Category: Lazy Reading

Hey, I made my averaging-once-yearly commit!

• The Questing Beast Appendix N.  I like the idea of “personal” Appendix Ns.
• Phrack is still publishing.  (via)
• PagedOut, tech articles with a one-page max.  (also via)
• Winners of the 2025 IFComp.  (via)
• One of Pascal’s original calculating machines from 1642 is up for sale.  (via)
• AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System.  Seeing the inside of Brian Kernighan’s office is sorta neat.  (video, via)
• Drawing an ASCII TIE fighter for post?quantum cryptography.
• Robot Phone Home…Or Else.
• Cursed Knowledge.  (via)

Doing my best to clean out old to-post items, so some of these sources are weeks old – but I hope new to you.

• Overview of alic and Differences from C.  (via)
• Introducing TCP-in-UDP solution.  That seems weird.  (via)
• How 100MB Ethernet came to exist.
• Project MadHat, building a CPU from the ground up.  (via)
• Paper Apps Labyrinth.  Single player notebook game.  (via)
• Same place, Pencil Dice.
• A Retrospective Survey of 2024/2025 Open Source Supply Chain Compromises.  (via)
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case.
• A coffee chat in links.
• OpenSSH and Post-Quantum Cryptography.  Now a default warning.

I think I find these link collections most satisfying when I have can point at history, opinion, and “oddity” links all at the same time.

• PalaeoGames.  “Scientifically accurate content for your palaeontology-themed tabletop role playing game”.  Dungeons and Dragons Dinosaurs.  (via)
• The power we use and the power we give.  (via)
• Related: Meta’s Cyber Necrocide.  (via)
• Open Source is one person.  (via)  Insert XKCD cartoon here; you know which one.
• Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa, YouTube.  (via)
• Aseprite, a pixel art / sprite animation tool.  (via)
• 16 Pixel Dungeon, a game.  (via)
• Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS.  (via)
• Discuss.systems: Discussion of computer systems research & practice.
• Previous link comes from Rob Ricci’s Are We Decentralized Yet?
• ded, a variant on ed(1).  (via)
• Which means I have to bring up Ed Mastery, the book.
• The Fortean Times is still running!  It is crazy.  (via)

A couple of these links are from previous weeks, saved because I already had more time-dependent links to post.  Still good!

• Filtered for bottom-up global monitoring.
• I mentioned Bill Atkinson’s death a while back – he also invented a superior dithering method, which I only found out by accident, and I suspect it may find new use locations.
• A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop.  Classic MacOS inside a PA-RISC / CDE? machine is a combo I have never seen before.
• Those Titles the AI Bot Thought I Had Written.
• ChatGPT agent’s user-agent.  Bing and Yandex both indexing your work, with no opt-out.
• 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Quay Brothers.  (via)
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The 30 Year Late Review.  I almost don’t believe this exists.
• Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl.
• Pimping my Casio: Part Deux.  (via)
• Bag of words, have mercy on us.
• Simone’s webdesktops.  Fun just to fiddle with.  (via)

This week is the right level of esoteric.

• WWVB, the radio protocol for time synch.  I knew this existed as a concept but not the details.  (via, via)
• Digital hygiene.  The work/home separation is an underappreciated idea.  (via)
• Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004.  Those are active, working, embedded Mac emulators on the web page.  (via)
• If you are able, use the tools you’ve got.
• John Stezaker, collage artist.  Here’s my favorite one I’ve seen.  (via)
• The Shape of the Heavens.  “Pity the poor d12”
• The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001).  (via)
• Introducing CaptchaStash.  (via)
• The Library of Congress publishes an updated “recommended formats” for data, which seems as authoritative a resource as it could be.
• A reminder you can log into various historic UNIX systems right now thanks to the ICM and SDF.
• BYO TRMNL.

Some odd, fun links.

• Tattoy: : a text-based terminal compositor.  (via)
• wobbly letters.
• The Yale ‘E’ editor and the RAND “Ned” editor, design documents.  It’s interesting to see how the requirements were defined, and how they match the current day.  (via)
• Brain Freeze.  One of the features of the Internet is to find strange things taken seriously.
• McMaster Nerf Blaster.  If you aren’t familiar with McMaster and their billions of parts, this is a good first step.
• The Internet Archive’s gif badge search.  The announcement of this came with this image, which I can’t actually find at the archive but is great.
• Preserving a History of Digital Mapmaking.
• How prompt injection works.
• Ban autonomous systems.  Also Trying to understand the bots.
• Babelcarp, an old-school site for tea terms.  (via)
• jemalloc postmortem and phkmalloc, contrast and compare.  (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Peanut Butter Breaks.