NYCBUG is meeting tonight at a changed location. There’s going to be discussion of the just-finished BSDCan plus talk about membership growth and handling streaming events.
This week, extended commentary on the links.
- Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links. “Even today, thirty years after Jerry and David, I still visit bookmarked webpages that maintain human-curated lists of links.” You can guess my opinion of that.
- Higher Intellect, a huge repository of documents of the sort you’d find squirreled away on the Internet in the late 90’s. There’s a PHRACK section, for instance, or nice copies of US WW2 posters.. (via)
- Defeating Mouse Lint. Mechanical mice only existed for a specific period in time, and probably never will again.
- The Tomb of Horrors. I had heard of this ‘impossible’ D&D module but never actually tried it.
- how-to.computer. This is the 2020s versions of old homesteading guides. Can you self-host too much? I think not. (via)
- LaTeX for Complete Novices. Nobody ever seems excited about LaTeX but people always report “I did a ton of work with it without issue”. (via)
- The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing. There’s some great quotable bits in this but my favorite is “The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. “
- The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder. Even if it was a blunder, the effects would have been limited by the lack of consumer Internet. (via)
- LibreOffice Substitutes. Something here to try for everyone.
- Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the idea of software platforms that doesn’t exist to disintermediate users and extract revenue intriguing.
- Two important things: the longest domain name I’ve seen yet, and the Kickstarter for Run Your Own Mailserver, an important technical book and also because SMTP is becoming hard to do at any scale other than “huge”. (via)
- I signed up for the aforementioned Kickstarter as should you; note there’s a Signed Useless EBook edition. Don’t buy it, just be entertained by the concept.
No theme this week, but some neat history items.
- Modern cactus.
- Winamp goes open source. (via)
- Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159. (via)
- Next NYCBUG meeting: June 5th. It’ll be a post-BSDCan recap.
- “udm=14” is now useful for Google searches much like you had to turn on literal search to avoid ‘helpful’ spelling fixes.
- The Nature of Shareware. Mentioned: Ambrosia Software, a former local company. Not mentioned: the 1-2% pay rate for shareware, if you’re lucky.
- When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim.
- A history of Spelljammer. (via)
- Archie, rediscovered. (via)
- Retro tech in anime supercut. (via)
- sshd(8) is getting split.
Only a BSD conference announcement would include a note about changing your SSH listening port. Also, BSDCan in 2 weeks!
What’s the history of Cinco de Mayo? (updated since last linked in 2016.)
- SNOBOL, ICEBOL, SPITBOL, et al.
- What is Computer Science? (via)
- Live performance of Blur’s Song 2 on a modular synth.
- A history / greatest hits of dedications and footnotes. (via)
- How I search in 2024. Saved for the links. (via)
- Some nice UOttowa rooms are available for BSDCan.
- A Thousand Suns. Original sci-fi shorts. (via)
- Announcing the long-awaited Links relaunch. Good links, from where I grew up.
- Type-in. I am assuming you know the text being parodied.
- Practical Vim command workflow. Complex but useful steps. (via)
- pcrowDoodle, my “desirable difficulty” laptop. (via)
- Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so… I plan to be out of the computing field by the end of 2037 no matter what.
Your unrelated music of the week: you bet from Drass, an artist previously linked here as Shardcore. (via)
Tomorrow night, NYCBUG’s monthly meeting is about ZFS. There’s simultaneous chat in IRC and livestream video, too.
If you sorta squint and tilt your head, it’s a games theme this week.
- Roguelike vs. Roguelite: What’s the Difference? (via)
- Awesome-Selfhosted. (also via)
- rigg 1.0 released – a new way to run indie games on OpenBSD.
- SEthernet: Modern, low-cost 10/100 Ethernet for the Macintosh SE and SE/30.
- Mastodon for Apple II (][+, //c, IIe, and IIgs)
- Hex marks the spot. (via)
- pkgsrc-2024Q1 branch released, and NetBSD 10.0.
- Further Explorations, the companion volume to 50 Years of Text Games, is available for standalone purchase. Related: merchandise.
- The Greenwich prime meridian isn’t where it used to be.
- FreeBSD Speedrun.
- Terminal status bar with only stock tools.
Your unrelated music for the week: New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol 1. (via)
George Rosamond is presenting on the 20th anniversary of I think the longest-lived BUG, NYCBUG, tonight. Go if you are near (and RSVP so they can let you in), but it’s also going to be streamed.
It’s for COBUG, and details are available here.
The March 6 NYCBUG meeting is coming up, and it sounds like something I’d want to see: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist, working remote using only a $100 Pinebook. Be sure to RSVP if you can go cause this is in-person and they need to know who is coming into the NYU facility.
