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Lazy Reading for 2012/03/18

I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day.  A nice full week’s worth of stuff.

Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger.  (via)  It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta.  If you like  postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/03/11

This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text.  I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute.  Thanks, Internet!  It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.

Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!

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Lazy Reading for 2012/03/04

Whee!

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Friends With Boys.  The whole comic is available online starting with the first page here and going on for about 200 more.  The full comic is only going to be online for a few days – hopefully enough for people to see it – and then you have to buy it.  (There will still be a preview.)  It’s a good story.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/02/19

Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots!   If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I’d welcome them.  I’m sure there’s more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these…

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak.  An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.

As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago.  The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously.  Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else’s burden.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/02/12

Hey, it’s snowing here!  Finally.

  • I remember when fractal zooming would bring a desktop computer to its knees.  Now, you can do it in a web browser.   (via)  This exists as a standalone application (x11/XaoS) too.
  • I see content from here get splogged, from time to time, and I think that’s what’s happening here.  Someone throws “BSD” into a content generator, with ads slapped on top of it?   Honestly, I’m not sure what it is.  (via)
  • Hammer 2 work is starting, as noted earlier this week.  Let’s see some details on a similar filesystem project, btrfs.  (via)
  • You should quit Facebook because privacy etc. you’ve heard it from me before.  The arguments are getting more thorough, though.
  • Here’s an article from independent game developer Jeff Vogel about serving a niche with your independent work.  I like his writing, plus if you squint your eyes and sorta look at that article’s point sideways, you could construe it as relevant for BSD.
  • For fun, spot the two things I mention/link to here frequently, in this somewhat hypey article about Tumblr.  (via)
  • An Economist article about shifting from computer to computer.   I read that and realized the one computer constant for me isn’t my desktop – it’s “~”.
  • If you ever played games on the Amiga, you may want to watch this movie.  It’s clips from a lot of Amiga games.  By a lot, I mean an hour and a half of footage total.  There were some really advanced games for the time there.  (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Shut Up About Cats.  The rest of that site’s good too.

Also!  On a related link, Venkatesh Srinivas, one of the DragonFly developers, is participating in a bike ride to raise cash for the Ulman Cancer Fund.  If you’d like to pledge  some money, he’ll feel better as he cycles a ridiculous 4,000 miles across the US.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/02/05

It’s like early spring here in the northeast US.  Which would be fine if it was actually spring.  I miss snow.

  • An explanation of the classic UNIX hierarchy.  (via thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  I’m behind any explanation that uses the phrase “accretion disk” to describe an organization.
  • Hipster BSD.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s based on this.
  • Would you like to have DNSSEC upgrading explained to you?
  • Hooray for Unicode!  (via)
  • What Commons Do We Wish For?  I was, briefly, technically, an AOL employee after the Time Warner merger in 2000.  I didn’t like the notion of working for a walled garden then, and I think that’s why Facebook and other companies irk me now.  Anyway, read that article for a good explanation of why that feeling is important.

Your unrelated link of the week: Top Shelf 2.0.  A small comics publisher that has put much of their comics online to read.  Their stuff on paper is worth buying too, as I have been doing for a while now.

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Lazy reading for 2012/01/29

This is the week of the funny, apparently.

Your totally unrelated video link of the week: The Necronomicon.  Pitch perfect.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/01/22

I even have some comedy in here this week.

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Tom Neely‘s Doppelganger.  Page 11 is my favoritest.

Another unrelated thing: David Shao, are you out there?  Can you get on IRC (EFNet #dragonflybsd) and help some people out with GEM/KMS questions?  Nobody’s been able to find you.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/01/15

Getting back into the rhythm, here…

Your unrelated comics link of the week: there’s a Freddy, and a dragonfly, but it’s not DragonFly BSD.  It’s still fun though.

 

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Lazy reading for 2012/01/08

I said posting would be more regular now that the holiday’s over, didn’t I?  I lied.

Your unrelated link for the day: The Restart Page.  (via)  Make your browser full-screen when trying any of them.

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Lazy Reading for 2012/01/01

Happy new year!  Regular posting should resume soon now that my holidays are over.

Your completely unrelated link of the day: Tiny Legs of Fire.  (video) Worth it for the origin of Beardslap.

 (Sorry about the giant text block.  This isn’t as readable as I’d like.)

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Lazy Reading for 2011/12/18

The links are sheer entertainment this week.  No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions.  Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me.  I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.

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Lazy Reading for 12/11/11

Last week was low on links, but this week is great!  I hope you have some time set aside.

