via)
• OpenBSD Webzine 15.
• Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1).
• Building a new Apple II?
• Braunstein Resources.  (via)
• The whole Whole Earth Catalog.
• The Curse of Dialup World.  (via)

This week I’m cleaning out links from saved emails and newsletters.

• Dragon Quest Disassembly.  (related: Tempest)
• A pile of historical computing books.
• Turning software defined radio back into hardware.
• Turning WinAMP into hardware.
• OK maybe too much hardware.
• The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements.  Any project, really.  (via)
• Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023.  (via)
• Backblaze 2023 mid-year drive stats.
• The 808 Edition.
• Making Way for Wayland.

A bit short this week – I am in the final parts of a large software transition at work.

• Ares OS.
• Try the Last Internet Kermit Server.   (via)
• Authenticate the SSH servers are you connecting to.
• TLD Domain Count Stats.
• Bitmapped fonts from disused operating systems.  (via)
• unix69 keyboard.  (via)
• The Archival Internet Video Index.  (via)
• An Abundance of Beasts,  (via)
• 20 Years of Vim.  (via)

Comfortably all over the map this week.

• Recreating a Cyberpunk 2077 game prop.
• Backblaze drive stats for 2023Q2.  I just found out how cheap b2 storage can be.
• Awesome Inferno.  (via)
• “Why would you do that?”  The management review of yacc.
• What’s special about this number?  (via)
• Dobbstown Mirror, $1.  You should subscribe; I’ve enjoyed 3 issues so far.
• I did not know: vim exists via Atari/Amiga vi ports.
• Futurism Restated, an electronic music blog.  I mean Substack.  The lines blur.  (via)
• v8 /etc/motd.
• Tiny life hack: paint your mouse dongles.  I wish I had read this years ago.
• Inflation in 1983 must have been horrible.  Linked just because 9 year old me thought the Elephant Memory Systems logo was cool.
• STIRred AND SHAKEN.  Boring, but quietly important.
• The first color e-ink monitor I’ve seen.
• On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions.  A certain amount of open source work is built on the tailings from venture capital, and from corporate waste.