Category: Lazy Reading

No theme this week.

• Distributed Cooperation
• Copilot lawsuit.  Happening with images too but not as obvious yet.
• Barilla’s open source tool for perfect pasta.  Is the app open source?  Couldn’t tell.
• Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects’ alternate motherboard and firmware   (via)
• In praise of ffmpeg
• More Thoughts About Dongles.  2FA TOTP mechanisms are sorta The New Dongle, arguably.
• The wonderful tee(1) command
• One more MOS 7600 Pong: Coleco Telstar Gemini

Your unrelated music link of the week: Death In Vegas – Zugaga.  I heard it on the radio and thought it was a remix of something eighties – Vangelis?

No theme this week.

• Going where BeOS NetPositive hasn’t gone before: NetPositive+.
• Haiku Activity & Contract Report, September 2022.  (via)
• The most important standard in development today.
• Last chance to preorder the “50 Years” book!
• Bea Wolf, a story.
• ISC DHCP Server has reached EOL.  20 years ago this was the only real reliable DHCP server I could find.  (via)
• Make Things Bigger Part One.
• Exploring the Cutting Edge of Desktop ARM Hardware.  Not there yet.
• Retrospective: Adventure.
• The Floppotron 3.0.  (via)
• Community Governance Outside the Web’s Dictatorships.

“New commandline tools” is the mini-theme.

• UML: My Part in its Downfall.
• BSing at 300 Bits Per Second.
• The top 10 things about blog and IT you should know.  Clever.
• Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk.  (via)
• VSIG Lecture on the Public Packet Infrastructure.  (via)
• Software engineering practices.
• Open Book Abridged.
• The appeal of small computers.  (via)
• Projecting Parallels in Archi Comics.
• Awesome Terminals.
• Nerd Fonts.  Common terminal fonts with added image glyphs.
• Oh My Posh, prompt configs for any shell.
• Modern UNIX.

Your unrelated video of the week: Bollards.  SheepFilms are fun.  Also: Potato House.

• My Top 10 Favorite Imaginary Settings (Part I) and Part 2.
• On the strange joys of mainframe OSes and legacy tech that has survived into modern times.  (via)
• The MIPS ThinkPad, kind of.  I have one of these.
• the nevada national security site pt 4.
• Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers, follow-up.
• Stupid Shit No One Needs And Terrible Ideas Hackathon Toronto.  MMOPong, for instance.  (via)
• A short history of the drum machine.  (via)
• So when did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
• The Best Command-Line-Only Video Games.  Kinda a listicle and no BSD-specific checks, I know.  (via)
• Plan9port, cause of something I read.
• Oral Histories of Museum Computing.  (via)

3 months until Christmas!

• Building the future of the command line.
• Working Offgrid Efficiently.
• Alternatives to Bloatware, found in the previous link.
• Ranking Vance’s SF and Fantasy Novels.
• The VCF East Swap Meet is coming up.
• Computing’s Woodstock.  People in 1976 talking about their projects for the first time, like ENIAC and Colossus, no biggie.  (via)
• Espresso machine historic gallery.  (via)
• Atari 2600 joystick port history.
• The Prelinger Archives.  Hours of ephemeral video.
• Running PalmOS without PalmOS.  (via)
• The phrase “open source” (still) matters.
• Because We Still Have Net 1.0.
• Authenticated SMTP and IMAP authentication attacks and attempts we see here.
• I don’t know how to solve prompt injection and You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI.
• The Quintessential Dungeon.  (via)

Oddities this week.

• Text-to-image for my inbox.  Random subjects into pictures.
• How we monitor the temperature of our machine rooms.  Linked for the reminder I need to look at that hardware.
• Bootstrapping the Old fashioned Way.  So… painful!
• The Open Source Rotary Cell Phone, 2 years later.  Surely I linked it before.
• A retro style online SSH client to play Nethack.  (via)
• Connectix Quickcam, the first webcam.  Designed by a studio in Schenectady, NY, which I happened to visit just after the product release.
• The Nevada National Security Site.  Here’s part 2 and part 3.
• Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3.
• XScreenSaver 6.05 out now.

No default theme this week.

• The Codeless Code, coding koans.
• The Black Beast cyberdeck.
• The World of TSRan.
• THE SYNTHESIZER’S GREATEST HITS – A1 POSTER.  (via)
• Campaign Cartographer 3.  Software for making fake maps.  (via)
• The Sender Policy Framework.  Ranks up there with IPSec as possibly designed to make things worse, not better.
• The Things Spammers Believe – A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends.
• The Eternal Paradox.
• Pope Fibonacci.
• Roguelike Celebration 2022 speaker list, plus preview today.
• Syntactics Crystalwriter.
• Circuit Simulator.  (via)
• Enlightenment 2.0.

