Lazy Reading – Page 33 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/05/262013/05/25

Lazy Reading for 2013/05/26

A really packed week, this week.

Interview with Donald Knuth (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Garry’s Mod on DragonFly. We need that linuxulator working on x86_64. (thanks, tuxillo)
Exxon used to be in the processor business? (via)
PDP-11 in your pocket. (via)
I’ve mentioned before how news aggregators go in cycles: Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News, which might be reaching the peak of its cycle. (via)
Another review of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.
And I don’t think I’ve noticed that Unix column before.
Dennis Ritchie’s earliest known C compiler, now on GitHub. (via)
Why makefiles indent target lines with a single tab character. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Computer Beach Party, with backstory and interview (via) Not recognizably Unixish.
A very in-depth exploration of SSH keys. (via)
The Real Origins of Tumblr. Related: I often link here to Trivium. (via many places)
UK readers may find this ZX joke funny.

Your unrelated link of the week: Superman’s Ultimate Crotch Kick.

2013/05/192013/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2012/05/19

Super-compact links week!

New Vim 7.4, soon. It’s mostly because the patchlevel is going to exceed 999.
10 Golden Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea. (via I forget)
Stop Avoiding Regular Expressions Damn It. Iffy example, but correct sentiment. (via)
Ode to a shipping label. (via)
The Luck of the Listserv. (via)
Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. (PDF) (via)
DragonFly-specific improvements in the Phoronix test suite.
Hand-drawn Emacs instructions, and printable. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Gauld, a U.K. artist who makes some very entertaining minimal cartoons (recently published), has the best inspirational poster.

2013/05/122013/05/11

No Lazy Reading

I’m inexplicably short on links this week; I blame my schedule/the nice weather for much for much of the U.S./the class I’m teaching ending/my trip to TCAF for this. More Lazy Reading next week! Meanwhile, I have a book review coming up as an alternative.

2013/05/052013/05/05

Lazy Reading for 2013/05/05

Lots of links, not a lot of commentary, this week. Enjoy!

What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? The first very extensive answer is actually all vi, not vim. (via)
Found via previous link: vi / vim graphical cheat sheet.
The site where that image site sells a vi emulator for Visual Studio/Word/Outlook. I can totally understand why you’d want that.
Memory of a Broken Dimension, a game that starts as a command-line shell and breaks out into a 3D glitchy world. This is what Tron should have been. Mac/Windows only right now, unfortunately. (via)
TCP Headers in Lego. (via)
The History of ASCII art. (via)
QWERTY, DVORAK, KALQ.
Greytrapping.
“Hey, a dot out!“
Futuristic User Interface 14: Primitive Computer Visualisation [sic]

Your unrelated link of the week: Baman Piderman. It’s a series of Youtube videos. Just… roll with it.

2013/04/282013/04/28

Lazy Reading for 2013/04/28

These are getting denser and denser with links, in part because I’m looking harder and in part because Hacker News is becoming a better and better source of links; there seems to be a new go-to site for tech links every 8-12 months. Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News…

Intel has published a HTML5 development environment. I don’t even know if it would work on DragonFly or even any BSD, but I feel efforts to make tools that are actually, genuinely, crossplatform should be looked at. Defensive platform-specific content seems to still be a thing.
Slightly related: Building a Roguelike in Javascript. There’s several parts to this. (via)
The Eternal Mainframe. The argument is a little wild-eyed, but the underlying thesis: “Cloud == Mainframe” is valid. (via)
A Primer on IPv4, IPv6, and Transition. I signed up for an IPv6 tunnel recently, but I’m not directing traffic over it. I should be. (via)
How to make Your Open Source Project Really Awesome. The title is linkbaity, but the steps listed are correct. You will look at the “If you want to completely screw your users…” notes and nod to yourself, recognizing something that bit you. (via)
There’s still Apple ][ software being sold. I vaguely feel like I bought from there before… (via)
Everything’s being put into a git repo these days. (via) Wait, spoke too soon. (thanks, ‘bla’ in comments)
Scaling Pinterest. I like seeing what technology is used as a site transitions from “oh yeah, running on leftover hardware in my basement” to “we need to hire yet another person to keep this all running”. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Sometimes, repeated variations on a single theme can lead to some entertaining humor. Therefore, Dog Snack.

(Did I just sneak in two unrelated links? Yes I did.)

2013/04/212013/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2013/04/21

I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…

For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.

2013/04/142013/04/13

Lazy Reading for 2013/04/14

We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.

E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
Workflow in Tmux. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)

2013/04/072013/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2013/04/07

It’s a week past Easter and I’m actually tired of eating chocolate. I never thought I’d say that.

On fat men and jellybeans, about how the press is reporting DDOS attacks. Related: Reporting on tech stories is very difficult; there’s very little photogenic material. I’d love to have more pictures on the Digest, but what would I show?
Lisp: A Language for Stratified Design. (PDF) There’s got to be a few readers that will find this a very enjoyable read. (via)
If you’re using Google Chrome, check your extensions list. Even though it’s not supposed to be possible, I had an spyware extension auto-install itself, from a page that I was going to link here – but now will not.
Music From Mathematics. Electronic music created with an IBM 7090. (via)
At first I was like “Yeah, yeah, another terminal emulator”, but then I watched the demo movie for Terminology and was quite impressed. It doesn’t seem to exist in dports/pkgsrc yet. (also via)
April 1st always leads to a number of announcements of varying quality. I like OpenBSD’s announcement, though.
The Untold Story behind Apple’s $13000 Operating System. The article hypes up something that wasn’t that exciting, but I like the pictures of the old Apple ][ material. (via)
Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me To Use Vim Was Wrong. Spoiler: he uses Vim. But: The author makes a very good point about how to get there. (via)
How the Chess Set Got Its Look and Feel.
HOWTO turn your shell prompt into a hamburger. The advice is for a Unicode-friendly Mac shell; don’t know if this works on DragonFly. (via)
Start talking about nail polish, finish by talking about the limited 16-color palette of early PC computers. (via)
Hello World cake. Based on a programming language called Chef where programs look like recipes. I can’t even make these things up. (via)
Dragonflies are Monsters.

Your unrelated link of the week: nothing. I didn’t find anything off-the-wall enough to use here. Geez.

2013/03/312013/03/30

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/31

I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.

Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
Mainframe computer supercut. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.

2013/03/242013/03/23

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/24

It’s still snowing in my area, which is unusual. And great!

An IBM Selectric being gutted, in stop motion.
Apple is Losing the War – Of Words. I’m not interested in it for Apple, but rather the casual reference to the huge quantity of astroturfing going on, all the time, from major tech companies.
Following up on my earlier tweetspam post: World’s Best Spam. Remember, recommendations from others is the most effective persuasion method to get people to buy, so there’s a big economic incentive to create positive recommendations. (via)
Related: The Economics of Spam. (via)
se, a modernized, screen-oriented ed. (via)
Where the symbols “+” and “-” came from. (via)
A Partial History of Headphones.
Geometric shapes in Latex. I’m sure someone will find this useful. (via)
“The Kung Fu Killing Machine DragonFly” See the second cover. I have this actual series in paper form; it’s great. (via)
That Afrodisiac comic from the previous link is available from the publisher; there’s a PDF preview.
Continuing – the best blaxplotation homage ever is Black Dynamite.
I never promised I’d stay on topic here.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: French cartoonist Boulet knocks it out of the park again.

2013/03/172013/03/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/17

You know what stinks? I find a really cool thing online somewhere, early in the week, or even in a previous week, like today’s unrelated link. Between me finding it and this always-on-Sunday post, other people encounter it, the link gets reposted everywhere, and it’s old hat by the time you see it here. Yeah, I’m complaining like it’s hipster linking!

Has anyone noticed how there’s been an explosion in nontraditional peripherals lately? Seriously, follow those links. I know there’s more.
A Roguelike Primer. An excellent overview of a lot of different roguelikes. I didn’t know NetHack had an isometric view. (via)
There’s a programming language called Quylthulg. That makes me happy, in a D&D/roguelike kind of way.
Abandoned Apples. I feel bad about the Apple ][ units, and the fatmacs. (via I forget)
yes `yes no`. The comments on the linking page note how the linking description is all wrong (and here’s corrections), but one comment is fun: shell Russian Roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click* (via)
A note about Google Reader’s demise from an interview with one of the creators. It strikes me that there aren’t more people mad that RSS feeds are hard to find. There’s lots of conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and other places, and I can’t see them without getting an account for each, and logging in. The overall effect of this separation is that it’s hard to follow any one source.
The Thing, an art BBS.
Here’s a chart of possible Google Reader replacements, plus my query earlier this week let to a number of comment suggestions. tt-rss looks like a good candidate, because I don’t have to worry about someone deciding not to run it anymore. There’s also newsbeuter, though maybe that’s too minimal.

