A lot of this was done early; last week had a lot of interesting stuff turn up.  Maybe because we’re coming out of a extreme winter in the northern hemisphere, and people are feeling a bit more energetic?

• How to Eat Your Entropy and Have it Too — Optimal Recovery Strategies for Compromised RNGs.  One of the authors, Yevgeniy Dodis, is I think speaking at an upcoming NYCBUG meeting.
• This may not surprise you, but the GNU version of ‘true’ can sometimes return false.
• I still have a weakness for 80s vector graphics.
• Matching one of the links from last week, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game online.  (via)
• The History of Information.  Mesmerizing, like reading Wikipedia in serial order.  (via)
• Drifting into Fragility, a look at complex system failure analysis at WETA.  Notable for the offhand comment that they’re rendering on 49,000 cores.  That’s… over 9,000!  (Old joke but still fun.)  (via)
• pleaserun, an attempt to abstract away the systemd vs. everything else argument.  Also, a perfectly descriptive name.   (also via)
• Unix: Pranks that sysadmins play.
• Token ring: still used.  Eh, could be worse; could be frame relay.
• The Mid-Career Crisis of the Perl Programmer.  The leading tl;dr segments are dead on, but the essay itself rolls out into a conversation about skills for older programmers and what choices you make.  (via)
• Maury, Innovation, and Change.  Open data and common APIs – in 1850.  (via)
• How to save read-only files in Vim.  A step better than the usual advice.
• UNIX Magic.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Conet Project, recordings of numbers stations, at the Internet Archive. (via the Orbital Operations newsletter)

Bonus timewaster: 2048.  (via multiple places)