Lazy Reading – Page 32 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/11/032013/11/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/11/03

This was a loooooong week, with me working 24 of the last 48 hours. It didn’t get in the way of the link-gathering, though!

This report on what’s new in Unicode 7 is stranger than you’d expect. (via)
gzip + poetry = awesome. This is a great way to visualize compression. (via)
The Internet Archive now lets you run old software via in-browser emulation. Of course, all the screenshots are of games because everyone wants to revisit childhood. (via)
I tell people a Leatherman is one of the best computer tools you can have. Here’s multitool overkill. I’m mentioning a specific brand for a reason, by the way. (via several places)
Fixing UNIX filenames. It’s a bit older, so you may have seen this. (via)
UNIX: the Art of Being Lazy. Remember, the Three Virtues of a programmer, from Larry Wall: Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.
A Mac Plus running System 7 – in Javascript. One of my first computers; even the control panels seemed to hold promise. (via)
Lets Blather All Over… Quadrilateral Cowboy. A hacking game that actually involves code.
What I do when I’m not on here. Rotary phones dialing through an electromechanical exchange to reach between Asterisk VoIP server. I love watching the gears go. (via)

Your unrelated animated image of the day: (via via)

2013/10/272013/10/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/27

Whee!

Commodore 64 and Spectrum keyboards – USB versions. Not interesting to me, but I bet at least one person reading this just got excited.
The Horrible World of Web Hosting. Unfortunately quite an accurate article, especially in his quote translations. (via)
Getting an Apple 1 to run. Note that the circuit board is mounted in a wall frame.
Interactive Fiction Competition 2013 recommendations. This can eat up a few hours if you have them to spare. (via)
Where shutdowns are not disasters. An exploration of the shutdown command.
Mail backups using newsyslog.conf for rotation. A clever idea.
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for ? That story and the link on Hacker news where I found it have some entertaining floppy disk anecdotes. I originally wrote “old floppy disk” but realized that was redundant. Almost all floppies are old at this point.
Don’t Copy That Floppy! Why haven’t I linked this before?
Don’t Copy That 2. Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a sequel?

Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films. You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around. Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them. (via) There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now. Why do I even know these things?

2013/10/202013/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/20

Whee!

The Shady Characters blog talks about alternate phone dial layouts. I’ve mentioned those here before, but Shady Characters links to this video describing the testing that went on for the keypads. Check at about 2:40 for the story on how AT&T figured out the ‘correct’ length for the phone handset cable.
The Youtube channel for Numberphile, the source of that previous video link, has some pretty entertaining math videos…
The UNIX as a Second Language blog has an article up about using strace.
The Roland SP-808. I didn’t know these had a built-in Zip drive. (via)
The ICT 1301 runs again. This is what big computers are supposed to look like, with large cabinets, and spinning tapes, and oversized operator consoles. (via)
Cryptogeddon, a sort of augmented reality game where I think you sneak your way across real systems. ‘Real’ as in not someone else’s computers, but real systems set up for this game. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence. I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers. The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab. For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since. I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover. It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.

2013/10/132013/10/12

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/13

This week just built up and built up.

UNIXStickers.com. Not really UNIXish. More vaguely free software cause-ish. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
The Hail Mary Cloud and the Lessons Learned. Peter Hansteen’s talk from BSDCan 2013. I linked to some of his earlier comments on this botnet before, but this is the comprehensive summary.
Dwarf Fortress NYC. A good exploration of how the symbolic representations in Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes in general are not that far from ‘accepted’ artwork and design. (via)
Killscreen on Salty Bet. Describing Salty Bet out loud sounds like a cyberpunk novel idea from 1998. (via)
The top 100 inventions of the past 100 years. I’d argue that some of them are not that important, but the photographs are neat. (via)
Resurrecting APL/360. People go to extremes to recreate not-very-pleasant historical computing environments. (via)
Facebook and Open Networking Plan. Facebook doesn’t exactly do good, but I do like the idea of separating hardware from software in networking equipment, a la pfSense. (via)
Polemic: how readers will discover books in future. Sounds awful, and unfortunately a bit feasible. (via, with a great illustration)
Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance. A lot of the stupid mistakes tech companies make happen because they are uniformly run by inexperienced people. Worse, this is the sort of perspective you only gain with age. (via)
How was Hangul Invented? I don’t know any Korean, spoken or written, but I find the planned creation of a language interesting. (via)
History of the Telegraph. I like the physical design of the old models. Also, Western Union was once the largest telecom company in the world.
A list of free programming books. (via)
Connecting a payphone to Asterisk. I did a similar thing with a Model 500. Hmm… and this guy has the same initials as me. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.

