Category: roguelike

This week’s material filled up fast.  It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, so let’s see what next week brings…

• “Anyway my point here is that all of crypto should be run entirely by tweens.”  Look for the Utility Token section, though it’s all fun.
• How to calculate leap second variation for the year 3000.  (via)
• Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.  (via)
• Text size control in st.
• DLX400 typewriter as a Keyboard.  Neat but it must be annoying; those aren’t great keyboards.
• Fast Software, the Best Software.
• “Don’t put it on GitHub“, something we all should know.  (scroll down to last third)
• Creepy pumpkin.  It doesn’t have to be a pumpkin; this could apply to all sorts of things!
• Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural?  You’ve played both, I’m sure.
• An xargs lesson.  (via)
• The Legacy of the Unix Wars is still around us.  (also via)
• What I want out of my window manager.
• Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors.  (via)
• Slacking on security.  I don’t think Slack is a healthy product to use.
• Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I’m sure that won’t backfire.
• Astronauts Falling on the Moon.  No achievement so amazing you can’t trip and fall in the middle of it.  (via)
• LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance.  I think the computer in The Story of Mel, mentioned here before.  (via)

I get indirectly cranky, this week.

• Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1.  Roguelike!  (via)
• Pressing Forward.  “The grassroots mechanical keyboard scene”.  I did not know about the Hall Effect, or the X1 keyboard, both of which are interesting.
• sc-im, a terminal spreadsheet.  Like Visicalc all over again!
• Design tools are holding us back.  I like the note on how toolschains are becoming too ultra-specific.  (via)
• The Internet and My 53 Years Online.
• Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
• Secretly Public Domain.  This means there’s now a huge amount of books, free to read, that couldn’t be reliably identified before.
• The Builder’s Remorse.  “once it was handed over to the corporation, everyone lost control”.  Collectively no-one’s fault.
• Size and the Inert Sandbox.  About Frontier: Elite.
• Tabletop Whale.  “An original science illustration blog”.  (via)
• The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction and Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat.  Video games, in an experience I bet we all share.

I’m going to break out the roguelike tag again even if it isn’t a perfect fit.

• Vintage CGI.
• The Gemini palmtop.  (via)
• From Vimperator to Tridactyl.  (via)
• A Kernel of Failure.
• Drinking coffee with AWK.  Accounting through text stream editing.  (via)
• Civilisational HTTP Error Codes.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Leon: An open-source personal assistant.  Comments at the source link led me to Mycroft again.
• Ringen (1979).  Second-oldest non-English text adventure known, preserved because it was brought into a MUD.
• Using Vim to take time-stamped notes.  (via)
• How Fair Is My D20? (via)
• Google-free Android Setup.  (via)
• Scientology and the Fellowship.  I did not know about this Ultima link at all.
• Pi-Hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements.  (via)
• Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement of Curiosity episode seven – The Battle of Carambola Ridge.
• How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal.  (via)
• Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks.  (via) 

Yay, got to use the roguelike tag!

• ARPANET: Celebrating 50 Years Since “LO”.  There’s a transcript farther down the page if you don’t want to watch the video; I am always grateful for transcripts.  (via)
• THROBAC, a computer using Roman numerals.  I had no idea this could exist.(via)
• Aspell to check spelling.
• Drist release with persistent ssh.
• Open protocols can evolve fast if they’re willing to break other people.
• Why I like middle mouse button paste in xterm so much.
• Using grep with /dev/null, an old Unix trick.  Muscle memory.
• Bad PC cases.
• Cygwin 3.0.0-1.  (via)
• Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience.  I linked to Cogmind 4 years ago, and it has significantly grown since then.  Note to self: play.  (via)
• Ask laarc: What apps do you love and/or use habitually?
• Ultima VII.  Deep dive into a deep game.
• Dwarf Fortress diaries: 3, a gruesome winter, 4 – Messages from Zon, 5 – culture war, dingo war, and 6 – Through the Interesting Door.
• Landley’s Computer History Page.  There’s a lot of history there.  Plus BSD history!  (via)
• Using gmail with mutt.  (via) 
• Writing a Rust Roguelike for the Desktop and the Web.  (via)
• Restoring My 90’s Era 386 (Work in Progress).   Back when heatsinks were much less necessary.  (via)
• Split keyboards, a five year experience and review.  Source comments led me to Keyboardio, which is nice hardware… and can be reprogrammed by the end user!  That’s the way it should be.

A sorta backwards-looking list for you, this week.

