I’ve mentioned it before, but custom live images are possible. Related: mkisofs(8) is no longer needed to build.
Some deeper reads.
- (mac)OStalgia. Mac OS 9 versions of software; accurate to the end. (via)
- The Mythology Index. (via)
- DIA Tools. (via)
- A Tiny Computer With A 3D Printed QWERTY Keyboard.
- PDP-11 computer system UNIX System file system.
- The History of S.u.S.E. Something I knew of but did not know.
- New Rust, Old Drama. Open source burnout is not new.
- This Week in Self-Hosted, via the previous link. A curated, updated list of self-hosted apps? This makes me happy.
- “ALGNOSTIC”, “MAILIVORE”.
- UNIX Magic poster annotations. (via)
- How to add a directory to your PATH. Not as straightforward as assumed.
- I never got the memo on “copyover servers”.
I almost maintain a theme all the way today.
- The origin and unexpected evolution of the word “mainframe”. 2 words.
- I Don’t Have Spotify. (via)
- Electromechanical computer from 1948 and hydromechanical computer, videos. (via)
- My stupid noise journey. I have done similar.
- Ambient computer research. (via)
- Stealth Macintosh Portable Case Mod. (via)
- Found at previous link: Macintosh Plus Exploded View shirt.
- The Internet Can’t Discover.
- Comics That Resemble The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Album Cover. Swipes swipes swipes.
- A Closer Look at the Tanmatsu. My recurring fantasy of doing everything at a terminal somehow.
- Sorta related: Some Terminal Frustrations.
Your unrelated violent claymation fantasy movie link of the week: The Dead Need No Chairs.
I have some interesting art projects to point at, here.
- Programming Quotes. (via)
- The CRPG Renaissance, Part 1: Fallout. I didn’t know about the GURPS link.
- The first perfect computer. (via)
- Recommended File Formats for Digital Preservation. (via)
- My electric toothbrush was acting up, so I tried to reboot it.
- Also “I tried to adjust the time on my alarm clock. I failed.“
- Insert “I will pay extra to NOT have a computer in my fridge” meme here.
- The glory of the A4 paper size. Sorry about the link location though. (via)
- Hyper-Kinetic. “I have a pen plotter robot called Stephen”. (also via)
- Data Viz Project. (via)
- Amiga Hardcore. (also via)
- Then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of their pransings. Online reviews are a marketing tool, not a quality reference.
- Solid State Watch. Art project, but also definitely waterproof.
Got all the types this week.
- Semi Social / Streaming hardware test session for NYCBUG, this Wednesday.
- 2025 IGF nominees, quick takes.
- Five Centuries of Board Games.
- Plan 9 inspired programs. (via)
- The Monospace Web. Looks nice. (via)
- ELIZA followup. Hopefully you get the joke.
- Dragonsweeper. (via)
- The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again.
- Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy.
- The truth about proprietary protocols.
- Which leads me to Pixelfed and Loops.
- Or, y’know, Tumblr.
- FACT 2025, which has a great speaker lineup. (via)
- The expanded Raiding the 20th Century turns twenty. “all copyright-infringement”.
- Narcissystem.
- Beginning Framework.
- Up Rye Zine.
Done quite early, but it cleared my tabs.
- A Retrospective on the Source Code Control System. SCCS, summarized by the guy who wrote it, 50 years later. (via)
- Coding font comparison, the game. (via)
- The new Public Domain Image Archive.
- “/bin/sh: the biggest Unix security loophole“. A more fun read than the format would lead you to believe. (via)
- The Visible Zorker. This is quite a gem.
- Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study. (via)
- What’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup? (via)
- a grep that doesn’t stuck. Not a typo.
- A tale from the time_t mines:
- Using tcpdump to see only incoming or outgoing traffic.
- What a FreeBSD kernel message about your bridge means.
Your unrelated music of the week: Tenebre Rosso Sangue by KEYGEN CHURCH.
Quirky, just like I want it.
- Why is editing PDFs so prevalent?
- A Suitably Bizarre Start of the Year 2025.
- Naming Quarters. I think fortnights and sennights are underutilized timeframes, incidentally.
- pkgsrc-2024Q4 is out.
