Category: Lazy Reading

• The Cognitive Style of Unix (via) – I find this argument absolutely correct based on all my computer experience.
• Hacker News is apparently getting more of a general news bent, rather than the actual hacker news it started with.  (via)  That seems to be an easy trend for many tech sites that start out focused on a topic (Let’s cover this area of interest!) and eventually diffuse (Let’s cover all our reader’s areas of interest!).  It may be because that seems to bring greater subscriber numbers?  Slashdot would be a good example of this generalization.
• Note to self: Try to not do that with the Digest.
• This page has a lot more good places to visit, but I’ll just link directly cause I don’t have any more commentary to associate with it.
• Did you know there’s open source software for managing conferences?  Not conference calls, but full-on have-speakers-with-papers-and-attendees-with-a-schedule conferences?  It’s called Pentabarf, and it’s used for BSDCan, among other things.  I find the name funny, and it has funny origins.
• Well, if I’m going to have a Discordian link, I should have a BSD-related Subgenius link.  By the way: I can perform weddings.  You know, just in case that comes up.
• You know you’re important when the IETF needs to come up with a plan to deal with your retirement.  (via)  This is why it’s neat.  Go, look, because this is one of those parts of the Internet that will not exist this way again, ever.
• This article at The Register about how open source isn’t making it very far in app stores is more aggressive than exploratory, as Register articles usually are, but there are some good points: phone app stores are able to charge money because of the ease of the delivery system, which apparently trumps ‘free’.   It’s also more purpose-built; pkgsrc I bet would work on an Android phone, but there’s not many applications you could interact with, easily.

The end of year holidays intruded, so I haven’t had one of these for more than a week.  Sorry!  Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.

• Whenever I am tempted to throw family pictures or something similar online in a ‘cloud’ service, I will reread this Jason Scott essay on the ‘Yahoo!locaust’ and come to my senses. (via)
• There’s a trade-off between size and price for SSDs.  Past a certain point, any drive is generally ‘big enough’, and under a certain price, the cost doesn’t matter.  We’re reaching the magic point where those two trends cross, as with this OCX Vertex 2 SSD drive, 60G in size and only $120 at Newegg.  There’s lots of post-Christmas sales going on.
• How soon will SSD drives become normal and platter drives the anachronism, like single-core processors are today?  It took less than 5 years for CPUs, I think…  No link for this idea; this is just me theorizing.
• Tomas Bodzar pointed out this article about 1,000 core CPUs, which I dub ‘kilocore’.  He also linked to these logical domain/logical partition articles on Wikipedia.
• In this day and age, a website that supports a limited number of browsers and platforms seems anachronistic.  Still happens, though.  (via)
• This is neat: an online, persistent space game with exploration and combat.  Not EVE, but Lacuna Expanse, playable via web browser.  There’s lots of browser games out there, but here’s the interesting part: the game even has a fully exposed API.

So, informal poll time: do people like these Lazy Reading roundups?

• Numbers everyone should know.  (via)  I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else.  If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations.  You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand.  Think about that for a bit.
• The end of a faithful server.  (via)  I can sympathize.  Run any computer for some number of years without any issues, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
• A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’.  Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me.  It may be best to keep it that way.
• I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization.  Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product.  (via)  I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.
• Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good.  I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can.  It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera.  The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.

Whoops!  This should have gone up last night.  I’m almost waxing nostalgic for this one.

• Two words you never thought you’d see together: “heartwarming” and “single system image computing”.  I think this is how we should document everything for DragonFly.  (via)
• Apple’s bringing the App Store to the Mac platform, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Ani Dash has a writeup of the various “app store” platforms out there.  pkgsrc (and FreeBSD/OpenBSD ports) would certainly count.  Surprisingly, the application count for pkgsrc exceeds most of the other stores he lists.
• Aw, no more cassette Walkmans. (via)  Nowadays, it’s difficult to not take music with you wherever you go.   In the 1980s, there was no other way to bring your music with you, except maybe a lot of batteries and this.  I loved my crappy JVC dual tape deck.

I am totally stealing the horizonal evocative image idea from things magazine.

Some links!  I normally would save this for a Lazy Reading Sunday entry, but I want to clear the backlog:

• 10 vi tips and tricks. (via)
• Pomodoro Technique, a way of breaking work into half-hour chunks to keep yourself productive.  (via)
• More unusual Git tips.  (via)
• 10 Differences Between Linux and BSD.  Not that exciting, but I like the anecdote in item 4.