Author: Justin Sherrill

Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.

• “Open source is everything!“
• Epistemological Slop.
• Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
• MNT April 2025 Update.  The handheld prototype is interesting.
• The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one.  “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
• Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl.  I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem.  (first two via)
• A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity.  If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
• Poisonify, same but for music.  (via)
• The Qwerkywriter.
• DOOM plus DOOM 2.  I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
• Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437?  (via)
• Digital hygiene.  (via)
• Don’t use AI for technical answers.
• If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common?  Brian Kernighan’s answer.
• “What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer.  Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end.  (PDF, via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping.  (via)

I have definite link overflow – I will start next week’s post now.

• Vim essence.
• “…when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.”  Why I keep doing this.
• ‘vibecoded’ saas are a privacy nightmare.  (via)
• dated carbon.
• Who Uses To-Do Lists?  Donald Knuth’s advice works well.  (via)
• Gamer Games for Non-Gamers.
• “An off switch? She’ll get years for that.”
• How I set up VimWiki for notetaking.  (via)
• The Curation Paradox.  (via)
• The office in Severance is a historic Bell Labs building – where a lot of Unix work happened.  Here’s some anecdotes about it.
• “Webster’s Second on the Head of a Pin” by Morris and Thompson.  (via)

Old home computers is the accidental theme this week.

• Home Assistant Voice.  Runs standalone, but related to ESPHome.
• Necronomicon Ex Mortis, up for sale.  (via)
• Clockwork PicoCalc.  Kinda a toy but also fun.
• Box124: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries.  Touches on a lot of topics I’ve linked to here before – but more descriptively.  My favorite article this week.
• Haunted Machines, related.
• Free Media Heck Yeah.  Some legit links, some pirate, so exercise caution.  (via)
• Not Feeling Big Tech This Year? Start an Indie Blog!  (via)
• Ultima III for the Vic-20.  (via)
• Vic-20 Elite, same author.  That’s not an easy fit!
• Four new patches for 2.11BSD released in March 2025!
• Booting A Desktop PDP-11.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Brutalist Riffs: A Guide to Math Rock.

 

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.

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.

 

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.