- Tellico, collection management software. (via)
- Some of the original BeOS icons reimagined in Blender. (via)
- Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets. (via)
- The next leap second is at least a year away.
- Copyright-free images. A vast amount of images available.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Where to Start With Tempa, The Label That Invented Dubstep.
Nice mix this week.
- Traveller Reading.
- Your Comics Will Love You Back! (via)
- The Ghosts in the Machine. Don’t use Spotify. Cancel your account, if you have one. Nothing else will cause change. (via multiple)
- My Favorite Weird Little Apps. (via)
- Field Companions. (via)
- In an unconfigured Vim, I want to do ‘:set paste’ right away. Reminder to self; muscle memory won’t change to accommodate anything else.
- How Multi-User Dungeons Taught Me To Code. Having a goal makes it much easier to learn to code. (via)
- Generative AI is for the idea guys. The ratio of idea to implementation at every place I’ve ever worked is like 1000:1.
- Y2K, again. It’ll be a problem 13, 25, and 75 years from now. Don’t forget GPS week number rollover while considering fundamental date problems.
- Public Domain Day 2025. The Dashiell Hammett books are good if you have not read them yet.
- Happy Public Domain Day 2025. Same topic, but it has specific links to good stuff.
This Wednesday, Jim Brown presents on QEMU at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting. Go, if you are near, but RSVP first so you can get in. It should be streamed too.
Happy new year! I have some history gems in here – not archival material but people that made history, speaking again, now.
- A TI-99 programmer resurfaces. (via Paul Ivanov, thanks)
- Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit – The History of the BSD Daemon. The original artist, Phil Foglio, is still making excellent comics. (video, via)
- Technical Marvels, Part 9: Program-Controlled Musical Picture Clocks. Novel to me. (via)
- Developing a public-interest training commons of books. (via)
- Not BSDTalk, but talk(1) on BSD. Follow the thread.
- Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository. I remember reading this but not linking this. (via this long thread)
- An oral history of AutoDesk. (via)
- What an Atari workstation might have looked like.
- Apropos for the new year: BSDCan 2025 call for papers.
- MNT laptops are neat, but they also do… earrings? (via)
- Research of RAM data remanence times. (via)
- Public Domain Day at the Internet Archive.
- And at the Public Domain Review.
- QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, in 3 days. RSVP needed if you are going, which I recommend.
This is going to seem minor, but it’s been annoying for a zillion years, and now it’s fixed: mail(1) now reflows text properly after a screen resize.
If you use TrueCrypt / tcplay, dm-crypt, or /dev/crypto on DragonFly, Michael Neumann wants to know.
Cleared half my tabs and none of my inbox… I think I’ll get started on next week’s Lazy Reading right now.
- Every Single Noise In The World. (via)
- Domain Naming. (also via)
- A Guide to Commodore PETs. I love the shape.
- Frequently asked questions about signal handling in C.
- Half-Life on the Digital Antiquarian.
- LinkedIn to Hell. (via)
- At Dawn We Ate Sugar Smacks: Wargaming Newbies Tackle the Monster of Monsters. A horrifying person writing a funny essay. (via)
- UFO50. (via)
- Anime Mechanics. (via)
- Starting with Classic Traveller.
- Smartphone Runs Home Server.
- Ridding my home network of IP addresses. Personal complaint: Github gists: better than social media for public documents, but not much. (via)
Terminal thoughts this week.
- Century-Scale Storage. “The RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe,” (via)
- “Rules” that terminal programs follow. (via)
- Text-based tools I’m using on my FreeBSD laptop.
- Related: chawan, a TUI-based web browser. (via)
- Sort of related empty musing: could Ladybird have a text mode?
- Resurrection, Journal of the Computer Conservation Society. Yay a flowchart! (also via)
- The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC.
- TRMNL, a sorta-standalone e-ink display. (via)
- Anti-Schmutz Phone Port Plug. I use a needle which is probably a bad idea.
- RFC 35140: The Do-Not-Stab flag in the HTTP Header. (via)
I could use a recommendation for a good, cheap registrar to use for domain names; I use gandi and the price has been creeping up. Any suggestions?