2013/10/062013/10/03

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/06

I’m going for pull quotes and dedicated paragraphs this week, just to mix it up.

The Slow Winter. It’s about the history and trends of chip design, if you can believe it. “Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.” I love it so much. (via)

Richard Stallman on 30 years of GNU. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the basic point is correct. “If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. ” (via multiple places)

When Pipes Get Names. For some reason, I’ve never had to deal with named pipes – directly. I’ve used them via other programs, of course.

The person who invented Whack-A-Mole also created dedicated email terminals in the 80s/90s called Anti Gravity Freedom Machines. All those smaller ‘Maker‘ projects seem unenthusiastic compared to this guy. Anyway, his warehouse full of robots blew up. I haven’t found pictures yet.

Joblint, a job description checker. This has more value than I thought. I’m curious about statistical results over a large number of jobs. Take a look at those warnings, too – they’re mentioning the possible dark side of a lot of job ‘benefits’. (via)

This XOXO presentation by Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, makes some good points about work, going against countervailing wisdom to some extent. “You can work on a lot of projects, but you will only get a couple of opportunities to work on something long-term.” Pinboard is one of those businesses that remains relatively successful without having to get bought by Google to return any profit. That’s a sort of success I find fascinating. (via)

CERN has created an in-browser version of… the first web browser. It accurately displays like a green-screen terminal, including key clicks. Watching the screen draw gives me flashbacks to playing MUDs.

Adding Vi To Your Zsh. Can you add vi-like keybindings to tcsh? (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Art comics links. It’s a link to more links, but it’s all worthwhile stuff. Be prepared for difficult but rewarding reading.

2013/09/292013/09/28

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/29

Moved 20 servers to new hardware this week. Normally my workplace doesn’t get very active until snow hits. Normally. Anyway, going for the long sentences this week.

Why I moved away from Microsoft ASP.NET. I agree with everything in this. I’m overgeneralizing, of course, but there’s a certain diminishing return in how easy you make any programming language.
In which I revisit the pastimes of my misspent youth. The last 2 sentences are a nerd experience I am sure we’re all had.
The Floppy ROM. Software via record. If you ever wanted to be able to see a head crash as it happens on your storage medium, this is the way. (via)
Chart of Electromagnetic Radiation. You’ll need to/want to zoom in. (via)
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring. I’ve linked to a review of the book before.
Paula Deen X Machine. Baked goods and graphs, two of my favorite categories of thing. (via I forgot, sorry)
The new Amazon tablets are nice, but there’s no video out. You have to use their network service. This is what makes me leery of newer tablets and phones; as it becomes easier to use network bandwidth to replace physical connections, you become dependent on a separate company to use your own hardware.
Vim documentation in PDF form. Maybe print it, maybe don’t. (via)
Salesforce Architecture. I like seeing how the really, really huge server setups work, but I doubt I’ll ever have to handle one; how many are there outside of Google/Amazon/a couple other companies? (via)
Obstacles to future proofing home automation. At that level of hardware, you can’t assume everything’s going to talk 802.11 or have an Ethernet port.
Tape rescues big data. I need to set up a larger backup system at work, and it might be tape. I hate tape, but I hate it less than the alternatives.

