Category: UNIXish

I’m very UNIXy this week.

• Have You Played… Event[0]?  Sounds like a simulation of IRC.
• TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO GOOD, REALLY BAD HEAVY METAL ALBUM COVERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD.  (via)
• The Best Metal on Bandcamp: March 2017.  A palate cleanser from the last link.
• Google Open Source Docs.  Everyone releases their code, but not their methodology, which is arguably as important.  (via)
• Windows disk-loading/code-swapping.  I remember this from Apple ][ days; there is no modern equivalent that I can think of.
• The creator of Dwarf Fortress doesn’t really like to play games like Dwarf Fortress.  (via)
• Research UNIX V8, V9 and V10 made public by Alcatel-Lucent.  (via)
• Related: What’s the earliest UNIX (or unix-like) OS that is both easily available and can run on x86?
• How to learn Unix/Linux and Lesser known but still handy Linux commands.  Essentially command line tool education.
• Zero Terminal.  Another item for my teeny computer fetish.  (via)

Your useful tip of the week: Setting the root login’s ‘full name’ to identify the machine that sent email.  This makes so much sense.  (via)

I had overflow from last week, so I have a good list for you, despite being offline for days.

• Your Code is Junky.  I haven’t thought about FrontPage in years, and that’s on purpose.  It was a trainwreck.
• Raiders of the Lost OS: Reclaiming a piece of Polish IT history.  I have never heard of CROOK.  (via)
• meaningful short names.
• missing features as features
• The Collapse of the UNIX Philosophy.   Drinking game: drink every time the author or commenters at the source link conflate bash and UNIX, or Linux and UNIX, or assume a quirk solved in 1985 is a relevant worry today, etc.  You’ll be drunk very soon.
• Adobe Illustrator is 30 years old.  Linking mostly for the side-by-side image of the tool palettes over the years.
• USG is a firewall for your USB ports.  firmware firewall – you can still have malicious software in the data portion of the USB drive.  (via)
• Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2.  gettimeofday() – about as simple as it gets, and used constantly.  (via)
• selfie – compiler, emulator, and hypervisor (C and MIPS) all bundled together.  (via)
• Computers and art meet face-to-face.
• (related comics link)

Your unrelated tea link of the day: defining what it means when you read “mug of tea” vs “cup of tea”.  You’d think it was interchangeable, but the meanings diverge.  (PDF, via)

Another diverse link week, hooray!

• Stupid Hackathon 2017 – results under Project.  (via)
• using yubikeys everywhere
• Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself.  I have seen all of these happen.  (via)
• Getting started with vim.  (via)
• The many faces of grep.  grep, egrep, fgrep.
• Finding the Lost Vikings – Reversing a Virtual Machine.  (via)
• Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2.  (via)
• SHAttered.  Every vulnerability has to have a cool name and website now.  (via)
• I found the best anagram in English, Moore’s law beats a better algorithm, and Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring, a series on anagrams that goes into glorious depth.
• Puzzle Zapper Blog, from the previous link.
• PuTTY 0.68 has been released, useful everywhere.  (via and via)

Your unrelated item of the week: How Wegmans inspired the most rabid fanbase in the grocery world.  I live in the town where Wegmans started.  “Grocery fanbase” is a relative thing, but: yes, they are that good.

Merry Christmas!  I piled up as many links as I could in the theory that many readers have the spare time for it today/tomorrow/next few days.

• “So somebody is throwing HTML at your sshd. What to do?“
• Because of weird traffic, I found this reference to an early occurrence of the Internet of Crap Things.  The weird traffic is possibly another Mirai variant.  Or Snapchat.
• Punched Cards: A Brief Tutorial (2002)  (via)
• The Hi-Bit Era.  (via)
• Working on ENIAC: Rethinking Innovation Myths with Author Thomas Haigh.  Video.  (via)
• Talk extract: Submarine cable systems 101 for AWS partners.  Video.  (via)
• 3D-printed Curta Calculator.  One of the best mechanical calculators.  (via)
• Taking Back the DNS.  “Most new domain names are malicious.”  From 2010, but unfortunately still relevant.  (via)
• Anecdote generator: Dwarf Fortress’s agents already sparking fun tales
• Terminal Madness (A 1980 Documentary About Personal Computers).  Video.  (via)
• Gitlabs going post-cloud with Metal
• Colossal Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing  (via)
• v7x86 UNIX.  (via)
• exfiltration via request timing, exfiltration via receive timing
• An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways  (via)
• 17 Unix tricks for a happy 2017.  Assumes bash but don’t hold that against it.
• Superintelligence  (via)

Your unrelated game link of the week: Lode Runner.  The whole thing in HTML5 as far as I can tell.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: AAAAAAAAAAAA

Dig up more on James Burke (linked below) if you can, and if you have the time.  His Connections show was a delight.

• “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design”  This clickbaity title is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley journalism… but I digress.  (via)
• QoS when there is no congestion.  (via)
• “Blame is apportioned appropriately.”
• James Burke and Connections kickstarted app.  (via)
• “Weird, fun, wonderful, or useful automated phone numbers to call?”  1-800-444-4444 I use often at work, with a recorded message from a company that ceased to exist years ago.  (via)
• Monads: Programmer’s Definition  (via I think)
• The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers
• Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
• A vi-centric family tree of editors (2000)  (via)
• Making umask work for you
• No more Solaris 12.  A rumor.  (via)

A lot of this I picked up in previous weeks, knowing that the U.S Thanksgiving holiday was going to either dry up all links or give me a crapload.

• Junkbot competition results.  (via)
• It Came From Bell Labs – Story of the Plan 9 operating system.  (via)
• Modelling data structures as files and directories on disk.
• Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES?!  (via)
• Who Will Command The Robot Armies?  Starts describing awful things I knew about and then charges to a new level of awful, like this.  (via)
• Jason Scott on porting VLC to the browser.  (via)
• The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile.  (via)
• Comments on the previous link led me to the fun-looking Pyra handheld.
• The end of the general purpose operating system.  Or the start of a new application development category?  I think this is a view that changes depending on what technology you are invested in.
• Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell.
• 30 days in a terminal: Day 0 — The adventure begins.  Spoiler: it doesn’t work out.  (via)
• Were your grandparents hacking in 1963?  (via)
• IFComp crowns its first non-parser game.
• The current Humble Book Bundle is a lot of classic/useful Unix books.  DRM-free, pay very little.  Worth it for any two of the books involved.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Secret World of Stuff.  (via)

Some of this is overflow from last week.

• “I don’t like computers.”  Same reasons here, too.  (via)
• Cheap IOT Threatens The Internet.  ‘Cheap’ is almost the entire idea behind the Internet of Things.
• IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction.  A light worm.  (via)
• 54 years old, COBOL gets Wheelchair, a web framework.  (via)
• inks.  From Ted Unangst, an OpenBSD developer, though not necessarily BSD-specific.  (via)
• Coloring your world with LS_COLORS.
• The Possibly Russian Fingerprints on the Shadow Brokers’ Trick or Treat Package.  Peter N. M. Hansteen, but not BSD-related.
• Aztec for the Apple ][ was my first desktop video game.
• Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down.
• The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems.
• TERM=aaa60 Mk.2.
• When Your Screen Breaks (In The Himalayas)  (via)
• production ready
• LiveCode, a modern version of Hypercard.  It is available as open source, though I haven’t seen if it runs on any BSD.  (via)

There’s got to be something surprising and/or useful for you in this week’s links; they are gloriously eclectic.

• This list is for discussions related to managing voice networks, both traditional and IP.  (via)
• “These videos are not real; they are hallucinated by a generative video model.”  (via)
• Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal?  It bugs me that people sometimes don’t care about what’s under their shell.  Microsoft is counting on that.
• A Quick Look at the Attack on Dyn.  RIPE is a good authority for something like this, I daresay.  (via)
• Stuff a recurrent neural network full of old sci-fi stories, attach it to a text editor, start sentences, and let the neural network finish them for you.  It is a real thing.  (via)
• Early History of Unix: Unix Is Born and the Introduction of Pipes.  (via)
• Lawrence Public Library Modular Synthesizer, a performance.  (via).
• They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo.
• CFP: SIGCIS meeting @ CHM, March 18-19, 2017.
• How to find all of an ISP’s ASNs.  (via)
• History of Mechanical Keyboards.  (via)
• C64-808.

Your unrelated browser game of the week: Epitaph.  (via)

I finished this waaaay early.

• Things About Vim I Wish I Knew Earlier.  (via)
• What is the oldest (retro) machine that you still use in production?
• Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System.  (via)
• The Ruins of Dead Social Networks. (also via)
• GUIdebook.  (via)
• Today in Applied Demonology.
• Warren Ellis sums up the Internet of Things – appropriate given what happened to Dyn.
• Interactive fiction from Adam Cadre and Emily Short.  (via)
• Awesome Falsehoods.  (via)
• Ten Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes.  (also via)
• Found this license plate in Dortmund (Germany) yesterday.  (via)
• The Soviet InterNyet.  How Not to Network a Nation excerpts.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Take On Me, shittyfluted.  Similar to sweding, and I’m so sorry.