One of these is a pure nostalgia link for me.

• Games from the Trash: The History of the TRS-80.  (via)
• preventing loss dot jp2.
• Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC.
• Return to Monkey Island.
• SSH Tips and Tricks.  (via)
• Macintosh Classic II with e-ink display.
• Hacker News historical “I predict” statements; sometimes hilarious in hindsight.  (via)
• The Pitt Rivers Museum.  Old school museum; worth seeing in person but there’s nice images of the ‘Victorian Age of Pilfering’ artifacts.
• Advent of Computing: Episode 89 – Forth.  (via)
•  The Public Packet Infrastructure.
• Large scale Internet SSH brute force attacks seem to have stopped here.
• Rotating food gifs.

This came together in about a day.

• Plua 2 continued: open source under GPL for your classic Palm.
• The ADAM74 terminal.  The ribbon cable does it for me.  (via)
• Retro UUCP/UNIX community?
• Indirectly from the above: A Compiler Writing Journey.
• Analyzing ScotRail audio announcements with Datasette—from prototype to production.
• Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers.
• PicoEMP.  You could really ruin someone’s day with this.  Or many someones. (via)
• ed is the standard editor.  (via)
• A Zen Guide to Paper and Pen Games.  (also via)
• XScreenSaver was released 30 years ago.
• Survival Research Labs medley.  Strandbeests with shotguns and flamethrowers.
• An Unnecessarily Detailed Look at the Design of the Login Screen.  (via)
• Setting up Minecraft, for absolute beginners.

Some link cleanout going on here.

• • bps.space successfully lands a model rocket.  Without smashing it into the ground, I mean. I can do that.
  • Emergency Exit Coffee Table.
  • Subgenius collage art.
  • The 100 Most Influential Pages in Comic Book History.  (via)
  • A design system for building retro Apple interfaces.  (via)
  • Make My Drive Fun.  Car trip, not your disk drive.  (via)
  • Links for people who remember Amstrads.
  • Play music from your LCD monitor with a radio.  (via)
  • Yabai — A tiling window manager for macOS.  A difficult hack.  (via)
  • I love my GPD Micro PC.
  • One D&D.
  • You can get 30-minute predictions on the Aurora Borealis.  Why 30 minutes?  Cause that’s how far away the L1 satellite is that gets hit by them first.

I managed to avoid a dominant theme this week.  On purpose!  I think it means a better summary.

• Build a tablet out of your Framework motherboard.
• In-browser retro-futuristic tank game, open source.  (via)
• Laptoppin’ like 1975.
• The Pong you could program, possibly: the MOS 7600/7601.
• The Comics Journal has been publishing link roundups about comics – all kinds, including good ones – for quite some time.  Here’s a recent one.
• The Spriter’s Resource.  Sprites sprites sprites.  (via)
• Plasma Tweeter.
• What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people.
• Decisions, decisions: Principles for making important choices in open source.
• Unhinged old newspaper reports lead to interesting ARPANET “first message” question.
• Reassembling a 3.5″ floppy.  (via)
• Video Nub Shank.

Some cranky links, some fun links.

• Re-reclaimed from nature: Resurrecting a DT80 terminal.  I’ve seen hardware worse off than this come back… but rarely.
• Amazon is incentivized to support ripoffs.  (via)
• It’s not just books, either.
• The Blessed Valley of Mild Proficiency.  (via)
• The Gametank game console.
• rePalm.  (via)
• 40 years of AutoCAD.  (via)
• Emacs Timeline.  (via)
• Mapmaking as a Game within a Game.
• Nam June Paik’s Wobbulator.  (indirectly via)

Unrelated game of the week: Hexagonal Pipes.

No mini-theme this week, just a mix.

• No leap second this year.
• BUY NOW, the BeOS screensaver.  (via)
• The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 1, day 2, day 5, done!
• An SPA alternative.  (via)
• The History of User Interfaces.  Linked for the screenshots.  (via)
• Status Update on LS1028A Open Hardware CPU Module.  Mntre is serious about that open hardware thing.  (via)
• Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.2.  FVWM disguised as CDE.  (via)
• Enginomics.
• Digital dice towers built in beautiful retro cases.
• The Codecs of Streams Past.  Linked cause reading about RealVideo and Silverlight gave me painful flashbacks.
• Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet.  (via)

Old machines week.

