• The Bad Apple video, ASCII version, playing without CSS or JS.  (via)
• Sounds of the 60s: The IBM 1401.  I’ve heard this before as sound effects and never realized it.  (via)
• The Map of Metal.  Similar to longtime favorite Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.  (also via)
• The BBC Tetris Companion.  Hardware I’ve never seen before.
• ICEBP Finally Documented.  The article is 8 years old, but it took 30 years to be documented.  (via Nick)
• “Kinky Latex Giraffe“, among others.
• This plant will die if I’m on my phone too much.  (video, via)
• PGSimCity.  Exactly what it sounds like.  (via)
• Syl’s Indie [game] Recs, vol. 4.
• endoflife.date.  (via)

• How you wind up with switches above your office’s false ceiling.  Every office job I ever had, now that I think about it.
• How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks.  Calibre is an astonishingly useful program.
• Entering accented characters in Linux.  Which should be “in X11”, so it should apply to BSD.
• “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”.  Esoteric languages alert.
• The KEXP breakdown of Paul’s Boutique.
• BSD Make extravaganza.  Mandelbrot in bmake.  (via)
• Most Googlebots are fake.  It used to just be “Mozilla” was fake.
• “That was then, this is now“.

• Decker, a modern tool enough like Hypercard to make me notice.  (via)
• Dinos That Drive, a new book illustrated by the guy who brought you Behold!  The Dinosaurs!
• Be More Party Cannon.
• Hardcore IndieWeb.  (via)
• Describing the early Internet was surprisingly easy.
• The Cybernetics Digital Library.  (via)
• I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to draw (with 9front).  Sometimes the tutorial is the point, not the skill being taught.  (via)
• email encryption.  I have worked at least a little with every protocol mentioned and it was always, always painful.

• A Minimal Syntax For Quantum Text, the methods used to generate the different-every-printing novel Subcutanean.  The book itself has been linked here before.  (via)
• Li’l Factory AB, a tiny fiction publisher.  (via)
• Asterism Books, another oddities publisher.  (via)
• The Virtual OS Museum, emulated computer setups, pre-prepared as Linux VM images.  (via)
• Declassified Space Invaders.  (via)
• The Book Handling Agency.
• Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader.  I am finding all these Xteink links through Bubbles.
• Sneakerweb.  (via)
• Don’t Panic Cyberdeck.  A full BOM is included.  (via)
• LisaFPGA: the Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA.  (via)
• VapourDeck, DOS games in a handheld.

Your music links of the week: Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch which led me to this 1950 film showing some of Partch’s huge instruments, and here they still are.  Related: The Warped, Wondrous World of Microtonal Jazz on Bandcamp.

• Next NYCBUG meeting: it’s a social meeting (no guest speaker), August 5th.
• The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything.  Everyone’s played at least one Sim game in their lifetime, correct?
• Weird Side Projects.  (via)
• Diane Lindo, stop motion animations.  (also via)
• A terminal version of Obsidian.  Different from the official CLI.
• MNT June 2026 Update.  Notes that OpenBSD runs on the Pocket Reform.
• Fish Shell.
• A pocket computer history museum.
• Ditch your Alexa.
• Cutting the cord to the cloud.
• LibriVox, free public domain audiobooks.
• “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?”  Linked for the animation showing an IBM 1401 console in action.

• Why I Like Small Keyboards.  Linked for the keyboard picture; smallest split I’ve ever seen.
• Erwin Wurm: One Minute Artworks.  Found via this post – read to the end for the connection, and watch the video while you are at it.
• Difficult, Important, Succeeding?
• OpenRA.  I thought I had linked to this before, and I had, but it was 8 years ago.  (reminded it exists via)
• Bringing Swift To The Apple II.
• Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD.
• Garbage for humans.  This is one of the incentives for gopher if you think about it.  (via)
• IIgs The Future.  Linked cause it reminded me about the old Apple game The Bilestoad.
• It Always Amazes Us.  Animation Obsessive’s current list of things they like.

• Cyberdeck Meetup Notes.  (via)  I wish Iffy Books was closer; those are some fun events on the calendar.
• Painting with Light.
• The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows.  I was finding wholesale copies of this Digest back in I think 2008 or so.
• Using Claude Code to Personalise the Xteink X4.  Adding to some previous links about this device.  (via)
• And also this: The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader.
• Also probably related: I don’t need it (and neither do you).
• Gmail Thinks I’m Stupid, So I Left.  (also via)
• Please, Just Stop Ruining “10 PRINT”. Seriously.
• Connect FreeBSD to OpenBSD using WireGuard.
• The Starlog 50.

• NYCBUG’s having a social meetup on July 1st; stories about BSDCan will be told, I’m sure.
• When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars.  This seems like a named aesthetic.  (via)
• Building a serial and VGA “everything console”.  Linked cause the author is using one of the IBM keyboards I always wanted.
• Key, In Sight.  The keyboard in the center of this also looks like one of those same keyboards.  Marcin says it’s a Shinobi, which I’ve wanted to get before.
• ‘Vim’ has many faces.
• Aeonic Nebular Character Generator, for a game jam for games that do not exist.
• Powering up a module from the IBM 604.  Linked for the computer styling that says “forties”.
• That new Commodore phone is running Sailfish.
• pkgsrc-2026Q2 is out.
• The freebsd-update(8) Screensaver.
• FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop.  Linked for the Thinkpad-specific parts.
• The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy.

