DragonFly BSD Digest

I need to always preview these posts, cause cutting and pasting text sometimes brings along formatting elements not visible in the editor, but play heck with the actual layout.

• D&D Map Sketcher.  (via)
• Web desktops.  (via multiple places)
• Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective.  (via)
• What Ever Happened To Hearing Aid Beige?
• 120,000pt Helvetica.  (via)
• Sloanstarter.
• Related: Robin Sloan’s delicious and expensive olive oil.
• Long Egg Production.  It’s in German, so I can’t tell what this is.
• Historic Tale Construction Kit.  (Thanks, Ben Collver)

Some retrocomputing as a mini-theme this week.

• Download files listed in a http index with wget.  Eventually you will need this.
• A Conversation With the Mysterious Dubstep Sensation Hannibal Rex.
• Stretching the c64 Palette.  (via)
• Announcing Perl 7.  (via)
• Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor.  (also via)
• Bluetooth (sound) latency is astonishingly bad.  50ms is all it takes.  (via)
• On Contact Tracing and Hardware Tokens.  This would be the right guy to evaluate this.
• modernish, a shell library?  I am not sure what to call it.  (via)
• General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS.
• NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software.  (via)
• Real VT102 emulation with MAME.  (via)
• Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration.  (via)
• Linux Kernel Is Still Seeing Driver Work for the Macintosh II.  Of course this isn’t surprising to a BSD person.  (via)
• A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2.  (via)
• No lack of documentation.  Linked for the image, and for the note that Twitter threads are bad for information storage.  Don’t do it.

Your unrelated music of the week: Skratch Bastid.  (via)

Minor computer history theme this week.

• Odeon theaters in LEGO.
• The guy who created the View-Master also was the first to figure out plastic trash cans.
• Home Computer Cultures and Society Before the Internet Age.  (via)
• roguelike celebration 2020 is happening virtually.
• The Gigatron, a no-microprocessor retrocomputer.  Available as a solder-yourself kit.
• The Smithsonian’s Computer Oral History Collection.  Grace Hopper, others, recorded.  (via)
• The ACM has free access to its books for the next few days; go now, before it ends.  See the source post for this for some ideas on what to read.
• A special item in that list, the Antikythera Mechanism.  I had never seen recreations of the device before.  (via)
• The Return of the 90s Web.
• Comments on that last link.
• 5 days with the MX Ergo.  I link these things just for the X notes.
• Speaking of which, Input events on X have an old world and a new world.
• The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk.  The one thing from Xerox PARC that didn’t take over the world.  (via)
• Recent Database Tech.  (via)
• The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM.