This isn’t really a dramatic event, but Rimvydas Jasinskas has added support for DWARF-4 line number tables in binutils 2.27. I am linking it to remind everyone that a little bit of Tolkien, in the form of elves (elfs?) and dwarfs (dwarves?) lives in your computer. We need a ORC standard. Oh. Hobbit? Hobbit.
I finally worked through my Lazy Reading link backlog.
- Computer-generated books, a list.
- Every Icon, eventually drawing every 32×32 monochrome image possible. I remember a 8×8 physical hardware version of this called All Possible Images, some years ago. Google doesn’t remember it, though, or chooses to give me links to API docs instead.
- Frankenbook, Shelley’s Frankenstein with additional essays and annotations worked directly into the original text. This is something web pages were built for. (via)
- MacTote, for lugging your FatMac around. (via)
- Grandma’s Zelda map. (also via)
- Actual screenshot.
- Towards LaTeX in the Browser. (via)
- Unix influence in history. (via)
- The UNIX Operating System: A Model for Software Design. Via this page. The target is behind a paywall. The mention of Kernighan as an author, though, made me wonder if he had published it separately. He hasn’t, but I did find his books page at Princeton.
- My Delorean runs Perl. (via)
- The revival of blogging. English translated version.
- The vi input model. (via)
- Mycroft II, an open source voice assistant. Are there more like this?
- How’s your soldering technique?
- Welcome to Armageddon! An excellent roguelike history from an excellent magazine.
- Why create a new Unix shell? (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: see the last paragraph of this Don Hertzfeldt interview; it’s important. “Every time you pay to watch something you’re casting a vote. You’re saying, ‘Hey go make more of this, please.’ Audiences have all of the power to shape what gets made and what doesn’t.”
A full slate of BSDs this week.
- Church of BSD. From 2005, and it is accurate for that timeframe. (via)
- ADOM, newly updated at 3.0.6, but only at 1.1.1_6 in ports/dports, pkgsrc, and two years gone in OpenBSD. But the ADOM download page lists new BSD versions? I may not have investigated far enough.
- OPNsense® 18.1 Release Candidate 1.
- Does anyone run OpenBSD as a desktop (ie not a server)?
- SMB V2+ client on FreeBSD 11.
- Intel microcode updates now available for NetBSD. (via)
- Bitcoin Full Node on FreeBSD.
- July – September 2017 FreeBSD Status Report.
- Hijacking Your Free Beasties. (via)
- Operating System of the Year 2017 : NetBSD Third place. (via)
- A positive look at GhostBSD 11.1. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/08.
- OpenBSD-current now has ‘smtpctl spf walk’.
I had to trim this down; there’s been a post-Christmas surge in material.
- Always good to start the year with new (to me) Mickens: Life as a Developer. (via)
- Learn – Computer-Aided Instruction on Unix. A UNIX tutorial program from 1979. (via)
- Espple – Apple 1 Emulator with PAL RF Output. (via)
- The History of Rogue: Have at You, You Deadly Zs (2009). (via)
- From the previous link: Rog-O-Matic.
- Operating System Design Book Series. (via)
- 30 Days of Stuff. Some gems in there, like 140 issues of Maximum RockNRoll! (via)
- ReCurta: Our goal is to build the first Curta calculator since 1972. (via)
- The Story of the Gömböc. (via)
- Productivity is Dangerous. Fun for the line “LINKEDIN IS A DEATH CULT”. (via)
- Inventing the Lisa User Interface. (via)
- REMEMBER turn your computer off before midnight on 12/31/99. The most eighties tumblog ever. (via)
- A history of S_IFMT. (via)
- V7/x86 – x86 port of Unix V7. (via)
Roguelike/UNIX theme this week.
- Apple ][ colors. (via)
- Ultimate ADOM.
- The Secret History of Cricket Magazine. Unlike any other publication ostensibly for children. (via)
- The Xerox Alto Struts Its Stuff on Its 40th Birthday. (via)
- Apparently doors run on UNIX now.
- A Net Before the Web, Part 4: The Rogue, the Yuppie, and the Soldier, and A Net Before the Web, Part 5: The Pony.
- IFComp 2017: Summary and Mini-Reviews.
- The origin of robotfindskitten, a roguelike.
- How Game Titles Work: 2017 Update. I linked to the earlier version of this some time ago.
- Run the First Edition of Unix via Docker. (via)
- The First UNIX Port. PDF. (via)
- The First Port of UNIX. Also PDF, from same timeframe and same source link.
- PoC||GTFO Print Collection. (via)
- Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (via)
- How I revived the 1973 Unix Programmer’s Manual. (via)
- Integrated development window manager. Why isn’t this everywhere? It doesn’t even assume bash! (via)
Your off-topic music link of the week: A Walk Through Buckethead’s Massive Bandcamp Catalogue.
All over the map again, but that’s what Lazy Reading is for.
- OpenVMS: State of the Port to x86_64 – October 2017 Update. PDF. (via)
- The Roguelike Celebration – a festival about roguelike game design. (via)
- More Taste: Less Greed? or: Sending UNIX to the Fat Farm. (via)
- books chapter fifteen.
- A Net Before the Web, Part 1: The Establishment Man and the Magnificent Rogue.
- A Net Before the Web, Part 2: Service to Community.
- TAOS Operating System. (via)
- The Physics of Bread. I am not sure what to think of Modernist Bread. (via)
- An ode to pack: gzip’s forgotten decompressor. (via)
- The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons. (via)
“tag: eyes, computers”, very much so. - miniwebproxy. A good idea.
- Tiny Wearable 8-bit VT100 Console. This I would want to make. (via)
Unofficial gaming theme this week.
- HyperRogue, the non-Euclidean roguelike, is a mind-melting masterpiece.
- A crapload of animation links.
- LANCER, a new mech RPG. Wait, here’s an update.
- Quondam: Finished! “The most difficult adventure game ever made.
- Unlocking Braden’s Potential. (PDF, via)
- Parallel processing with unix tools. (via)
- A 1979 War-Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Complete. (via)
- The History of Email. (via)
- PocketBeagle – A $25 open-source USB-key-fob computer. (via)
- Building the plasma. (via)
- Gravitational Teleport, fancy ssh. (via)
- Email: a lost relic of the before-before times.
- Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
- The Beauty of Unix. (via)
All over the map today.
- $3,200 per month for 5 megabytes of space: the first hard drives.
- csv,conf,v3, a cleverly named data conference. (via)
- Silicon Graphics’ IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop. Nostalgia! (via)
- C64 Yourself. C64 palette applied to a picture. (via)
- Strategy headroom in roguelikes. (via)
- WiFi232 – An Internet Hayes Modem for your Retro Computer. (via)
- ESR Shares A Forgotten ‘Roots Of Open Source’ Moment From 1984.
- Plan9-9k: 64-bit Plan 9. (via)
- Leave Britney’s Command and Control Server Alone! Many places linked to this, but this is the best link text. (via)
- How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran. (via)
- Best Board Games of Essen 2016. Complex games, too. (via)
- Warren Ellis’s podcast subscription list.
Unrelated link of the week: I Love Butter Tarts. If you’ve never encountered a butter tart, you should. Found via the Midland Butter Tart Festival, which I am disappointed to have missed.
A little heavy on the history this week. And no tea!
- Commodore 64: For the Love of a Machine. (via)
- Fun at the UNIX Terminal Part 1.
- Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment. More places named in the source link comments.
- A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017. (via)
- A link at the same place brought me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
- Hottest Editors.
- Upgrading a Vectrex to 32 Bits. (via)
- Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM.
- The secrets of password aging on Unix systems.
- on the title of “git commit murder”
- Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine
Your unrelated food link of the week: Eating In Translation. This person seeks out new places, eats there, and makes notes, and has been doing it for more than a decade. The result is the most in-depth informal food guide I’ve ever seen. It’s NYC focused, but not exclusively.
A slightly UK-ish tilt this week, by accident of course.
- Playing roguelikes when you can’t see.
- How Fountain Pens Work.
- Something you didn’t know about functions in bash.
- A comparison of regex engines. (via)
- /dev/null Follies
- Turtles on the Wire: Understanding How the OS Uses the Modern NIC. (via)
- In love with the BBC micro:bit. (via)
- Ultima VI. (via)
- How the PC Industry Screws Things Up. (via)
- Top Five Results of the Past 50 Years of Programming Languages Research. (via)
- The Arte of ASCII. (via)
- 1970s word processing with JOT. (also via)
Old-school UNIX and games this week.
- Managing an open source project. (via)
- There was a Coke machine connected to the ARPANET in the 70’s. The local version of this has a Beastie on the front. (via)
- Swan – GNU/Cygwin Xfce Desktop. At first glance, “XFCE for Windows” is a much more clear title. Plus the inevitable bash shell, which seems to be a good enough simulation of Unix for most people. (via)
- Making Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with 253 cooks and no head chef.
- OCR typography, a more extensive subject than I expected.
- Sunsetting SixXS. Time for service providers to put up.
- No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I hate modal popups. (via)
- Xfce bug: “default desktop screen causes damage to monitor” Cat problem, and not the one in /bin. (via)
- Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg. (via)
- A Second Life for very old C programs. (via)
Technical details week for Lazy Reading.
- Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
- mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencastis a shell wrapper forffmpegthat allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)- 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
- CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
- How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
- Today in OBEY.
- Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
- A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
- Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
- Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
- Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.
Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)
It’s all twofer links this week.
- The many faces of DOOM’s afterlife. A good example of what open source can do for the lifetime of a software project. (via)
- The forgotten joys of turtling in strategy games. (also via)
- Perl6 One Liners. (via)
- How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text. (via)
- Whatever happened to Winamp? Arguably one of the better programs ever put together. (via)
- Shut Up & Sit Down, tabletop board/card gaming reviews. There’s far more out there than I ever realized. (via I’m not sure at this point, sorry.)
- A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming. (via)
- The TTY demystified. (via)
- THE GRAY-1, A HOMEBREW CPU EXCLUSIVELY COMPOSED OF MEMORY (also via)
- The BD Software C Compiler (BDS C). From 1979. (via)
- Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics. (also via)
- How piracy can accidentally encourage IPv6 adoption.
- Dwarf Fortress and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Interface.
- Free Online Courses at openculture. Get past the page ads, and there’s got to be something in that very long list that interests you. (lost source, sorry)
- Cards Against Silicon Valley. The description of the game is more fun than the game, but then again maybe so is what it’s parodying. (via)
- Vim’s 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8. (via)
Your unrelated entertainment activities of the day: Places to Telnet. (indirectly via)
You weren’t planning to do anything else today, right? Find some headphones.
- The future of iOS is 64-bit only: Apple to stop support of 32-bit apps. Following a trend. (via)
- Four Column ASCII. (via)
- From the previous link source’s comments: “The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968“, a PDF from this repo.
- A Quick Look at the SoftIron OverDrive 1000. Multiprocessor ARM is starting to show up in non-Pi shapes.
- How computer terms came from physical parts of the Mark I. Neat pictures, too! I know I’ve seen the moth one before. (via)
- How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros. Someone do this with BSD flavors. (via)
- Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Molecular Tschunk Spheres. Sounds mathematical, but actually related to Chaos Communication Congress and food. Read the ‘small scale hack’ at the end. (also via)
- Printer Security. (via)
- Electrocuted CERN weasel joins McFlurry hedgehog at dead animal exhibit. (via)
- From free software to liberal software.
- Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures. (via)
- CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim. (via)
- The Enviable Pedigree of UNIX® and POSIX®. (via)
- Dial-A-Grue
- Level Up Your Game: The Untapped Potential of Roguelikes. (thanks, Brandon Gooch)
Your unrelated link of the week: Bandcamp Daily. Curated daily presentations about a band or type of music, where the enthusiasm for any given esoteric sonic whatsit oozes through the writing and samples are there to back it up. Of course I would like it. Recent highlights from just the past few days: a history of doom metal; Kid Koala’s new album, and whatever this is.
“Old consumer computers” is this week’s accidental theme.
- Viva Amiga, the trailer. (via)
- NANOG 69 is happening in early February.
