Category: Lazy Reading

The mini-theme this week is that some of these links go to lists of more links, so I’m sure there’s a rabbit hole in here for you somewhere.

• Paypal security story.  (via)
• LETTER BOMB TRANSFER PROTOCOL.  (via)
• textual-paint.  (via)
• Plain-text journaling.  Not necessarily recommending this.  (via)
• Why is DNS hard to learn?  (via)
• Warren Ellis’s UbuWeb Top Ten.
• The only remaining pre-1950 valve computer.
• Free and open source software projects are in transition.
• tildeverse.org.
• Wrench button to root.
• Forthcoming books.  (scroll down for the list of suggestions)
• CRT Rejuvenators.  (via previous)
• The Garden of Computational Delights.

Whee

• General Turtle, Inc. and Educational Machines.
• From the previous link, some in-the-know shirts.
• Also from that link, Lessons from METAFONT.
• Also also, The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories.  Far better than I expected.
• PNG glitches, one and two.  (via)
• Miniatua, tiny classic computer reproductions.  (via)
• Operation Razit: Raze Reddit.  The long explainer.
• Related: There’s no excuse to add content to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit right now.  The actual title is much longer.  (via)
• Charlie Bit My Finger should be acquired for the nation.
• Browser game: Fallen London.  About the game.  (via)
• 20 GOTO 10.  (via)

A short list this week.  I’m heading into the final month(s) of an ERP replacement projects at one of my jobs, so it ain’t going to get better for a while.

• Where does my computer get the time from?  (via)
• Software Modernization Failures.  (follow the whole thread)
• Bell Labs vs “East Coast” Management style of AT&T.  There’s some tangential BSD history in there.
• System Shock: The oral history of a forward-thinking PC classic.  (via)
• cooperative.computer.  I am surprised this didn’t exist years ago.  (via)
• Ctrl-Zine.  I like that you can print and fold your own.  (via)
• Macintosh Emulation and Printing using Mini VMac on a PocketCHIP.  (via)
• How design is governance.  (via)

Nostalgia / game styling is the inadvertent theme of the week.

• 1-bit pixel art of Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave off Kanagawa”.  The layout of that site is fun.  (via)
• SpaceTraders: an API based game.  (via)
• From comments on the previous source: Text Elite.
• The seven programming ur-languages.  (via)
• The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware.
• The Chonky Pocket computer.
• The Flexowriter which was I think the output from a version of the Whirlwind.  (via)
• Before UNIX daemons, there were gnomes.
• AutoHotKey, which I always thought of as compensation for Windows not having a shell.

Some links: The Next Generation in Graphics Part 1, talking about the colossal shift in gaming that was Doom/Quake, and different kinds of differential, explaining how GPS is corrected.  And here’s something unusual: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band tracks with single instruments separated out by AI.  You can more easily hear how unique John French’s drumming was/is.

VCF East photos.  Some of these machines are complete mysteries to me.

Large language model, via the command line.

Audiobooks Without Audible.  Apple and Google have a financial incentive to make data loading that is on their platforms but outside of their marketplace as crappy as possible.  (via)

Sometimes updates are bad.  (via)

The Age of Average, which applies to operating system / open source development these days too, I think.