Your unrelated link of the week: Proper Opossum Massage. Yes, it’s a serious video, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

2013/09/222013/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/22

This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!

Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
The Walkman Archive. (via)
Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
Kickstarter for open source. (via)
Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
Atari box art.
Atari box art parody.

2013/09/152013/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/15

I think I’m finally catching up on the backlog.

Unix: Flexibly moving files with lftp. I usually copy and paste a shell script together.
BANCStar source code. In that sort of environment, there’s no good or bad code. It has moved beyond such considerations. (via)
The Lenna Story. About the 1972 Playboy centerfold image used to test image compression. I mentioned it once before in passing. (via)
If you find regular expressions difficult, putting another layer of expression on top doesn’t help. (via)
How not to check the validity of an email address. I had a similar experience at an old job in 1999, where a coworker set a site’s main page to get all news stories and then showed the 10 most recent. This started to really slow things down when we reached over 5,000 stories… (via)
Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services. A PDF of slides. (via)
It’s described as “the best programming fonts“, but it’s really the most popular monospaced typefaces. Who cares about correct language – it has visual examples. (via)
Phone keypads could have been very different. (via)
Sudo Mastery’s first draft is complete. You can buy it now and get updates as it gets polished.
Have yourself a keysigning party. GPG is complicated. I know there’s reasons, but still, this is the sort of thing that would be better with as little barrier to entry as possible.
The Internet, via Commodore64 and Neuromancer.

Your unrelated link of the week: The Alan Lomax recordings.

2013/09/082013/09/04

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/08

By the time you read this, I’ll have already been sitting on an island for a few days. There’s so much stuff to post lately I’m scheduling material a week out.

Have you used the grep replacement ‘ack‘? There’s a Twitter feed of tips for it.
A horrible programming idea, so bad I can’t tell if it’s trolling. (via multiple places)
Links at the previous item led me here: Breaking Systems for Fun and Profit.
A tiny fatmac. It’s adorable.
Beautiful Code, from Rob Pike, described by Brian Kernighan.
That previous link was found via this reimplementation of Pike’s grep in Go. The “Practice of Programming” book mentioned is one of my favorites.
The SCUMM Diary. The SCUMM engine could arguably be as big an influence as the Quake engine on game history. (via)
This is a very nice keyboard.
Managing sshd in Ansible, cross-platform. A sequel to last week’s Ansible/Lucas link.
UNIX pioneers remember the good times. These anecdotes seems to illustrate the personalities of their tellers/perpetrators. Or at least I imagine they do. (via)
NTP reference clock statistics. (also via) When milliseconds matter. Also, yay graphs!
WTF Visualizations. A counterpoint to the previous well-illustrated link. I read through a bunch of the nonsensical graphs and started to feel disoriented. (also also via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Scout, by Malachi Ward. A self-contained sci-fi story.

2013/09/012013/09/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/01

Another week of links completed early. And there’s a lot, so get clicking!

1BSD, the installation. Interesting to see the procedure and the tools used.
Over the Rainbow, polychromatic type from Microsoft. I don’t know if this is as exciting as they seem to think it is.
Do your own backups. Yeesh, what an unfortunate event. I’m fixing up my backups now, after my own troubles.
Operating System Development series. Dry but interesting. (via)
Windowing operating systems are too messy, too restrictive. From 1984. (via)
Home Automation via the Internet. For those who don’t want to deal with x10.
Chess implemented in Sed. No en passant? Sheesh, I was on board until that point. (I’m making a joke) (via)
Managing sshd in Ansible. Ansible’s getting more popular, it seems.
Remember that PDF compression/scanning error I mentioned a few weeks ago? Xerox has fixed it for their devices, and the patch is available. One of the ways to apply the patch is to print the file to a copier, via LPR/raw. Firmware updates via printing – that seems like a good and bad idea all at the same time.
JAVASCRIPT MESS. 45 different computers all emulated in Javascript. A Javascript Mac SE, for instance.
An XKCD cartoon slightly related to the previous link.
Learn to code. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The remix of this 1997 Kid’s Guide to the Internet – somewhat NSFW, and has all the best moments. More from EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.