- Next NYCBUG: QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, 2025-01-08. QEMU is far more influential than I expected.
- For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. (via)
- The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023).
- A physical save button.
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (1978) vs Spanner (2012). (via)
- SCCS roach motel. A pretty exhaustive description of SCCS and the weave format.
- Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer.
- Public domain works done for NASA. (via previous)
- The Biggest Shell Programs in the World. You want to look and also look away. (via)
Unofficial theme: synthesizers!
-
- How to Build a Chess Engine and Fail. (via)
- cablesoft. Finally, a ‘computers are bad’ story where I experienced (some of) the history described.
- Jon Makes Beats. Seeing synthesizers and samplers in use. (via)
- More synthesizer stuff: the Orchid. (via)
- Even more: Music Thing Modular Workshop System. (via)
- Using (only) a Linux terminal for my personal computing in 2024.
- more tales of the unscreenshotable.
- AI-powered Self Service Checkouts.
- Why pipes sometimes get “stuck”: buffering. (via)
- Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web. (via)
- Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. Tabletop RPG history. (via)
- A Margaret Hamilton’s worth of printed code. (via)
- What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. (also via)
Your video experience of the week: Hundreds of Beavers. This was played in a theater in my town months ago and I missed it. I should have gone to see it on the big screen, but here it is on YouTube. (via)
No theme but some new-to-me topics.
- Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming. (via)
- The Monstrome. A Monster Manual.
- FriendlyStack Reminder, a hardware implementation of Post-It Notes.
- Tetris Forever, a game and a documentary at the same time. (via)
- Like pizza, the first version of Tetris you encounter is probably the one you will consider the best. It’s the old Mac version for me.
- SPAG: Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games. Back issues. (via)
- Starbattle. A sort of inverted Minesweeper.
- Beckn Protocol. (via)
- The Usenet Feed Size exploded to 475TB. Continuous Usenet traffic would burn out server disks every month, years ago when I worked for Road Runner – and that is when traffic was measured in GB.(via)
Links are from a wide range of sources this week; it’s often a good idea to follow the (via) tags to find even more.
- NYCBUG meets 12/4 at the usual time, for lightning talks.
- Maximizing Time For Reading. (via)
- Half-Life 2 20th anniversary. Documentaries like this are sort of about the game but also an inside track on software development case studies. (See also Psychodyssey)
- Asterogue. (via)
- Procedural text and tabletop roleplaying. Speaking of roguelikes…
- The missing text focused programming environment. Makes me think of Smalltalk.
- IMG_0416. (via)
- MyNoise. (via)
- CW&T, a design studio. (via)
- Keep It Simple Tools. (via)
This week’s music: Thank You, Dream Girl. (via)
I might have cleared my open computer-related tabs for once!
- The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832. Open access book; order a physical copy if you enjoy it. (via)
- A Brief History of Cyrix.
- Totalisator, mechanical racetrack/betting computers I had never heard of. (video, via)
- A Craving for Calculation. Linked for the of-a-time feel of the pictures.
- Infinite Mac: Macintosh Garden Library. (via)
- tvcon, a Knight TV emulator. Try ‘tvcon -2BCS -c000002 bitzone.sdf.org‘. (from a nonpublic list)
- The Internet Gopher from Minnesota.
- Spell checking in Vim.
- Self-hosted web browser bookmarks syncing.
- Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023.
- Grim Fandango.
This is a settle-in-and-read list.
- eink.cam. (via)
- Keyboard size guide. I never knew the names. (via)
- Why Don’t We Read Like We Used To? Linked for noting how people read only headlines. Like for this very Digest.
- Current challenges in free software and open source development. Slides here. Thanks Paul for sending.
- TI-99/4A Star Trek Theme Song. From the recent Chicago TI-99/4A
User Group‘s Annual Chicago TI International World Faire. Also thanks to Paul. - SourceType Index. So many tiny rabbit holes to go down; this will eat some time to read. (via)
- Via the previous link, UN-11, a Selectric-style font that dare I say I like more than Helvetica?
- Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone. (via)
- Colophon. He’s been blogging longer than I have.
- The Beyond and Leviathan, coming very soon. Two excellent authors.