Category: Off-Topic

Off the beaten path: Jason Brown is giving a talk called “Paranoid Machines”.

When: Sat, April 4, 7pm – 9pm
Where: 300 Nevins St, Brooklyn
Free. Organized by Machine Project, Los Angeles

Jason Brown’s talk will examine contemporary gnostic mythologies of technology and paranoia, focusing on Vannevar Bush as a self-embodied allegorical emblem of information perversity. Bush’s famed “memex” and the modern UFOs are both hypothetical machines—devices which use association and performativity to spin information out of noise. In modern techno-myths, this process is often represented as an alchemical self-destruction resulting in god-like power. Not coincidentally, all these issues are illustrated with disturbing density and prescience in the 1981 Disney film “Tron.”

This is just old-school enough to be interesting to some readers, and I like to think I find things you won’t see on Reddit or Slashdot. (via my second favorite magazine)

I’ll mention this briefly, since it’s off-topic: I’m looking for a new job, and it should come as no surprise that I’d like to work with BSD systems.   (resume as PDF)

The epoch time is going to reach 1234567890 near Valentine’s Day, as noticed by Hubert Feyrer.  The extreme nerdiness of that moment makes it that much more entertaining.

Reading this Textfiles article about keeping data in “the Internet cloud” and then this one about Google made me think: if the Internet went away, what data would you lose?

If you feel frustrated that big (>100G) solid state disk drives are still relatively expensive, well… It has been much worse.  (via)

Holiday distraction: Some not-completely-accurate educational literature about computers.  (via)

This is not really part of DragonFly, but it will be interesting for some people.  Matthew Dillon’s updated his personal investment notes to focus on the recent credit upheaval.

txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary.  Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved.  If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing.  For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming.  (via)

On an entirely personal note, I was having a conversation with my coworkers today about the change in technology within my lifetime; when I was young, there was no world wide web, no digital music, no timeshifting of TV programs, etc. etc.  My workplace has an intern young enough to have never encountered these things.

Now, I noticed this musicmaking tutorial on Youtube.  In 1985, this would have been done in a room filled with electronics, probably hand-built, with cabling run all over the place.  Now, the software that accomplishes that, with a single computer, is expressly designed to simulate those old analog connections.  It’s very wierd, and probably meaningless to those under 30.

Also, yay dubstep.

Supplied by Alexander Schrijver: the happiest dragonfly ever.

Some random links for browsing that I’ve been holding onto:

• PCMag’s top 10 Greatest Hacks of All Time – Item #3 mentions my alma mater.  (via)
• Readers of a certain age will enjoy Atari Modern Classics, plus the Bootleg Demakes (via)
• This GameSetWatch article on managerial rhetoric will be familiar to most anyone working in software.
• FreeBSD phone job in Canada – anyone interested?

I had a conversation with a coworker today about what phone to buy, and I thought about this: iPhones are pretty, but you don’t get to own your software or fully choose what to run.  This developer’s blog entry sums up all the things you can’t do with Apple’s App Store, and by doing so manages to describe the opposite of open source.  (via, I think)  The point I’m making: BSD licensing is more valuable than you think.

One link to describe the pain of creating with software/the web, and one link that will make you want to keep doing it.

(Culled from other blog’s posts – sorry, lost original entries!)

Another week, another @Play column talking about roguelikes. This time, it’s about Izuna, a Japanese ‘JCRPG’.

Also, Sascha Wilder (I think – lost the email, sorry!) pointed out that the ultimate roguelike may actually be Dwarf Fortress, a theory I have heard before. (links to go Rock Paper Shotgun, one of my favorite game sites.)

This Wired article on Android is worth reading.  Not because it’s directly related to DragonFly, but because it’s a open source platform.  If you’re interested in DragonFly, you must have at least a passing interest in open source software.

We’re all used to being able to install and configure (and break) our BSD systems the way we want, when we want, without having to seek permission or necessarily pay a fee to someone who isn’t the author of the software  we want.  This is not generally possible with phones, which, after all, are specialized computer systems.  Keep an eye on this.

(Via)

The @Play column at GameSetWatch has another article on roguelikes. This covers early roguelike software that has become lost; a strange concept in today’s world where everything is saved somewhere out there on the Internet. For an added bonus, the column has a link to a newspost from Moria’s original author, which includes this interesting quote:

I plan to download it and Angband and play them… Maybe something has been added that will surprise me! That would be nice… I never got to play Moria and be surprised…

Is that perhaps the worst part of game development? You always know how the story ends.

Another linkdump!

• Waxy.org has a complete version of the 5-part series, The Machine That Changed the World. This aired in 1992 and is both an excellent history of computing and also an interesting glimpse of the computing world before the World Wide Web steamrolled into the public eye. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 are available. If you don’t have a Flash-enabled browser to watch them, part 5 has a link to a torrent of H.264 MP4 files that contain the same complete broadcase.
• More old school nerditry: Dungeons & Dragons history, plus a rebuttal, all in far more depth than I thought possible.  (Via)
• New school (rejectionist) nerditry: Ten ways to make an iPhone killer.