  • This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11.  I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before.  (via)
  • Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
  • Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet )
  • nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently.  Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
  • This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point.  Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run.  (via)
  • Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
  • “Don’t Be a Free User” (via)  The last paragraph is the best.
  • An expanded grep and diff.  ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds.  Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult.  (via)
  • A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright.  This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference.  It doesn’t.
  • So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like.  You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI.   (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
  • I like this indicator light setup.  (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too.  I wish there still were computers like these.
  • While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station?  Here’s some pictures.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?

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Lazy Reading for 2011/12/04

Another week, another linkpile.

  • Here’s some old software.  I’ve got something older sitting on my shelf here, though.
  • A patch to DragonFly, taken from OpenBSD, submitted by Loganaden Velvindron and committed by Venkatesh Srinivas.  The patch isn’t that exciting, but it makes me feel cool to namedrop non-Americanized names.  If only I could pronounce them!
  • Speaking of which, there isn’t always a lot of comments on this Digest (which is good; a long series of comments on the Internet tend to be the result of trolling or inanity.), but the recent strlen() story led to some juicy details.
  • Man, I wish this NoteSlate device existed.  There’s the BoogieBoard, but it’s not quite the same.

I’ll make up for my relatively low number of links by asking a question:   Where do you go for your end of year gift giving?  Where do you wish people would go to buy you gifts?  I’m looking for suggestions for a gift guide.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Gun Show.  This one and that one are my favorites.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/27

Happy (post) Turkey Day for the U.S. readers!  A light link week this week.

  • Facebook is bad for the Internet.  ‘Gaslighting’ is a new term to me.  As that article points out, I can’t even put my posts to the Digest onto Facebook in any sort of automated way.  Facebook suggests that of course I’d love to retype them all by hand.  That’s not realistic.    Facebook doesn’t want any sort of useful external link to be visible to their customers.  Customers isn’t actually the right word; the customers are the advertisers.  What would be a better word for the users?  Crop?
  • “the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.”  It’s a very long essay that points out people are confusing brand identity with personal identity.  (via)
  • You know what would be good?  More conversations about games on BSD, cause it could use some attention.  Oh hey there you go.
  • A Dragonfly lamp (via Julian Gehtdichgarnichtsan)

Your unrelated link of the week: Animals Talking In All Caps.  It is what it says it is.

 

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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/20

Hey, the date’s sorta palindromic!  Sorta.

  • “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors” – a video description of the physical parts of the Internet.  Remember when MAE-East or MAE-West would have a bad day and half the Internet felt it?  Really, half.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating. (via)
  • Google has a verbatim search mode now, for those of you who regret the loss of ‘+’ as a required search term designator.  (via and also sort of via)  There’s always alternatives.
  • “The expr program is a real piece of crap.”  Laser-focused complaining about a small program that’s had 4 decades to improve, and hasn’t.
  • “Mechanics for Pure Aesthetics”  The videos are interesting, and I’m linking to this because so much of what I post here and deal with is focused computer work.  Everything is a tool, with a purpose, and a result that you expect.  This idea of machinery or even software having a purpose other than result generation is underexplored.  There’s lots of tools to create art, but there’s little that is art itself.  Even with that general lack, we still get excited when the edge of some sort of aesthetic appeal nudges its way into the materials we use.  You could argue that Apple’s success (for instance) comes from being the one company that consistently thinks about what a product is, instead of what it does.
  • If you use fastcgi, you may need the patch that this blog post talks about.  Also, apache-mpm-prefork is the better choice for Apache on DragonFly.
  • “DragonFly mug shot“

Your random comic link of the day: Calamity of Challenge.  Also here.  And here.  If this artist’s way of drawing grabs you like it grabs me, he has pages and commissions for sale.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/13

I’m going for more verbose linking.  Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it?  If not – too late!

  • NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“.  He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
  • It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux.  “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“.  Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
  • I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation.  Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
  • Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design.  (via)   The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF.   The book for the class should make interesting reading.  Oh, you can see the class details, too.
  • FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”.   Get on the mailing list if this interests you.  Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented.  There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
  • If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches.  (via)  I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.

Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics.  Slightly NSFW, sometimes.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/11/06

A bumper crop of articles to read this week.

Random unrelated link for the week: “War Photographer“.  This animation makes me so happy.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/10/30

It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy!  Keep going, sky!

Unrelated link of the week: Manly Guys Doing Manly Things.  Most of the jokes revolve around games you may or may not know, with the occasional realistic experience that I’ve had myself.

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Lazy Reading for 2011/10/23

Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf.  This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.