Author: Justin Sherrill

10 months until Christmas!

• Five ways to instantly improve blah blah your productivity blah.  Useful techniques, described with humor.  I need to use the “Analogue Day” one.
• Be Newsletters, the archived index.
• What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death.  It used to be Moore’s Law that drove replacement, not the choices of the manufacturer.
• Vim Anywhere.  (via)
• We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms.
• Ex Libris, about the New York Public Library.  (via)
• Fall of Voodoo.  So that’s what happened to 3dfx.
• Custom game system hardware.
• An Introduction to Digital Computers, a film.  Digital as in “not analog”, 1969.  (via)
• https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/ – I am entertained by the URL, and I understand why this applies to most package managers… but it doesn’t take into account the metadata leakage that https would prevent.  (via)
• Aaaand here’s the counterpoint, which I agree with: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories.  (via)
• Futures of distributions.  (also via)
• Predictive command line usage, a PDF.   That seems odd.  (via)

The links this week aren’t necessarily long, but they are definitely “make-you-think” material.

• The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing.  Paul Ford.  The story abounds with good quotes, and good summaries of the strangeness that was LISP, or Plan 9, or etc.  (via)
• That led me to the Squeak website, cause I always had a vague desire to learn Smalltalk, someday.
• Best Practices for Cache Management.
• Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch.
• WinAmp, recreated in Javascript.  Feature-filled.  (via)
• Paradise OS.  (also via)
• Linux’izing your Windows PC into a dev machine.  I don’t like this trend of running Windows and pretending it’s not.  (via)
• Tough love, or stultifying ossification? I don’t know.
• The Bandcamp 2017 Year in Review.  Bandcamp is a good idea even if all it does is avoid streaming audio monoculture.
• Spectre Mitigations in Microsoft’s C/C++ Compiler.  I link to this to show that the mitigation methods users rely on are secret, cause it’s not open source.  So this researcher has to rely on evaluating the output rather than the code itself.
• Edible Games.  Exactly what the name implies.  (via)
• Can’t get UNIX v7/x86 to work in virtual machine.
• How to redesign a tech logo.  Monoculture, like I said.

Some really fun things this week.

• A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files.  A fun, crazy read.  (via)
• Miniature Macintosh Plus.  Also crazy.  (via)
• Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, going on now.
• Centralise Your Bash History.  (via)
• Computer Role-Playing Games Book released.  (via multiple)
• The Case for Automatic Updates.  (via)
• X’s network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure .  (via)
• How Facebook Is Killing Comedy.  And why I keep this all on my own blog.  (via)
• OpenSC2K – An Open Source Remake of SimCity 2000.  (via)
• From the same source, openra.net, a Red Alert remake.
• Backblaze 2017 Q4 and 2017 yearly report.  (via)
• spectre and the end of langsec.  (via)
• Plan 9 Public Grid.  (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: Verse.