• Approved brands in the Worse On Purpose Ledger.  Everything in here that I am familiar with, I agree.  (via)
• My Trip to VCF Midwest 2026.  Linked for the pictures.
• ANSI Art and Webcomics.  (via)
• Small Web Presentation Links, to go with this presentation.  (via)
• The Slurptop.  A cyberdeck design that uses power tool batteries.  (via)
• The Old Internet Is Still Here.  Linked for the links, which seems appropriate.  (via)
• Cybernaut and Time, new mood boards from Christopher Butler.
• A complete internal iPod replacement.  (via)
• An attack maybe against wildcard certificates? A proxy attack?

Your unrelated video of the week: Lurpak Butter Douglas Aardman Advert Compilation (1985-2003).  (indirectly via)

I was able to update this server without problems.  The only manual step I had was reinitializing Postgres because the major version changed.  The announcement has the details.

• Sent in by a reader: discodoor, a project that uses Syncthing public information to update firewall controls.
• bukmark.club, a collection of personal websites.  Hit the random link.  (via)
• Cards Against AI.  Even if you are not anti-AI, it’s a way to turn off annoying features you never asked for.  (via)
• Shadow Library Uptime Monitor (SLUM), which as a side effect tells you where some of these shadow libraries live.  (also via)
• A very sensible writeup of why you should self-host in general: Why Self-Host 9Front?
• Symbools.com, the 1973 ‘Trademarks & Symbols’ book.  Is this an automated AI thing?  I can’t tell, but the site says  more out of print books on the way.   (via)
• reManager, a plugin install system for the reMarkable.  (I have one but haven’t used it recently – this is what I needed to install KOReader)
• Previous link came from New Ways to Read E-Books, which should show you something new.
• The Terak, a computer system I’ve never heard of before.  (via this detailed history)
• This Link Is This Document.  A little brain-twisty.  (via)

The other side effect of all this is that I think I need more tools that don’t use PHP.

• Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables.  Surely someday I will need this 3 foot 50 pin Centronics cable?  (via)
• PICOmputer FLIP – pocket ZX Spectrum.  Mostly I like the Psion-ish shape.  The ZX part is just emulated.
• Disk Mood Board.  I bet there’s at least one format on here you’ve never seen.
• Thefractals.net.  Design fractals in your browser.  Or drag your browser rendering to a halt.  (via)
• The Voynich Viewer.  If you are not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, here’s the explainer.
• Lightink, a solar power e-ink watch.  References Watchy, which I linked back in 2022.
• Are We Sixel Yet?  Terminals supporting bitmapped images.  (Via a quxnet post.)
• Clair De Lune, a somewhat hypnotic Rube Goldberg animation.  (via)
• Rex’s Dino Store.  (via)

• As much as it is easy to complain about big tech companies, sometimes they quietly do the right thing.
• Related: The people holding up the Internet.  (via multiple places)
• Adafruit Halloween projects.
• BYU’s fossil vending machine.
• Obfuscated, self-evaluating bash script by CDN Akamai being supplied to consumers via retail stores.
• Previous link from Some Measured Fractal Dimensions, worth a read on its own.
• quxnet, submitted by the admin.  Old-school messages, almost like USENET circa 1995.
• Related: quux == four.  I hope that exists already in your brain and you know why.
• Ron Pippin.  I’ve lost track of where I got this link, but it’s neat stuff.
• The Institute of Network Cultures and their publication Fragments of Tactical Media, available as PDF or more interestingly as Etherport.  (via)
• The Most Accurate Watch that Doesn’t Tell Time.
• Hammer Horror, a quick explainer in time for Halloween.

Your unrelated music video of the week: Return the Goat.  Next in the story: Helm Yeah.  Yes, it’s a gimmick, but the music is good.

• The RetroTINK.
• Become worthless (to tech companies).  Good steps, not difficult ones.  (via)
• Experiencing a Victorian London street in 3D.  (via)
• “One printed IP/ICMP “ping” packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149″.  (via)
• Bastardica.  (via)
• A note on content restrictions and One possible future for websites is pervasive gatekeepers, two articles that I think are more significant when read together.
• Display mood board.
• A trick to render all 1.1M Unicode characters in your browser.
• The Invention of the MMO.  (via)
• How a combination lock works.  I’ve linked to that site before; something to dive into.  (also via)

Unrelated music links: The best metal, electronic, and jazz on Bandcamp for September.

• Inflight Simulator. Flight sim where you aren’t the pilot.  Seems obvious but I can understand if nobody wants to play.  (via)
• Turning a $40 Surface Go into an always-on camera monitor.  Neat but also you can buy the same result off the shelf.
• Vim’s Ctrl-w.  Vi command muscle memory is built one action at a time.
• Small Web 101.
• Oglaf Book 5, a Kickstarter.  Read the comic or perhaps their Patreon if you aren’t familiar with the humor.
• Design Fiction Mood Board.
• Book Corners, a library finder.  (via)
• tmp.out, which I linked to in 2021, has continued to publish nearly-yearly.  (reminded via)
• Technology work at the Metropolitan Museum.  (via)

