Author: Justin Sherrill

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.

 

No theme past my grumpy start.

• AI web scrapers: a data point.
• AI search: a bad data point.
• Predictions in the Apple-sphere.  Linked for the note that LLMs support existing languages – not new, and therefore slow development.
• OK, getting off that theme…
• An extensive writeup on terminal colors.  (via)
• Why you don’t want event-specific time zones.
• BBC Micro text mode Xevious.  (via)
• The Second Annual Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree.  Read down for links to previous submissions of good blog posts
• The Magic of Code, out now, and worth reading if the author’s newsletter is any guide.
• Related: The Humanistic Computation Project.
• An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Ring of Power Delivery Feasibility Study.  (via)
• Should I Stop Caring and Let IP Address Reputation Sort Them Out?   IP blacklist issues over time.
• Tinkering with an old-school cable community info channel website.  Related to Weather Star 4000.

 

More tab-clearing.

• modern software 2025 edition.
• I’ve just implemented a Forth system.  Then, The basics of an indirect threaded code ANS Forth implementation.
• Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions.
• Using TRMNL to make digital signs with LibCal.  I know someone who just bought two TRMNLs just for inside signage.
• From that previous link: TRMNL-Kindle.  I just found an old Kindle mixed in with some other books, too…
• Script to convert HEIC image files to PNG.  For my own benefit.
• parking_lot: ffffffffffffffff…  (via)
• Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple.  (via)
• What is Glaze?  (via)
• SysctlTUI is Out!
• Come make some candles with me.  A worthwhile offer.
• Books on Unix security?  Given that it’s a list from TUHS readers, it’s probably the most definitive list possible.

Your unrelated music of the week: Left Hand Path from ITX038 – 89! Gloom by Commodo x Gantz.

Open tab cleanup week!  I didn’t even get to the links saved in my email, yet.

• subvert.fm, a collectively owned Bandcamp.  (via)
• Reframing Abundance: Open Tools, Free Games, Distributed Culture.  The text is good, and so are the links at the end.  (via)
• That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List.  I’ve linked a few of these before.
• The pico-mac-nano and where you can buy the parts or even the assembled thing itself, along with actual 25-year-old Apple parts.
• Viral bad plotter art, a TED Talk.  (via)
• The Underground Designer’s Handbook.
• We Need Small Web Communities.
• Caddy against the Machines.
• When was peak message in a bottle?  Most interesting use of a googlewhack.

I managed to get away from most of my usual themes.

• 50 Years of Text Games, final overstock sale.  This is a unique book; buy it now if you want one of the fancy versions.
• Bored Spreadsheet, all the most common minigames of the last few decades, in a spreadsheet interface.  (via)
• Signal Carnival, swapping a C64’s audio and video outputs.  (via)
• Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, still available, and there’s a sort-of walkthrough, too.  (Thanks, Phil Pirozhkov)
• The First Port of UNIX.  (via)
• Zoomable User Interface, Scrolling User Interface.  (via)
• How to Quit Streaming, a brief and practical guide.  (via)
• Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen.  Petty but I enjoyed it.  (via)
• Organizational Edge Cases.  Related to UNIX.
• Femur, in-browser musical doodads.  (via)

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)