• I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days.  (via)
• Taken.  (also via)
• Feynman’s formula on trying new restaurant foods.
• The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech.  Yeah, clickbait, but accurate.  (via)
• How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer.  (via)
• 21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations.  Movies to watch, mostly stopmotion.  (via)
• Detecting and removing dangerous secrets on dev workstations before Shai-Hulud does.
• Kentucky’s Bourbon problem.  Read to the end.
• SCIFICORRIDORARCHIVE.  (via)
• The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History.  (via)
• I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline.  I am doing something similar but not as drastic.  (via)

• FreeBSD sh for MacOS.
• Biggest DynaTAC ever.
• 3D.City.  (via)
• Dice Soup.  (via The Glatisant.  Lots of other links in that source.)
• The best secondary prompt string possible.
• A hat on your calculator.  (via)
• Related: modern versions of HP calculators.  (via)
• Video for NYC*BUG Nov 2025: The Once and Future COBOL, by James Lowden.
• Games for Freaks, a game magazine.
• the totalisator.
• Daniel Temkin – FORTY-­FOUR ESOLANGS, The Art of Esoteric Code, a book review.
• Some games that happen to be all about music.
• I don’t know how to describe this.  (via)

• Vibe Coding a $20k /year Enterprise Logistics Platform.  We are returning to the era of custom internal software.  This I sort of like?
• my favorite independent stop-motion movies.  I saw Blood Tea and Red String years ago; it was a wonderful if strange experience.
• Those old modem upgrades.  I had a similar experience; starting at perhaps 2400 baud?  9600?  and working up.
• Key, in sight.  (via)
• AI errno(2) values.
• How and why I jailbroke my Kindle.  I am curious about calibre integration. (via)
• An Apple ][+ compatible laptop.  I would really love to have this, despite it being a complete folly.  (via)
• It’s time to talk about my writerdeck.  But then again, maybe a command line is all you need?   (via)
• Planescape: Torment, Part 1: From the Tabletop…
• “Why pay for an orchestra when your computer can do it all?”
• “the moat will keep getting filled“.
• Microcosm Industries, simulation toys.  (via)

• Let’s find out how to get predictable IPv6 addresses assigned to OpenBSD VMs.  Linked in part just for the IPv6 details.
• Fractions in HTML.  Linked to remember it for next time I need to write a fraction, though not here.  WordPress will eat the HTML entities when saving.
• DinoCon 2026 schedule.  I won’t make it, but it sounds fun.
• The vi Family.  (via)
• rsstrogen/CLAUDE.md.  (via)
• Your Dinner Got Worse on Purpose.  (via)
• Actually, just go look at the most recent Things entry.  Too many good links to cherry-pick.
• Obsidian Ecosystem Overhaul Announced.
• OpenSMTPd instead of exim.
• Orion PDA.  I can think of remote locations where this would be useful.
• Three Things about Data.  “Gather less of it” is a surprisingly practical rule.

• Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC.  (via)
• Monitor your devices with LibreNMS on FreeBSD.
• Adventures in Code.  (via)
• Related: Russ Cox on regex.  (via)
• Vibing a wardriving visualizer.  Linked for the wifi mapping.
• The 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159`.  I wish I had thought of this, cause I am entertained by the same coincidences.   (via)
• Very manual bootstrapping.
• Markdown Ate The World.  A useful document history.  (via)
• curl to /dev/sda.  A fun idea, not a good idea.  (also via)
• LibreOffice and the art of overreacting.  Remember: pay, always pay, for what you like using, even if it’s not required.  It makes a huge difference.  (via)
• INIT HELLO: A New Apple II Conference.

• Moppetry.  Muppets plus D&D.  (via)
• Using A VT-100 Today.  That reminds me, I have a VT-320 in the basement that I need to hook up.
• NetHack 5.0.0: Release Notes.  (via)
• And you can run it on your Atari.  (via)
• THEC64 Handheld.  (via)
• Claude saved me hours of link cleanup.  Boil the oceans to replicate:%s/http:/https:/g.  (via)
• Ellanew.com posts tagged “obsidian”.  Linked for me to go through later.
• Incidentally, bubbles.town is turning out great for link discovery.   I also even see my own self linked which is quite heartening.
• How I Discover New Blogs, and Why I Still Like the Internet, both related.  Get a RSS reader if you haven’t already and follow their tips.  (via)
• The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books.  (via)
• “these messages “pee in the pool” of internet communication“.  Relevant in a week where I’ve sent (and received, thank you!) multiple ‘hey you don’t know me but I like your blog’ messages with real people.
• “It’s the best articulation I’ve seen yet for a blanket ban on LLM-assisted contributions“.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Angine de Poitrine, Vol II.

Update: apparently the slides for this talk have been ready for 48 years or so.

• “Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay.”  Pseudo-ASCII design tools.
• Old-School Essentials Online Rules Reference.
• Root Loops, cereal-themed terminal colors.  (via this discussion of tmux config, via)
• “Don’t eat your seed corn”, about homogenization of ideas.
• Who Is That Knocking At My (SSH) Door?  Incidentally a fabulous domain name on that link.
• The implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, RFC1149, 25 years later.
• A list of list of alternative service providers.  (via)
• Open web vs AI: what can W3C do?  A lot, as it turns out…
• HyperCard on the Macintosh.  A retrospective of a fantastic tool.
• ‘Slimline’ Commodore 64C Ultimate: BASIC Beige.  This is going to be really exciting for anyone with a liking of Commodore hardware.
• The GPS III Rollout Is Almost Complete, But What Is It?  A nice summary of what will be nearly invisible to everyone… if it goes well.

Your unrelated subscription item of the week: The Cacao Barista Snail Mail Club.  I’ve been running a small chocolate manufacturing company for several years now and I’ve tasted a lot of chocolate from many sources.  Map Chocolate is some of the best.