Your unrelated link of the week: I almost can’t tell this is a parody. Actually, it’s more like a double level of parody. Seen on this inexplicable, wonderful Tumblog; found via arts inscrutable.

Bonus link: Dog Snack Episode 3.

2013/03/102013/03/10

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/10

I managed to come up with a lot of links this week, somehow, despite the start of the class I’m teaching in addition to normal work. And Summer of Code’s coming up! And we’re due for a release relatively soon! I may appear somewhat… stretched over the next few weeks.

Hey, other people are noticing that odd linkspam email I’ve been getting. (via)
The followup: Don’t share that infographic spam. I’m pretty sure I’m the ‘one reader’ mentioned by the author, since I mailed him about the previous story.
I always enjoy stories about troubleshooting strange performance problems.
We need something like this Red Book idea for pkgsrc/DPorts.
Ode to the Semicolon. I love semicolons; I use them more than an em dash. (via)
The Maker Map. You may find this useful for building resources. I’m gaining one near me soon. (via)
The Book-writing Machine. Possibly the first book written with a word processor. (via)
Vim Git Gutter. A brilliant idea: show the git diff as you work in Vim. (via)
Add everything to Vim! Add nothing to Vim! (via a long twisty path of links)
An HTML5 roguelike, THE ROYAL WEDDING; nicely done. (via)
Hey, the Digest is on Google Plus, or at least the RSS feed is.
Smallest analog computer ever made. This is what computers should look like. (via)
List of inventors killed by their own inventions. No good reason to link this other than it’s a longer list than I thought it would be. (via)
This PHP/MySQL assessment made me laugh. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I’m the Computer Man. I always thought the mid-1990s were sort of a Internet/computer teenager phase. Everything had potential but everything was also awkward. (via I forget, sorry!)

2013/03/032013/03/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/03

I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path. There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!

Puctuation obscurantism, punctuation humor; I like it all. (via)
Exporting your git repository. Found while looking for something else.
I want CTRL-D at a terminal to make something like this to happen.
Visual Representation of Regular Expression Character Classes. I like visual ways of classifying complex data.
Speaking of which: Anatomy of Data. Not sure how I found it.
Digital Files and 3D Printing – In the Renaissance? The title sounds a bit linkbaity, but the story of the 14th century map designed to be recreated with a graphing tool is pretty neat.
Postgres: The Bits You Haven’t Found. Advanced/odd Postgres usage. (via)
Breaking your arrow keys is the latest idea in improving Vim usage.
PC-BSD is moving to a ‘rolling release’ format, and also using the new pkg tools that are also in DPorts. Historic details on this new setup are available.
Fred, taking off.
Ten hours with the most inscrutable game of all time. I like the idea of Dwarf Fortress more than I actually like playing it. I’m somewhat afraid of it. It looks like this sounds.
That last comparison wasn’t necessarily fair, but it was fun.
If I’m going to talk about music like that, I should link Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
The Wizard of Pinball. I just want my own standup pinball or arcade cabinet game. Yes, yes, I know, MAME cabinet.
Appropriately this week, “Ball Saved”, page 1 and page 2 of a 2-page comic about pinball.
UnReal World, an Iron-Age roguelike. Apparently pretty brutal, and two decades in development. Runs on several platforms, but not BSD. (via)
You Are Boring. Some of the ‘boring’ items made me laugh. (via)
The first review of Michael W. Lucas’s Absolute OpenBSD, Second Edition is available.

Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.

2013/02/242013/02/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/24

A calm week, for once.

Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post. These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated. If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions. Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else. (via)
Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing. (via)
The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter. (via)
The Story of the PING Program. I could have sworn I linked to this before. I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk. (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want. (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic) Look at a sample page if you are curious.

2013/02/172013/02/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
“Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)

Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!

2013/02/102013/02/11

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/10

For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.

“Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
“It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.

2013/02/032013/02/03

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/03

No theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.

Here’s a good coincidence: I already had a link to post from Ycombinator about the rather scary Ken Thompson compiler hack. Note that the Ycombinator answers are generally, “Nah, this hack is extremely unlikely to happen.” Except Christian Neukirchen happened to note separately that this really happened as recently as 2009, with Delphi.
This poster doesn’t understand that “removing the license” is not a legitimate use of BSD-licensed code.
That crazy anti-BSD ranter on phoronix is getting a fan club – just what every troll desires, unfortunately.
OpenBSD is actually looking at paring down ports, which makes sense when you read why.
LearnYouAHaskell.com – a free tutorial on the programming language Haskell. It’s entertainingly written. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Javascript is the new Perl. I can see that. (via)
Courier Prime, a new version of the ‘traditional’ Courier monospace font. (via) Reading about Courier Prime to the end leads to a mention of Inconsolata as a good ‘coding’ font. Anyone tried it? Sans-serif monospace fonts are the most subtle way you can make your xterm look modern, I think. Update: Thomas Klausner just added courier-prime to pkgsrc, so you can try it now. Inconsolata is already there.
Who hasn’t thought about doing this with the computers in their house, really?
“Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them.“
A modem from the 1960s, communicating. I’d like this even if it didn’t work; the box is nice. I remember watching text scroll on screen like that with a 1200-baud unit. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Related to that: The sound of the dialup, pictured. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: MeTube: August sings Carmen ‘Habanera’. Might be NSFW, probably will make you mildly confused or uncomfortable. Here’s the ‘making of’ video which is all in German, I think. If that’s too much, try a recent Cyriak-animated video. I never thought I’d recommend a Cyriak video as the less disturbing thing to watch.

2013/01/272013/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/27

Whee!

This is a good thing.
This is a (description of) a bad thing. (via)
Linux is becoming the opposite of UNIX. (via makx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Found via the previous article: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.“
Arch/FreeBSD. This mixing is still weird. Don’t take this stuff seriously, yet. (via)
Gygax Magazine, a reinvention of gaming magazines that no longer exist. It’ll apparently include What’s New with Phil and Dixie, from the original Dragon magazine.
What does the middle initial “B” stand for in “Benoit B. Mandlebrot”? Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
So that’s where Markov chains came from.
The first computer image of a person, and of course it’s porn. (via)
Hey, that’s my haiku!

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Kyle Baker comics, available as PDFs for free. Go, read.

2013/01/202013/01/20

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/20

Ok, now posting this on the correct day…

If you are familiar with 2d/3d animation, web apps, game design or graphics programming, look at my alma mater. They’re hiring teachers… I’m teaching an open source class there this spring.
Kriegspiel, the board game. Kreigspiel, the computer game. Kreigspiel, the Avalon Hill game on my shelf, which is unfortunately not the same thing. Anyway, in the process of looking up that one game because I remembered the name, I found that one of the other games on my shelf might be available again. Silent Death is one of the the best miniatures games I’ve ever played. There’s still some continuation of those Avalon Hill games too. (Long chain of memories set off via)
A noble goal.
The 19A0s, visually somewhere between the late 1980s and the year 2000, with a Pinterest board to match. (via)
Message in a Binary Bottle, secret messages stuffed into the ROM of console games, years ago. (via)
For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade. I miss these. The closest thing to me that’s like these old arcades is this museum exhibit.
Same source: Inside one of the last pinball factories in the world.
This Thinkpad Chromebook actually gave me a ‘Shut up and take my money!’ gut reaction. My work laptop is a Thinkpad x220 and it’s one of the best laptops I’ve ever used.
30 Years of the Apple Lisa and Apple ][e. (via) Hey that’s neat I remember this oh my god I’m old.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Game, by Boulet. Goes with some of the links.

2013/01/062013/01/06

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/06

I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.

Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via)
2600, from 1985, in free collected form. (via)
Russ Cox’s writing. I’ve linked to some of it before. It’s all fun reading.
IRC is dead, long live IRC. Shows the first IRC server.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Some very good tutorial videos. Don’t worry, it’s just electrostatic discharge, wire safety, fun with capacitors, and how to make a Windows shortcut (via/via)