2013/08/252013/08/22

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/25

This week, I’m opinionated on every link.

An 80s computer ad that got almost everything correct. It used to be sci-fi environments were super-clean – now they’re dirty, with ubiquitous electronics. That’s something that could be picture-blogged to prove, but I ain’t doing it.
Bunnie Huang does “exit interviews” when he stops using equipment. Given his electronics knowledge, he goes into a lot of detail, including pictures through a microscope. Speaking of this, how has my ancient HTC Incredible survived 3 years of trips into a salt mine? I don’t know.
InterTwinkles, open source group decision making software. Don’t know how well it works, but it certainly seems like the right idea. (via)
Turning the Apple //e into a Lisp machine, part 1. They don’t actually get to the Lisp machine part, but it talks about how Apple computers could load data through the audio jack. I remember doing that with a tape player, too. It sucked. (via)
kOS. It’s so minimal that I am not sure what it can do or how to use it, but it’s also so minimal that I’m sure there must be something to it. (via)
Building a Chording Keyboard. I’ve mentioned the Microwriter and Twiddler before, but this article goes into a lot of detail about the actual construction of a home-made unit. (also via)
Book review: The Healthy Programmer. It may or may not make you exercise, but it will make you feel a little guilty about sitting and reading the web like you are doing right now.
Hyphen, en dash, em dash, minus. So few people know there’s a difference. (via)
ASCII Art. History of, examples, and so on. (via, with video)
Five Useful Git Tips. Git tips come up all the time, but this one is interesting because it’s using “showterm“, which lets you make text-based animations? movies? to show a work process in a terminal. I think I may have linked to something similar before, but this is good.
How to Avoid the Emacs Pinky Problem. A neat idea, but some of the suggestions are actually going to make it worse. (via)
Vim: revisited. Decent ideas, and the links at the end are good further reading. There, I’ve posted on both sides of the editor issue. (via)
The problem with Vim. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the Scary Godmother Doll. One of my favorite illustrators, building a doll. I met the creator years ago in Pittsburgh; she is an astonishingly energetic person.

2013/08/192013/08/14

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/18

Had this one done before the last Lazy Reading. There are so many things to see and think and do in a day, and they’re not even all on the Internet. You get only the Internet ones here, though.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News. Found on Hacker News, of course, and I suspect the title was designed to get clicks from there. Some interesting thoughts on how people read.
Facebook is like a television that monitors to see how much you are laughing and changes the channel if it decides you aren’t laughing hard enough.
Unix routing. It’s actually Linux routing, but if you avoid the Linux-specific parts, it’s a useful introduction.
ASCII cheat sheet.
How to build a user-level CPU profiler. Followed by Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles.
Mediagoblin. I haven’t tried it, but the idea is a good one. As long as we don’t have to call it GNU/Mediagoblin.
I was going to make a joke about not using software I can’t name out loud without sounding incomprehensible, but then again, I’m using BSD. Too late for that joke.
The Future of Programming. Take the time to watch this. The list of resource links is enough to fill several afternoons with reading. Also, it’s not yet another TED talk where someone is trying to communicate excitement rather then information. (via)
If I’m going to link to Reggie Watts, why not look at one of his music videos? Normally that would be an Unrelated Link, but I just made it related from the previous item, yay! (link contains naughty language.)
Go for system administrators. (via)
Git + webcam = lulz. This could be fun or scary or both. (via)
Retro video games, delivered. (via) I still hope to build a MAME box someday.
0.9999999999 repeating = 1.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Boulet’s Long Journey. Get ready for a lot of scrolling. I know there’s a lot of really good French comics that I don’t see just because I don’t speak the language. (This one’s in English, but the cartoonist is French.)

