Category: Lazy Reading

I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week.  Merry almost Christmas!

• Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage.  (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
• Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk.  I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
• Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail.  This seems pretty slick.  Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more.  Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘  (via)
• How I got four errors into a one-line program.  All via git.
• Go for C programmers.  (via)
• Mars Code.  I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time.  (also via)
• I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
• XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general.  I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
• Why is grep always fast?  Here’s a very technical explanation of why.  There’s more.
• Bunnie Huang is building a laptop.  All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox.  (Bunnie mentioned previously here)  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine.  One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive.  (I’m licensed to operate it.)  There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic.    It can be a fun drive.  However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon.  (via)

I hope you like links, and lots of history.  It’s been a bumper crop this week.

• The Radio Shack catalog from 1983.  Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk.  For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte.  A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte.  Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002.  (via)
• Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download.  Found from a link to Unix Text Editing.  I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987.  (indirectly via)
• The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
• Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters.  The ancestor of the TTY.   It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter.  I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
• The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels.  I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style.  (via)
• Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports.  (via)  Warning: they’re all in Postscript.  Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
• If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel.  I had to read the solution twice to get it.
• Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago.  It’s true, and also makes me feel sad.  (via)
• Google60, Google via punchcard and printer.  It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun.  (via)
• If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general.  Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case.  It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it.  You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.

This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.

• Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools.  The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect.  Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
• “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive”  Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982.  I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work.   (via).
• While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format.  (via)
• And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California.  There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio.   Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
• Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401.  I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers.  I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on.  Well…  I can think of one that would be OK.
• The Enduring Object.  I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well.  It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
• The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide.  There’s some really neat board games in there.
• Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
• The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection.  An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA.  My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
• It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie.  This time, it’s  “Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“.  (via)
• The DuckDuckGo command line.  (via)
• Exploring Emacs.  Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff.  (via)
• “What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“.  A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference.  I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about.  I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things.  Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.

I had some interesting home network troubleshooting over the past week…

• What’s the “scroll lock” key on my computer for?  The article almost identifies it: it’s to allow scrolling up in the hardware terminal, if you’re on BSD.  Or for changing how navigation via arrow keys works in Excel, on Windows, as I’ve had to show to people a few times.  (via)
• “systemd requires HTTP server and serves QR codes” – not really, but it’s a long discussion of just what balance to strike between minimal and excessive for an operating system.  Also, it’s Linux, so it’s messy.  (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
• Why I Two-Space.  I thought this would be about two-space tabs, but it’s about something I care about more: space after the period at the end of the sentence.  (via)
• Simplify Your Life with a ssh config file.  I keep meaning to do some of these things.  (via)
• 9 Enhancements to Shell and Vim Productivity.  The last one, about keeping your config files in a git repo, is a good one.  Read the comments for some exceptional ideas.  (via)
• Huh.  42 really is the answer.  (via)
• CSRG‘s SCCS history brought to svn.  I like that old code can be revivified, so to speak.  (via)
• Commanding Your Text Editor.  Text editor tips in a ecumenical style.  More specifically, Textmate, Vim, and Emacs tips side by side.  (via)
• An Introduction to Graphviz via R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” Hip Hopera.  That… is one of the odder tutorials I’ve ever read.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Terrorism as Art.  An extended profile of Survival Research Laboratories at The Verge.  Even if you don’t like the content, the focus of the artist is remarkable.

Yay!

• What will you have: tea or chai?  Mapping out all the names for tea around the world.  I love etymology and tea, and I know there’s some tea drinkers reading…  (via)
• Speaking of tea, this London universal tea device sounds awesome.  (via)
• Uncle Miod’s machineroom.  There’s some pictures of some old hardware buried in there that was incredibly expensive when it first came out…   (via)
• This security issue is interesting because it’s a new kind of problem, but also depressing because it’s a new kind of problem.  (via)
• Apparently a packaging system is always a good idea.  (explanation)
• A patient explanation of /usr/local and a bit of UNIX file system history, too.  (via)
• The history of Unix from where it happened, Bell Labs.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t linked to that before.  Interesting trivia note: playing the original Space Travel game in 1969 cost $75 for the computer time.(via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf is having their annual $3+ comics sale.  There’s some really good books for cheap, there.  Of special note: From Hell, about Jack the Ripper, drawn by my favorite artist.  Wizzywig, mentioned here before as a fictional mishmash of real stories and rumors about hackers and BBSes and other things people need to be a certain age to remember.  The Ticking, drawn by Renée French, whose art should be familiar to fans of Plan 9 or Go.