Lazy Reading – Page 31 – DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

2014/11/022014/11/01

Lazy Reading for 2014/11/02

Short this week because of the amount of time I was at work, but what I have is good.

System/360, older computing pictures. (via)
Everyone wants a ports system. EVERYONE.
Salto, the Xerox Alto emulator. For those who saw the Alto code release last week. (via)
Hidden Histories of the Information Age. (scroll all through for links)
Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic. Fun if you are the right kind of nerd. (via)
Why You Should Never Use MongoDB. Not a diatribe against MongoDB as you might expect, but an excellent, extended talk about data structure. (also via)
I thought I had linked this already: Internet Arcade; many old games re-implemented in Javascript.
Beginning to Observe Network Management Practices as a Third Party. (via)

2014/10/262014/10/25

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/26

Lots of light topic links this week.

A 50 Year-old Teletype Powered by a Raspberry Pi. (via)
Found via the same link: teletype restoration.
Also found: the rotary VoIP phone. I’ve made rotaries work again via ATA, but only for inbound. This, I would love to do.
How SimCity came to Unix. It’s available now as Micropolis.
Which reminds me: Magnasanti, the biggest SimCity 3000 city ever. (video)
The Xerox Alto source code has been released. There’s a nice history at that page. (via)
Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
Computing is women’s work, in 1967.
An interview with Tom Limoncelli. (About LISA)
Why Hypercard had to die. I taught a Hypercard class to older students during college; it was surprisingly easy to get people with no computer experience to build things. I miss the old “computer as tool” approach Apple had back then.
Shall we fork Debian? (via)
Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
Vimswitch.
curl | sh. (via)
PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (via several places)
An excellent description of the social ‘littlenets‘ concept. (via)
Web frameworks from Wal-Mart. Not a sentence I thought I’d type.

Your unrelated animation of the week: Karateka. I remember discovering this, and laughing and laughing…

2014/10/192014/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/19

Writing this now, and hoping I’ll get the server apart and back together fast enough nobody notices.

BlackBerry: The Endgame. Points out that QNX is/was a problem for the ecosystem.
Breaking Madden: Edge of Tom-morrow. I love these despite being indifferent to football.
Measure your open source community’s age to keep it healthy.
The Bot of Mormon.
Trouble at the Koolaid point. Rethink the “ignore it and move on” response. (via)
How tilde.club came together. There’s a potential tilde.club on every BSD machine.
Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js. That’s pretty much what I always envisioned the future to look like. (Youtube, via I forget)
Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals. (via)
The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution. (via)
slfsrv, a GUI wrapper for command line programs. (via)
NTK, the archive.
The Shen of Programming. (via, via)
TinyScreen, another Kickstarter project, with hardware so small it’s adorable. (via)
My Philosophy on Alerting. (via) Linking for myself at some point.

2014/10/122014/10/08

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/12

Whee!

A talking car dashboard from the 1980s.

Argos Catalogs. Count how many of the pictured items have been absorbed by cell phones. (via)

Features are Faults.

King of click. More Model M stories.

2014/10/052014/10/04

Lazy Reading for 2014/10/05

I spent a good chunk of this weekend at work for various reasons, so it’s a slightly less long list. On the plus side, I know a bit more about setting up fiber links now.

On the Design of Editors for Small Computers. Pre-vi, pre-emacs. (via)
Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems. Video. (via)
Writing a Simple Operating System – From Scratch. PDF. (via)
tilde.club, an effort to resurrect the ~/username web page. Wish I had got in. (via many places)
The “Mark I“, (one of) the first programmable computers, designed in 1937.
Cool-retro-term, another analog terminal simulator. (via)
A progress update on the Novena computer, with significant manufacturing detail.
An interesting paper on Alan Turing. (PDF)
disk seeks are slow don’t do them. SQLite internals. (via)
BadUSB, which naturally leads to USB Condom.

Your unrelated image of the week:

I’m getting a new pet tomorrow.

2014/09/282014/09/26

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/28

I have an excellent mix of links this week, I think. I like to have multiple links on multiple topics.

Xenix 1.0, stuck on the 286. The second operating system licensed from Microsoft by IBM, and it was a type of Unix. (via)
50 Years of Moog. (via)
Uselessd. (via)
The End of Linux. (via)
Revitalizing the Perl Power Tools. AKA the Unix Revitalization Project. It’s possible to contribute; this is something I’d like to see modernized. (via)
Culture Stories: Introduction and Milk. I like the “I gave stuff away and eventually everyone did” part of the story. (via)
mdp, a Markdown-based presentation maker. I like the concept and the animated gif used to demonstrate it.
Remarkable, a Markdown editor with a WYSIWYD (what you see is what you did) component. Does it run on BSD? Dunno. Markdown is one of those deceptively good ideas that’s becoming accepted in part because it’s unowned.
Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme. This is going to be the exact blend someone wanted and didn’t know it. (via)
From Vim to Emacs+Evil chaotic migration guide. It’d be better as “Chaotic Evil”. You know what I’m alluding to, nerd. (via)
Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car. Is building Faraday cages for your own things going to be a lucrative business 5 years from now? (via)
Forth Salon. (via)
The Craft of Text Editing. (via)
Programming Sucks. (seen many places but this time via)
Current Status: (via)

2014/09/212014/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/21

Lots of links this week.

Device names. (via)
xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
This hard drive still worked. (via)
Unix: Scripting with templates.
Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Intel Edison. Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale. (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
Bézier Method. (via)
wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft. (via)
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile. (via)
HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want. (via)
Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC. BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
Booting directly into Vim. (via)
Memory Management Reference. (via)
ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s. (via SIGCIS)
The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
XScreenSaver on YouTube.
World’s longest traceroutes.

2014/09/142014/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
“I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)