2013/08/112013/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/11

Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”

Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
A crash course in tmux. (via)
Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)

Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.

Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.

2013/08/042013/07/31

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/04

These have been very easy to create over the last few weeks; there’s been a torrent of reading. Can I say torrent without making it sound like this is all downloaded large files? The word is overloaded. Anyway:

How emacs changed my life, from I think the creator of Ruby. (via)
Autodesk uses Creative Commons right.
British kids in the early 80’s, using computers. Might induce nostalgia for some.
Forth – The Early Years. (via)
The Collapse of the Animal Crossing Economy. I am entertained by the intersection of games and economics. (via)
Tagsistant, a tag-based filesystem. Works via command line, which is unexpected. (via Tim Darby on users@)
Git and GitHub Secrets. (via)
IE vs. murder rate. Correlation, rather than causation, but still funny. (via)
toybox, a BSD-licensed command line environment for Android. I mentally said “so what?” until I saw the “Why is Toybox?” presentation. It’s an excellent talk that makes a sequence of good points about many topics on licensing and utility, and I recommend making time for watching it. (first link via)
The Confused Deputy, an explanation of capabilities. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)

Your unrelated link of the week: What goes on when you are not there!

2013/07/282013/07/25

Lazy Reading for 2013/07/28

So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.

The FatMac cooler. Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
Note the embroidered dragonflies.
Early mobile and video phones. Decades early. Look at the slideshow.
Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
Best Open Source games. Dunno how many work on any BSD. (via)
The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
The GREP test, an excellent standard for code. (via)
What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky? (also via)
Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
People are really starting to pile on Microsoft. (I already started) Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market. Maybe ubiquity is a better word?

Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!

2013/07/212013/07/17

Lazy Reading for 2013/07/21

Last week was relatively light, but somehow this week I read a zillion interesting things. It’s been too dang hot to do much else, other than flop in a chair and point a fan at my head.

Chopping up CSV files. Tabular format will never die, and for good reason.
Reanimated: The story of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. I like this idea that someone can just keep working on a project long after the originating company disappeared, just to improve it for their own benefit – no mention of open source or even a plan for it. See also Oblivion Lost or Complete for some of my personal game fix/improvement modification favorites. (via)
I don’t think this systemd/Debian news is accurate in its reasoning, and they don’t say what’s going to happen with non-Linux Debian. However, it’s still crappy, any way you slice it. (via)
The paranoid #! Security Guide. Lots of details that won’t necessarily apply to your BSD system, but the descriptions of various attacks are neat. (via)
Another reminder of how easy it is to deal with a lot of text data at a Unix-ish command line. (via)
Those ssh password attempts are still going, and have been for a decade. (via)
Don’t care about the story, but I like the dragonfly illustration.
Linus Torvalds swears a lot. The problem is not ‘office politics’ as he sees it, but that if you swear all the time as the leader of a project, it becomes commonplace. Linus really has to really freak out for people to notice something new. There’s other issues, like how other people emulate the behavior, but I’m pointing out the ‘verbal base sweariness’ of a project affects the entire tone.
Quine Relay, where programming languages write each other. The Ouroboros illustration is appropriate. (via many places)
History of emacs and vi keys. I like how this shows that the command styles in both editors was shaped by the available hardware. (via)
Fear and Loathing in Debian^H^H^H^H^H^H/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd). A wonderful rant about the creeping complication of operating systems. Let’s place bets on when people start complaining about Linux bloat. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Your unrelated link of the week: Bones Don’t Lie. An anthropologist who blogs about various discoveries of human remains. I really enjoy blogs where someone is talking about a subject they care about – not to sell a product, not to be paid (directly), but just because they like the topic and they want to share it with others. Of course I would think that, wouldn’t I?

2013/07/142013/07/13

Lazy Reading for 2013/07/14

Busy, busy week.