No theme this week.
- BSDCan papers submissions close tomorrow – get yours in.
- Next NYCBUG meeting, March 6: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist. Traveling and working with only a Pinebook.
- Anatomy of a Hollerith Card.
- More stories about the famously idiosyncratic author of that previous link, David Mills. (via)
- Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents. (via)
- What is a terminal-based game you’ve played that’s worth mentioning?
- Understanding phonetic symbols. Written for IBM but talks about a standard.
- D100 sheets. I enjoy just reading these. (via)
- Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. (via)
Assuming the weather hasn’t interfered (I am preposting this), NYCBUG meets tonight.
ChiBUG meets tomorrow, in I assume the normal place.
Update: postponed due to weather.
Of course the first thing I did was type the wrong year into the title of this post.
- OpenBSD printing and Avery labels.
- pkgsrc-2023Q4 out.
- Next NYC*BUG: Jan 10th.
- DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s.
- There’s a thread about disklabel on the TUHS list that went from interesting history to OpenFirmware discussion and then into the problem of bootstrapping/hardware monitors. Lots more I didn’t link. (iPhone-related)
- ‘Merchants of Complexity’: Why 37Signals Abandoned the Cloud. Recurring monthly payments for static goods are a goldmine – for the seller. (via)
- Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone. (via)
- Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD. I don’t agree with it but it is interesting.
- 2024 FreeBSD community survey. Closes tomorrow.
- Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate. I don’t know the products well enough to say this is the only analysis.
- Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store. Counterintuitively, he’s charging less money but making more money.
- The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again. Read the article for the links inside it.
Happy new year! More BSD content in this week’s summary than usual.
- The Infinite 8-Bit Computer Game Character Archive. (via)
- OSR Rules Families. (via)
- How about not having platforms so large that their policy decisions carry this much weight? Having an alternative platform makes these problems go away.
- Battle for Libraries. Seeing some of the authors signed up to support this made me decide “yes, this is good”.
- A Murder at the End of the World: Are you Vi or Emacs? (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 28 – Configuration – Corner Actions.
- Making my own Bed Sensor. (via)
- My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter. Always check voltages / don’t trust written voltages. (via)
- First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD. (via)
- Default mail transport in FreeBSD 14.0 is DragonFly Mail Agent, neat.
- The BSDCan 2024 Call For Papers is out.
Your unrelated music of the week: Don Leisure, Halal Cool J. Music’s good, title’s hilarious. (via)
Here’s a weird confluence of things all based on me searching out links and stories for this blog: Based on the recommendation of Cooking Issues listeners, I visited Hi-Collar last weekend, a Japanese kissaten (which I know of because of Craig Mod’s mailing list / book) while I stayed at St. Marks’s Hotel, which I know about through NYCBSDCon. Meal was good, and all these things would not have come together without these years of Lazy Reading posts.
- BSD on Windows. A product I never heard of. (via)
- A List of Lists. I have linked to at least one of them before.
- Children of the Geissler Tube. Seems like something to buy at United Nuclear. (via)
- From a comment on last week’s Lazy Reading: CCC is coming up.
- The original UNIX Lab had left-handed lightbulbs. Note the author of the post.
- History of SMTP. (Video, via)
- DateTime, an XKCD cartoon. Painfully accurate.
- Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. (via)
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Ctrl+Alt Museum pictures.
- Dungeons & Directories. (via)
- Umberto Eco Formulates The AI Novel In 2011.
- Apple ][ copy protection affecting how a game plays. A game world being affected by a physical aspect of a legal status in the real world.
- Finishing Up a FreeBSD Experiment. I like seeing what people use. (via)
- “the plural of regex is regrets“. (via)
ChiBUG is meeting in the normal place tomorrow on the 19th. Go, if you are near. (Plans changed after I posted this.)
Old hardware – really old – minitheme.
- ARCC tickets 30% off with code CH3AP.
- Fun with DNS TXT Records. Password storage, bizarre but hilarious. (via)
- The BSDCan 2024 page is up.
- The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard. (via)
- Decker, Hypercard clone that builds web pages. (via)
- User Manual for Babbage’s Difference Engine #2. Which exists. And you can build it. Or 3D print it. (via)
- Saturn V Apollo Flight Configuration. Poster to print. (via)
- Fake mainframe, real lights and switches.
- The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer. Linked cause I remember seeing “PC-98” in I think the FreeBSD installer. (via)
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow at the normal location.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tomorrow, the 21st, with a presentation on shell scripting. It’ll be online through Jitsi. Slides from Nick Holland’s last presentation are available, for the curious.