• An excellent payphone project.
• The Goriest Fight Scenes from The Iliad, Pt. 1.  I enjoyed those books for a reason.
• A tiny Pinball Fantasies table – Intro.
• Crypto Ancienne 2.0 now brings TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things (except BeOS).  Linked for the screenshots.
• The Commodore 64 Smartwatch can now sync with your Commodore 64 desktop.  Not a sentence I expected to type.
• In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard Issue 1 – PDF Released.  I just found my copy of the Peridot the other day, which was a fun read.
• Macintosh Common Lisp.  (via)
• Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development.  For example, this very blog.
• Sweet Mars inspired theme for WindowMaker.
• Writing and Running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus.  Somewhat bonkers.

I think I cover all the popular Lazy Reading topics: old computers, RPGs, graphs…

• Doom on Doom.
• An explanation of phone firmware using the PinePhone as the base example.
• Watches that don’t tell time.  (via)
• The Impact of Open Connectivity.
• Your Adventure Ends Here, blogging ‘playthroughs’ of choose-your-adventure books.  (via)
• Rewilding PowerPoint.
• Supertab for vim.
• god damnit adrian stop it.
• @defensecharts.  I have encountered some of these in the wild.
• The Lost Tron Arcade Documents.  (via)
• CP/M is (more) officially open source.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Better Living Through Synthesizers.

The “Weird Coding Experiment…” link is a good one.

• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I).  The ‘effective strategy’ part makes sense to me.
• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II).
• Give Up GitHub – Software Freedom Conservancy.  (via)
• Walkmellotron, combining the best features of the Mellotron and the Walkman.
• The Old Computer Challenge V2: back to RTC.
• Retrospective: Wizardry.  I never played this; always Ultima.
• 1970s desktop email notifier.
• SourceHut is committed to making IRC better.  IRC generally has the same learning curve (and power) as vi.
• Microsoft To Ban Commercial Open Source from App Store.  I can’t tell if this is misinterpreted panic or Microsoft attempting to stop open source from being a paying job.
• The modifiers vs. the keepers.  I think 3-shift keyboards should make a return.  (via)
• Weird Coding Experiment: A Virtual Retro PC… that plays Sierra games!?  If you want a retro computer and don’t have room in the house.  (via)
• Upscaling Sierra graphics. (same source as last)

Whee!

• Mesopotamia, a nice online version of a museum exhibit.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games bonus article: Amnesia.
• MNT Pocket Reform, the smaller version of something I’ve linked before.
• The least friendly keyboard ever, but certainly interesting.
• The Internet as a Public Good.
• GitHub Copilot and open source laundering.  This applies to AI art too.
• A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt).  Linked cause I wondered out loud “why that change, in version 36?”
• Dangit, Git!?   (via)
• A strategy to defeat AI chessbots.
• The Dwarf Fortress Development Plan.  Some of this sounds more like writing an epic novel than a game, which is good!   They have a dirt-simple Patreon, too, and graphics are on the way?  All news to me.
• Plan 9 was almost a music disk, too.  (via)

Your unrelated cartoon of the week: Mega.

Mini-theme of old games.

• The Nethack Challenge: Dungeons, Dragons, and Tourists.  (via)
• I’ve played dopewars on Slack.  Linked because dopewars is really a variant of unique-genre game Taipan.
• Clarus returns home.  (via)
• 3 More Fonts for Working with Plain Text.  I find Source Code Pro works very well.
• I posted about arttime before; the author helpfully reminded me version 1.5 is out.
• Rebecca, Michael recommend the Gateron Black Ink V2 keyswitches.
• David Ahl places all his classic computing publications into the Public Domain.  I loved those books.  (via)
• Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games).
• Dial-a-story.
• CaptionIt, live subtitles on a heads-up display, open source.  (via)
• Dinosaur Pictures and Facts.  My favorite dinosaur.  (also via)
• Game Design Mimetics.  (also via)

This is a week of fun links.

• Cyberdeck Cafe.   All custom terminals.
• My PSU just won’t do.
• So long, home T1 line; hello, hacking the T1 router.  A good T-carrier explanation.
• Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?  (via)
• A Web Around the World, Part 11: A Zero-Sum Game.
• Interactive Art Museum.  Pleasing webgubbins.  (via)
• A Trail Tale.  A very nice presentation of an Appalachian Trail hike; something I’d like to do someday.  (also via)
• Porting Doom to A/UX.  (via)
• Artvee, public domain art search engine.  (via)
• Fun With Power Monitoring on the Apple IIe.
• Installing a payphone in my house.  The last paragraph is the best.  (via)
• Regular expressions are effectively a (hard) programming language.
• How is Voyager still talking after all these years?
• Frogress Bar.