Category: Lazy Reading

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.

Mini-theme of hardware this week.

• Electronic Catan LCD Tiles.  (via)
• Watchy, open hardware and software watch.
• Modal dialogs and other things that steal keyboard focus are dangerous.  That makes me so mad.
• DuskOS.  Linking cause “low impact computing” has turned into “postapocalyptic computing” for some people.  (via)
• Catalogs and Context.  (via)
• What happened to Perl 7?  (via)
• Related: perl v5.36.0 has been released.  (via)
• Access the Tesla API with Perl!
• BBQ20KBD.  (via)
• Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 MK3.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games crowdfunded book launch teaser.
• XModem in 2022.  (via)
• The Thompson MO5, I’ve never seen before.  Plus free BASIC.  (via)

This was done very early; I have been rigorous at cleaning up open tabs.

• Finger: the First Social Software.  DOOM news was distributed that way.  (via)
• Some things that make languages easy (or not) to embed in Unix shell scripts.
• My programming language odyssey.
• IntyOS – An Operating System for the Intellivision.  Never went anywhere but that’s OK.  (via)
• “The Canary in the Coal Mine…” A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge.  (via)
• Round.
• Wizard Zines.  (via)
• Recommend Me Books, Part 347.
• XScreenSaver 6.04 out now with 2 new hacks.
• Uncurled, 30 years of open source project experience summed up.  People need to write more overarching summaries like this.  (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• arttime, ASCII art + terminal clock.  (via)
• A tip: ctrl-A and ctrl-E move your cursor to the start or end of your command line, non-destructively.  It’s taken me 3 years to learn to use that instead of erases-the-whole-line ctrl-U.

Your unrelated music for the week: KUTMAH – Original Production Beat Mix.

No mini-theme emerged this week.

• A Web Around the World, Part 9: A Network of Networks and Part 10: A Web of Associations.
• Book review: Practical File System Design with the Be File System.
• The Central Question.  Touches on ARPANET.
• Net Losses.  Count up how many of these you have used.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Animated Series.  Realistically bad!
• The History of Computer Communications.  (indirectly via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2022 Call for Proposals.  Paid.
• VCR Virus warnings.  (via)
• Glitcher – breakcore generator.  (via)
• mdehling/sun-fb-logos: A collection of Sun framebuffer logos for your viewing pleasure .  This will entertain at least one reader I am sure.  (via)
• Rust: A Critical Retrospective.
• Duck Chess.  Makes sense.  (via)
• Rockbox, linked as a reminder after reading this accurate gripe on how iPhone music playing isn’t as good as dedicated music hardware.

Still working on cleaning up RSS backlogs, so this was done early.

• Chonky Palmtop is a DIY portable Linux computer with a split keyboard and 7 inch display.  I’ve linked to this before.  (via)
• r/ErgoMobileComputers/, from comments at the previous link.  The e-ink setups are interesting.
• Porting Zelda Classic to the Web.  Interesting for the game and the method.  (via)
• MVC — Xerox PARC 1978—79.  (via)
• Emulating the Space Invaders look and feel.  Recreating analog issues.  (via)
• Gopher on the Palm Pilot and the pitfalls of PalmOS connectivity.
• Pendragon, an RPG I never ever encountered.
• Triple Entry Blogging.
• Increasing the surface area of blogging.
• VCF East XIII — David Walden — Remembering the BBN ARPANET Project.  (Youtube, via)
• Signs of Life, art show and technology experiment.
• Korg MS-20.  (via)
• The failure of the idea of X resources, and What goes into an X resource and its name.
• Termtris on a terminal.

Your unrelated noise music of the week: GROAR by Juanjosé Rivas.  (via)