Category: Lazy Reading

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.

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.

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.