Month: February 2021

If you enjoy the weekend reading, or even the weekday posts, consider my Patreon.  It’d be nice if it bought me some good coffee.

• The Public Domain Review’s Caption Contest.
• Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer.  (video, via)
• Typographische Jahrbücher, 1902.
• What else hath God wrought?  “lo”, one of my favorites.  (via)
• 72 encounters from the City of Spires.
• Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step).
• History of the PDF format.  (via)
• Stores for Commodore 128 components.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1977: Zork and 1978: Pirate Adventure.
• MacLynx beta 3 — really!
• The Plain Text Tools I Use (2021 Edition).
• Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program.  Very much a transitional machine between early analog and modern.
• “Basic Computer Games“, an updated version of the book.  (via)

Your unrelated to anything at all image of the week: Saskatchewan!

Today’s date is slightly confusing.

• A point to consider before retr0brigting.  Dirt as nostalgia.
• Ditherpunk 2 — beyond 1-bit.  I like the layout, not just the content.  (via)
• pineapple60, an ergonomic keyboard with trackpoint.  Made to fit in a Thinkpad.  (also via)
• Visiting Another World, about Gemini.  (via)
• Wonders of extraction: Coffee (part 1).
• 16th century automata.
• Unwinnability and Wishbringer.
• Starting FORTH.  (via)
• Of tea, cakes and computers, Georgina Ferry (Wuthering Bytes 2019).  I think I linked to another telling of this story years ago; the first business app was for a British caterer.  (via)
• Neopixel LED Skirt.  The bouncing ball animation is neat.
• I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You.
• Make the BeBox great again: TLS 1.2, inetd and more for PowerPC BeOS R5.  (via)

Another informal history theme, not uncommon.

• Amulets, cassette tape art?  (via)
• Early warning signs of shitty software.
• Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science, by Knuth.  (via)
• The History of Trackers.  (via)
• The Second Coming of Star Wars.  The video games.
• The quest for Wolfenstein 3D music on the Apple IIgs.
• Tomorrow is ENIAC Day.  75 years!  (via)
• MIDICSV.  Structured text and music, has potential.  (via)
• How and why I stopped buying new laptops.  (via)
• On Planetary in 2020.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1976: Adventure.
• The Animation That Changed Cinema.  30 minutes of good animation.
• Free MWL novel.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Best electronic music on Bandcamp, January 2021.

There’s a few links in here that you could lose hours to.  Those are the best!

• A 6502 (think Apple I) as a clamshell.
• “predicting the weather in the earth’s core is hard“.  Meaning, the earth speeds up and slows down, unpredictably.
• Colour & Shape: Using Computer Vision to Explore the Science Museum Group Collection.  (via)
• Simulating Zoom circa 1990.  The whole Slow Networks series there is fun.  (also via)
• Useful video clips of Turing Award winners.  Talking about innovations with the people that actually did them; Knuth on compiler writing, Hellman on public key encryption, etc.
• I wish every program that wanted ‘a SQL database’ would let me use SQLite.  Same.
• The Hidden, Destructive Legacy of ‘Duke Nukem’.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1975: dnd.
• Bluetooth trackball Mark II.  The ball is the trackball.  (via)
• Semi-related: The Computer History Museum’s short films sorted by topic.  You will also find some gems here.
• “The center of the Cloud is in Ashburn, Virginia”.   The Cloud, the Civil War, and the “War on Coal”.  (via)
• little sound dj, emulating a Game Boy just to make music.  (via)
• “TLS Mastery” first draft done!  Looking for technical reviewers.
• Generative Unfoldings, Opening April 1, 2021.  All open source generative art.
• Links about todo.txt.