DragonFly BSD Digest

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)