- A New Year, a New Round of pop3 Gropers from China
- Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out. The Hacker News thread has some good stories, too. (via)
- Hidden Voice Commands, where the computer understands but the humans do not. (via)
- Using Unix commands to profile your users
- When the little hand is on the two, and the big hand…
- Read “The Tao of tmux” prerelease for free online (via)
- RIPEStat, nicely summarized information about a given network. (via)
- LISA16 slides and video (that’s the Large Scale System Administration conference) are available. (via)
- Donsol, technically a roguelike. (via)
- Portal for Apple ][. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Turbo Encabulator. There’s more like that out there, like the Rockwell Retro Encabulator.
It took me three edits of this post to spell “Salvador” correctly.
- Dick Tracy Wrist-Mounted Lisp Machine. It segues into a link to Atari 2600 keyboard controllers, which look painful.
- Cataclysm DDA, a new dark future roguelike.
- After 20 years, the Toasters have returned. (via)
- A short history of shareware.
- “Guys it’s 2016, why are we still using mailing lists (listserv)?” No, forums are not a good replacement.
- A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand. (via)
- Manifesto for Responsible Software Development. (via)
- Related: Facebook: Still Literally The Worst. Related to that: irony.
- How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud. (via)
- 29 Bullets, about PowerPoint as a concept.
- Lost Car Key Puzzle. (via)
- The speed of light is unlikely to improve: consequences.
- i enter the web design class
Your unrelated food link of the week: Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook. (It’s getting reprinted.)
Every third link is about old technology, and I swear it’s not on purpose.
- The creators of rogue talk about permadeath. (via)
- IRCv3. (via)
- Cyberdeck64. (via)
- The oldest U.S. government computers. (via)
- The Silmarillion Seminar. (via)
- The MIT License, Line by Line. (via)
- Network mapping.
- Unix tips: Saving time by repeating history.
- How to Capture Network Traffic using Tcpdump.
- Wander (1974) — a lost mainframe game is found! (via)
- The Ice Cream eBook. A comprehensive resource, free.
- Advanced Compilers Weeks 3-5.
- Debugging PostgreSQL performance the hard way. (via)
- How Hollywood Gets Its Old-School Tech. (via)
- Wot I think: Hackmud.
- What’s up with Windows developer tools being written in perl? “Perl is a socially-acceptable form of Visual Basic.”
- Searching for “finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it” yields excellent results.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: DHARBIN. I briefly met the artist at TCAF a few years ago; he looks exactly like how he draws himself. Here’s an affecting strip about pets and loss.
Partially assembled while I was in some multi-hour conference calls at work.
- This Why Computers.
- Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release is the OS News of the Year. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. (via)
- html email comments.
- Schrödinger? I hardly know her!
- The algorithms, they are not subtle.
- Dealing with Unix arguments.
- “Im a vi guy but consider changing to vim if it cleans the house“
- Restoring YC’s Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data. (via)
- Recommendations for Vim. (via)
- Vim 8.0 released! (Changelog, via)
- A tale of an impossible bug: big.LITTLE and caching. Asymmetrical core capabilities, yeesh. (via)
- Weirdly broken wifi access points.
- Dungeon Generator. (via)
- How roguelike is your game? (via)
Roguelike Celebration, happening tomorrow (the 17th) in San Francisco. Normally this would be in Lazy Reading, but that’s too late. (via)
Assembled hastily on Saturday, which is later than I’ve been in a long time.
- Don’t tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to.
- “Beautiful artwork plays the UNIX timestamp on cymbals“. A 32-bit art installation, judging from the year 2038 time limit.
- Every parallel ATA connection ever in one device, or close to it.
- The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction. (via)
- The Secret Nuclear History of Cat Videos. Where diffserv levels came from, in a very thorough explanation. (also via)
- DevOps vs. SRE. (via)
- “NetBox is an IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool.” I really could have used this about 8 years ago. (also via)
- Mathematical term or Hollywood movie?
- Xerox Alto Restoration Part 3: drive ok and First boot attempt. (via)
- Sil, a roguelike that is as Tolkienish as possible. (via)
- Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful. (via)
- What to Consider When the Platforms Show Up with Money. This is why I still run the Digest as my own site, rather than through Facebook/Twitter/Medium/whatever. (via)
Unrelated link of the week: Heavy metal riff generator. (via) Related to unrelated: Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing – Part 1. (via)