• NYCBUG social meeting (i.e. no presentation) on October 7th.
• A ‘clamp’ power strip.  I like the design.   (via)
• GIMP, The Movie.  (not really)
• An in-depth explainer of SSH certificates, which are much nicer than… every other security certificate system I’ve ever used, now that I think about it.  (via)
• Risk in 3D – as in a physical globe.  (via)
• folk.computer.  Computing without keyboard or monitory or touchscreen or whatever.  It looks fun!  Read this nice story from someone seeing it for the first time.  (also via)
• The 1981 Framebuffer Show.  (via)
• What playing games can teach us about simulating the future.  Prussian wargaming to D&D.
• Two Slice, a two pixel high font.  “somewhat readable!”  Use this in your terminal of choice and see what sort of weird aspect ratio you get.  (via)

• That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler.  (via)
• They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.  Neovim vs. Vim.
• Similar: s/Neovim/Helix/g.  I’m not picking on Neovim on purpose, rather this is just the particular rabbit hole I fell into.
• The Jef Raskin “3 Laws” quote in the previous link led me to find his book.
• New Cyriak: Sea Life.
• Rethinking space opera, by Charlie Stross.  The article itself is good, but it also led me to some other interesting links, like the next two:
• The Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Krugman.  Relativistic time vs trade in goods and services.  Sci-fi-adjacent.
• Starship Stormtroopers: Michael Moorcock.  Fun for what he says about science fiction, useful for the new (to me) authors and books mentioned at the end, despite being written in 1977.
• And from the comments: all three seasons of Connections are on the Internet Archive.  If you have not watched, you should.

Your unrelated video/animation of the week: CAPAREZZA – A COMIC BOOK SAVED MY LIFE.  My first encounter with Italian hip-hop.  (via)

• Notes on Software Quality.  (via)
• What’s new with robots, 2026 edition.  Linked for the consumer hardware.
• Tesserae: Self-hosted dashboards for e-ink displays.  (via)
• Vim’s UserGettingBored autocmd.
• The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer.  Linked for describing the Gridfinity standard.
• Public Domain Art Resources.  (via)
• ekkoBSD 2.1 released, 20 years after the last release.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 6.16 is out with 4 new hacks.
• LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects.  (via)
• Hyperuplink, a new bit of forum software that sounds… maintainable?
• A review of the Flipper BUSY Bar.
• hc2html, convert Hypercard stacks to web pages.  (via)
• The RAM shortage takes a dark turn.

Your unrelated music suggestion of the week: SETI by Joker.

• mdbase, a specification for Markdown files.  Linked because it’s a good idea, and because the swarm animation is neat.  (found via)
• Open Source Ecology.  (via)
• Hosting a Bulletin Board Service on My Casio VX-4.  (via)
• Hearing Things, a new music blog.  (via)
• Those who don’t know pipes are doomed to reinvent them.
• A Tale of Two Greps, related.  (via)
• Afterglow, original After Dark screensavers using a built-in 68K emulator.
• Roguelike Celebration 2026: Preview Event Speakers!
• Carla Speed McNeil comics for sale.  There’s sample pages.  One of my favorite creators.
• UNIX Reference Cards.  I wish I had one of these early on.  (via)
• How to turn anything into a router.  Of course it’s easier with BSD.  (via)

Also: the Roguelike Celebration Preview Event is happening right after I post this, so it may be happening as you read this.  Tickets are free and it’s online.  Of the three talks, “Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games” sounds most interesting to me but of course it would.  I’ll be working but don’t let that stop you.

• OpenAI’s Rogue Agents Are a Normal Accident.  Linked for the Morris Worm history.
• The Kleptones are on Bandcamp.
• The first machine to run rogue(6).
• UNIX News / ;login:, the earliest issues.  (via)
• Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?
• ESPectre Human Detector for Feather.
• bsd.cafe.  (via)
• “WARP, then ZOOM, FLY, RUN, WALK, TENEX, and the slowest being MULTIX“.
• UNIX was originally UNICS.
• How to dig for music without Spotify.  (via)
• Writerdeck resources.  (via)

• City Builders.  The SimCity genre has kept going.
• “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”  I remember playing this at least once.
• BeepAlive – keeping my soundbar from going to sleep.
• How I use Home Assistant to help with my cats.  Far more ambitious than I expected.
• Found via the recent DinoCon: multiple high–quality small–company dinosaur reproductions.
• Tim Hunkin’s History Of Arcade Machines.
• Introducing Avogadro: A parametric waffle recipe generator.
• I love reading lists of people’s favorite books, especially when I’ve never seen any of them.
• WebZFS.  (via)
• Michaelsoft Binbows.  This is fun but the link has only worked intermittently for me.  (via)
• Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same.  (via)

• “Gravity is worth asking about.”  Linked for describing the “zero-one-infinity” rule, but applied to things you don’t want.
• reTerminal Sticky, a new reader in the now-popular ‘Xteink’ form factor.
• A Network Filesystem for 2.11BSD.  (via)
• Visiting the History of Computing and Play.  Look for “abbreviated history of floppy disks in a single photo”.
• Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C.  1963 ASCII didn’t have } or {, and neither did the hardware.  (via)
• “non-Unix stories about important Unix people“.
• BoxyBSD, virtual BSD systems for people to try out different flavors of BSD.  The base machine is free.  (via)
• UNIX in a Hostile Environment, or Mouse Watching by a Cat – go to page 13.  (via)
• Where UNIX Runs Today.  An interesting article, and a built-in shooter game at the same time?  (via)
• Telehamster.  (via)

• 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“.