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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.

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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.

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

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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!

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Lazy Reading for 2013/09/15

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

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

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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.

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

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Lazy Reading for 2013/09/01

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

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.

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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.

 

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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.

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.)

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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.”

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.

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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:

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

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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.

Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!

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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.

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?

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Lazy Reading for 2013/07/14

Busy, busy week.

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

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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.

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

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Lazy reading for 2013/06/30

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

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)

 

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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!

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.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/06/16

This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser.  Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)

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PRISM, privacy, and what you make yourself

If you’ve been reading the Digest for a while, you’ve seen me talk about the value of hosting or running your own services.  It’s not too much of a surprise in my case; if you are working on an open-source operating system, you want to run it.  It’s good to get the experience, and you can run programs the way you want, instead of picking from whatever vendors happen to sell you.

The PRISM disclosure, which I am going to assume everyone is familiar with at this point, is another facet.  Every time you use another company for your email, your entertainment, your software, and so on, their information on you can be accessed.    This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by going from one webmail provider to another.  You can shop around, but notice that the author in that link effectively throws his or her hands in the air and says, “there’s no way out” by the end of the article.  This is because corporations work as collecting agents for the government, even if they don’t plan to do so.

That sounds drastic, but there’s legal frameworks in every country for governments to require companies to give up data on any person, on request.  It happens.  I’ve seen it myself; I worked for Time Warner for several years, tracking down cable modem user information and handing it over as compelled by law.  I know the lawyers at TW Corporate didn’t like doing it, but they didn’t have a choice.  (I have some horrifying stories about what people would do to themselves and each other.)

Companies are increasingly working to create services to sell, not products to buy.  A service never stops being consumed, so it forms an ongoing revenue stream.  I’m not saying this is bad; I firmly believe that a financial incentive to be paid improves services.  However, as only a consumer, you can end up not owning what you use.  Other people have pointed this out, and I don’t want to sound like a frothing crazy person… but it is relevant, though not necessarily as catastrophic as some people pronounce.

What I’m working towards here is a reminder that you should run your own software, and running it on DragonFly is the best way.  (Or some other operating system, I guess.  If you have to.)  Instead of trying to figure out what the least-bad commercial option can be, run it yourself.  Good for privacy, good for learning.  I know that’s not an option for everyone; fighting with Sendmail (for instance) is not an activity that many people pick voluntarily.  But, if you’ve been thinking of setting up a replacement for Google Reader, or hosting your own mail, or own blog, etc… there’s never a better time than now.

(Follow all those links for some good information; consider it an early Lazy Reading post)

 

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Lazy Reading for 2013/06/09

Not as wordy this week, but still wordy.  And linky!

  • Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI. A discussion of how old fake CGI can look better than modern, real CGI. This is an opinion I’ve had for quite a while, and my children pretty much ignore it every time I bring it up.  (via)
  • The Colby Walkmac, which predates the Mac Luggable.  Linked to because it includes good pictures of what the (external) hardware was like.  I find all the old ports interesting, since it’s all USB and the occasional eSATA these days… not that I’m complaining!  I’ve never had a good experience with a 9-pin serial port.  (via)
  • A brief education on escaping characters.
  • I get worried when remotely rebooting a server in a different town or even state.  In Praise of Celestial Mechanics covers much more stressful circumstances: interplanetary reboots.  Does Voyager 1 or 2 have an ‘uptime’ function?
  • The equivalent of what you are doing right now, 20 years ago.  I personally never got to see this; my experience was MUDs.  Speaking of which…
  • The Birth of MMOs: World of Warcraft’s debt to MUD.  MUD == MMO, Roguelike == Diablo/Torchlight, Doom == almost everything else.  There’s a number of game archetypes that haven’t changed in some time.  (via)
  • Playing with powerlines.  I used to work at a company that used these lines for data transfer.  It was neat technology, but it sure wasn’t easy to set up.  Imagine wiring a city but only being able to use Ethernet hubs.  Not switches, hubs.  That, combined with undersized ARP caches/MAC tables, made it really difficult.
  • OpenVPN on FreeBSD, which will come in handy for at least several readers, I’m sure, as the directions should apply to any BSD.
  • Is there anything DNS can’t be used for?  Cause now it’s domain-based mail policy publishing.  (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
  • “Have you tried DragonFly?” posts on various forums seem to pop up with some regularity.
  • Uses of tmux, explained.  A slide show talking about how tmux works.  (via)

Unrelated link of the week: I’ve had several deadlines and a mail server with issues this week at work, so this is all I got.

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Lazy Reading for 2013/06/02

Last week was a lot of very brief links.  I’ll go for verbosity this week…

  • Regular expressions and regular grammar.  I hope you like detailed explanations.  I’ve said it before: you should understand regular expressions.  The difference between knowing and not knowing is sometimes the difference between knowing how to finish a project, and being hopelessly swamped.  (via)
  • A plea for less (XML) configuration files.  From the same place.  I don’t advocate rejecting XML files out of hand like some people, but I think you need to have a certain existing level of complexity already in your program before you use XML.  For example, so complex that nobody will notice some XML sprinkled in there too.
  • Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid, a talk about the Internet from roughly the late 90s to the 2000s.  Some parts of this get farther into political notes than I usually care to read, but I like the point made with “Many women and men alike are using, not building, the web.”  I am frustrated by how the Internet is effectively one-way transmission for so many, like TV.  (via I forget, sorry)
  • Bringing Unix commands to a Windows world.  It’s about Cygwin.  I’ve installed Cygwin a number of times, but it’s such a strange hybrid I eventually stop after using it for whatever specific reason caused the first install.  These days, it’s almost easier to set up a virtual machine on a Windows system and just switch over as needed.
  • The Weird Stuff Warehouse.  How much does this look like your basement?  I like looking in stores like there cause there’s always some hardware item that seems to be worth resurrecting.  (via)
  • Open Source Game Clones.  I feel iffy about these things.  This tends to be viewed as “I want a free game”, not “I want the right to modify a game”.  Also, you could argue it takes revenue away from the original artists who work on a product when it copies the original game methodology, reducing the incentive to produce.  That could be debated, but I am certain of this: I wish people tried original rather than rehashed ideas in open source, because it has a much lower threshold for success.   You don’t need a studio to tell you when you can be published…  which is sort of the idea behind “indie gaming“, I suppose.  (first link via)
  • Remember those old not-a-desktop-not-a-laptop computers?  They looked like this image I saw recently.  I actually learned to use vi in a mild panic on a Sparcstation Voyager, which would be another device in that land between categories.
  • SSH Tricks, found by accident while I was searching for how to do per-host configs in ssh, so that I only had to type a short name and leave off the long suffix (like dragonflybsd.org) when connecting to a server.  Someday I might even get remote port forwarding over ssh correct.
  • USSR’s old domain name attracts criminals.  Somehow I doubt you can identify a criminal site by domain suffix that easily.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Massive Chalice, a Kickstarter for a new strategy and tactics game.  It’s by Double Fine, who has made some fantastic stuff, and it has permadeath, turn-based combat, randomly generated maps… it’s a roguelike!  It’s cross-platform, apparently, though I don’t know if it will work on any BSDs.