• IBM PC-XT Emulator on an ESP8266.  The hardware is basically a wifi USB plug.  (via)
• Leak Mitigation Checklist.  “If you just leaked sensitive information in public source code…”  (also via)
• @Play 87: Interview with Josh Ge, Creator of Cogmind.
• C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines.  Wierd, wierd systems.  (via)
• What I really miss when I don’t have X across the network.
• For a brief period, the kernel tried to deal with gamma rays corrupting the processor cache.  Not … impossible?
• So tonight I’m gonna blog like it’s 2002.
• Learn Git Branching.  (via)
• Hardware effects.  (via)
• Fun tip #1: Apply a diff with ed.
• Moving away from Emacs, 130 days after.
• “please don’t “disrupt” my dotfiles, tech industry”  (via)
• Why Aren’t There C Conferences?  (via)
• sr.ht, the hacker’s forge, now open for public alpha.  BSD-friendly, too.  (via)

Unrelated video of the week: Mashups are a mental dead end in most cases, but this “Benny Hill/Slayer Mashup Disaster” tickled me.  (via)

I almost put the OpenSSH stuff in In Other BSDs yesterday, but it is really cross-platform at this point.

• A fun optimization trick from rsync followed by More about auto-generated switch-cases.
• Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: 
  Chapter 14 Introducing Open Platforms and Business Ecosystems.  From Harvard Business School, so different from the usual open source discussion.  (PDF, via).
• Unix in East Germany (GDR).  (via)
• ‘Scraper’ bots and the secret Internet arms race.  (via)
• Exploring OmniOS in a VM (2/2).
• “OpenSSH has broader key revocation than I thought“.
• OpenSSH Principals.  OpenSSH cert authorities and revocation; good ideas.  (via)
• How to Make a Roguelike.  (via)
• A Model M with 5 functions per key.
• d100 Mutations.

Oddball things week, this week.

• My favorite apps on F-Droid.  All open-source, reviewed.(via)
• Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector.  (via)
• Slack client for Commodore 64 (2016)  (via)
• Bud Uglly Design.  Goes with Smelvetica last week.  (Thanks, Chuck Fry)
• “Now you have ???????? problems”  Somewhat evil.
• n-gate Hackernews summaries are snarky-great, especially the last one here.  (via)
• Portal Point Generator, a power source for use in Antarctica, or wherever.
• 1,600 pages on the history of computing.
• 2018 IEEE Chip Hall of Fame inductees.  Stories for each model.  (via)
• Excel Unusual.  Animated Excel spreadsheets.  Somewhat bonkers.  (via)
• BASIC Engine.  (also via)
• Terminal Whisperer and Command Line Curiosities, videos both via.
• Fractal Curve Generator.
• Animating “This Is America” on vintage Mac hardware.  I did CAD work on similar hardware, years ago.  It was slooooooow.   (via)
• @Play 86: Interview with Dr. Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM.

Historic games is this week’s accidental theme.

• Zork I: Storm-Tossed Trees and Getting Out.
• Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages.  A bit old but still entertaining.  (via)
• Monitoring the Fermentation of Sourdough Starter with Computer Vision.  I’ve done this with the low-tech approach of a dry-erase marker and a notepad.(via)
• Cool Retro Term.  Emulates multiple types!  (via)
• Terrible Ideas in Git.  Video.  (via)
• Hackmud’s 2.0 update introduces 32 player hack offs.
• Best June 2018 on Bandcamp: Metal and Electronic.
• The Brief and Incredibly Poetic Life of Bañec Hazyblockades: a Dwarf Fortress diary.
• The Computer Literacy Project, a series from the BBC, right through the 1980s.  (via)
• How Clang Compiles a Function.
• Tetris for Applesoft BASIC.  (via)
• Smelvetica.  This is one of the meanest things you could pull on someone aware of typefaces and how they work.  If you don’t understand just looking at it, you aren’t one of those people.  (via)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  In the U.S., we drink green beer and wear kilts, cause nobody’s terribly sure what Irish means within an American context anymore.

• Can you identify this VMS roguelike?  (thanks, Erik Blomberg)
• An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector.
• A potential way to have spaces in filenames and not break the Unix command line.
• QueryParser.  Well, at least Uber has a positive side effect.   (via)
• Sortix.  (via)
• Light Phone 2.  Linked to mostly because of the e-ink screen.  (via)
• futures of distributions, “programmer-archaeologists”.  (via)
• Tidelift.  Related to the previous link: a sort of umbrella organization to create financial incentives for open source maintenance.  (via)
• Looking back on the Jupiter Ace (Forth Minicomputer). (via)
• Unix folklore: using multiple sync commands.  (via)
• Actually using ed.  (via)
• Pulled from the last item’s source link: people who use acme seem to be devoted to it – even more than vi/emacs users.
• But there’s always ed.  (also via)
• While on the editor kick: Spacemacs, an enhanced Emacs.

Your unrelated mollusk-related death metal of the week: Slugdge.