An in-depth programming language comparison. These can be fun for reinforcing your language choices, but also interesting just for the depth of comparison. Spoiler: Java can be crazy slow; Perl can be crazy fast. The page has lots of charts which always make me happy. The quotes at the end per-language are enjoyable. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
PC-BSD is using a content delivery network for their image delivery – that’s a good idea. It’s very hard to get people to consistently use mirrors, even if they are consistent and local.
A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts. Nerf guns are fun, charts are great, so that whole article is the bestest. (I think via)
1,200 computer interfaces from the movies. See this link for the story, and this link for more details and some new interfaces to that huge quantity of visual information, about visual information.
80’s childhood. It’s linkbait, but I like the sort of burst of how personal electronics looked at that point in time.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan fight scenes.

2013/07/072013/07/06

Lazy Reading for 2013/07/07

A U.S. holiday and very warm weather has made this a less intense week. At least for links.

Someone help. A problem I never anticipated. (via)
Git Cheat Sheet. This one’s for printing. (via)
Real Life Tron on an Apple ][gs. (via)
Neocities, an excellent idea. Follow the suggested links. (via)
Mandelbulber, a cross between Electric Sheep and Xaos. (via I forget)
A drawing of the Internet (ARPANet) in 1977. The whole thing. (via)
Bunnie Huang’s making an open laptop. Won’t be cheap or easy, but it’s still neat.
Vim 7.4a hits beta.

Your unrelated link of the week: A new Cyriak-animated video, this time for the band Bloc Party.

2013/06/302013/06/29

Lazy reading for 2013/06/30

Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!

This short story from 1954 might serve as a reason to avoid single system image computing… (via Sascha Wildner)
Vim and Ctags tips and tricks. (via)
Psygnosis game box designs. Nostalgia for some, neat art for anyone else. (via)
50 years of ASCII, and here’s the table it comes from. Some other neat links there, too. (via)
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. If you like stories about Feynman, who was a very interesting person, you may want to read Feynman, the comic book. I met the writer, Jim Ottaviani, years ago, and he was very energetic about both science and comics. Look up his other work if that sounds interesting – which it should. Here’s a sample from the Feynman book. (via)
Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
Building a Cray at home. Similar to this previously-linked idea. (via)

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)

Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)

2013/06/232013/06/23

Lazy Reading for 2013/06/23

I was going to make excuses for a low link count because of being on the road this week – but somehow I managed to find a lot to read anyway. We all win!

Dragonflies with brain-tracking backpacks. Not DragonFly-relevant except for the subject creature. (via)
Speaking of the actual bug, my daughter caught a dragonfly for me. That moth, incidentally, wasn’t as dead as I thought it was…
Roguelikes breakdown. It’s an overview of roguelike games, which may not contain any surprises for you… the screenshots of graphical versions are nice, however, and there’s a lot of links to roguelike games at the end. (via)
“If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?” Talking about APIs and how you should not trust your data to companies that won’t let you access it the way you want. Also, that’s a great pull quote, which is why I’m the second one to use it. (via)
Great Works in Programming Languages. This is a list of titles but not links to the actual documents, though some (all?) are freely available. At least a few of you reading this just said, “Hey, I know what I’m doing this afternoon!” (also via)
Rewriting history. It’s about shell history, though unfortunately Bash-specific.
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Playable online. (via multiple places)
I enjoy old analog computer(ish) pictures, so here’s two.
Here’s another: the first stored program computer was 65 years ago as of yesterday.
PDP-11 systems, still in service. Doesn’t saw what they are running. (via)
Fax machine evolution, an animated gif. (via)
The Pet Shop Boys don’t like BSD. Yeah, it’s a typo, but a funny one.
Here’s an NSA/PRISM joke; one of many.

Your unrelated link of the week: Who you gonna call? This kills me because there was some obvious prop work and setup just to create this 7 second joke.