Lazy Reading – DragonFly BSD Digest

2020/01/192020/01/17

Lazy Reading for 2020/01/19

No theme, just lots of links.

1978 “Heathkit” D&D Digital Dice Tower. Homebrew, Nixie tubes, D&D dice; this was made for me to link.
VisiData, command line tabular data manipulation. (thanks, Paul Ivanov)
The History of Games conference Call for Papers is out. (via)
No leap second this year.
Related: Did you know there is a global institution covering the rotation of the earth? The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. They graph Earth’s spin. (via)
The Beasts of Europe. More graphs! (Thanks, brother)
Why are modern computers so slow? Scroll to the Technology section; there’s a collection of writeups about modern latency, some of which I’ve linked before but all are worthwhile.
2020 IGF nominees: puzzles, Shakespeare, topical games, interactive storybooks, and adventure plus.
The Roots of Doom Mapping. Goes with the ReDoomEd link yesterday. (via)
The Art of the Post-Internet.
Using Computer Modern on the web. For the TeX-lovers. (via)
Ganymede Series 01 Watch Arrived. A deliberately confusing interface.
Retro Review: Zeven OS. (via)
Opening up the Baseboard Management Controller. (via)
My review of the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM powered laptop. I want to see some in-depth BSD experiences on that hardware. (via)

2020/01/122020/01/10

Lazy Reading for 2020/01/12

Accidental themes this week: keyboards and game remakes.

Indieweb; something I plan to explore more.
Autocomplete as an interface.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3, as open source game engine. (via)
Hello World, a comparative exercise. (for one meaning of “better”)
Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS? (via)
Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy.
Weird Keyboards, Programmable Keyboards. The author sells some bonkers keyboards. (via)
How to create a handheld Linux terminal (v2). Or BSD! (via)
The Planck Keyboard, via comments on the previous source. Apparently a “40% keyboard” is the phrase that describes this sort of smaller keyboard.
tmux-resurrect. Somewhat magical. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Class of 2020: New in the Public Domain today! I linked to a different article before, but this one talks about outside the U.S.
BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X. (via)
A Decentralized Web Primer: Dat. “The read/write web”. (via)
Unciv, an open source Civilization V; probably could run with openjdk8? Haven’t tried. (via)
A retrospective of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. (via)
Society for the History Of Technology call for papers is out. (via)
2020 IGF nominees: a good mood and 2020 IGF nominees: hit and miss.
Monoid: open source coding font. (via)
2019 Income Sources. Interesting since a chunk of that is BSD books.
A Compiler Writing Journey. (via)

2020/01/052020/01/03

Lazy Reading for 2020/01/05

I very nearly scheduled this to January 01, 2019. And then fixed it for the right year but not the day, so you may have seen an early draft of this. Oops; it’s here now.

- The link that will eat the most of your time: href.cool links of the decade: there is a lot to look at in here. Some highlights: Smash TV (video collage), esp8266.net (ultracheap hardware hacking), Magic Mirror (achievable tech), SPACEPLAN (clicker game), and Line Wobbler (physical roguelike). If I hadn’t linked to some of these things before, I should have.
- ASCII graffiti. Not really ASCII but that’s OK, still fun to see. (via)
- The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland. My current peeve: following a link in a newsletter and getting a popup over the content … to subscribe to the newsletter. This is not hard to fix. (via)
- Public Domain Day 2020.
- multicians.org. Pre-UNIX. (via)
- Time will end in 2038… for Unix. (via)
- Managing my dotfiles as a git repository. Not a new idea, but has a nice host-specific setup.
- Inter-networking.
- Chesterton’s Shell Script. (via)
- Black Hack 2nd Edition and Apocalypse World, 2 RPGs recommended.
- Can We Build Trustable Hardware? Like any headline posted as a question, the answer is “no”, but this is Bunnie Huang, so there’s a much more complex but real solution.
- The Joys of UNIX Keyboards.
- Good times create weak men. (via)
- fingers.today, like wandering through someone’s $HOME. (via)
- A brief history of liquid computers. “Billiard-ball computing”. (via)
- Rhasspy: a completely offline voice assistant. That’s what I want. (via)
- X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach. Requires no new technology.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cankor. (click on preview button) I saw Cankor pages years ago; it’s disturbing in a good way.

2019/12/292019/12/28

Lazy Reading for 2019/12/29

There’s several accidental themes fighting it out this week.

Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog. Seriously.
Blogging Less in the 2020s. Social media demands your complete attention to “succeed”.
Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore. The problem of depending on external services that can be turned off or changed.
This Page is Designed to Last. I have this worry about the Digest. (via)
Working on our Thoughts, a publish-in-multiple-formats (website, book, etc) method. (via)
Back In Time For Xmas. Linked for the picture of fiber wrapped around a large auger; the stuff of nightmares for anyone responsible for network infrastructure.
Public Sans, a typeface from the U.S. Government. (via)
PinePhone review.
Plasma Mobile as Daily Driver on PinePhone. (via)
Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative. That is kinda linkbaity but what the heck. (via)
Inkplate 6, crowdfunded, via comments on the previous source.
reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics. (via)
2019 Retrospective. Interactive Fiction. (via)
Miller, a command line tool for tabular data. (via)
The tyranny of ideas. (via I lost it, sorry)
The Blue Tape List. When I do this at a new job, I call it the Crazy List. You have only the first 6 months at a new job before everything that struck you as crazy becomes accepted, and you won’t be able to see the problem any more. (via)
In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle. He created the 6502, which powered it seems like almost every home computer. (via)
Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feed. I use Tiny Tiny RSS and had no idea how nice the Readability plugin is. (via)
Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings. Ugh but convincing argument.
Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg and Crop a video using ffmpeg. Linked cause you’ll need it sooner or later.
The man who made Wolfenstein. One of the few commercially purchased Apple ][ games I ever had – and still have. (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Cosey Fanni Tutti ?– Tutti. Found via Ted Gioia’s Best 100 Albums of 2019, which was discovered via Conversations with Tyler. There, now you definitely have enough to listen to until 2020.

2019/12/222019/12/21

Lazy Reading for 2019/12/22

Accidental theme this week: roguelikes! Maybe with me that’s not so accidental.

Neal.fun. The old weird web. This will eat some hours.
“Link In Bio” is a slow knife. There’s a lot of things I can’t link to because they are hidden away just like this.
blinry’s Advent Calendar of Curiosities 2019. (via)
It’s Time to Get Personal. (via)
Tmux and Vim — configurations to be better together. (via)
OpenHAB, open source home automation software. (via)
36th Chaos Communications Congress, coming up.
Real time clock for your ISA slot.
A Spotify playlist of all songs mentioned in the Time Zone Database documentation. I love everything about this without even hearing the music. (via)
AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights”.
(via)
Roguelike Tutorial: Up-to-Date and Literate. (via)
Roguelike Tutorial – In Rust, via comments in the last source. There’s a lot more links in there, too.
Dungeon Generation in Enter The Gungeon. (via)
The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained. (via)

2019/12/152019/12/13

Lazy Reading for 2019/12/15

Some deep dives here; take your time today.

The ZedRipper: Part 1. 16 cores, 83 MHz. (via)
Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.
Links of the 2010s. There’s a lot here.
3 Wyrd Things: Robin the Fog. Listen to Catch 22-20, on that page; a skipping recording that skips with the right timing to create coherent music.
Two malicious Python libraries caught stealing SSH and GPG keys. (via)
DNote, self-hosted personal note saving.
Unreleased Infocom Game Unearthed (from 1986).
“The Unbeatable Deck of Ronan Shin” by Kiyash Monsef. (via)
Think App Updates Suck? Try Upgrading a Programming Language. Every language gets to find this out.
Freebies. Oddball desktops, etc. (via)
Vim 8.2 is out. (via)
Andy Baio Uses This. Linked cause he’s a superior link source.
What I want for CES.
It’s a good idea to label all of the drives in your desktop.

2019/12/082019/12/07

Lazy Reading for 2019/12/08

Accidental theme this week: terminals.

Teletext’s creative legacy. (via)
Related: Teletext, the font. (via)
The Plain Text Project. (Thanks, Benn Collver.)
TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers.
IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display. An answer to the recently-linked-here “80×25” post, and perhaps the definitive answer on terminal size. Also: sound delay lines are bonkers.
The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver™.
26th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2019) winners. (via)
New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth).
New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance is Nigh.
Unlocked Recordings, via the recent Music Modernization Act. This is one of the many reasons to donate to the Internet Archive. (via)
Migrationator: Open source tool to help migrate away from Google. (via)
Big Pile of Vim-like. (via)
It was 20 years ago today. 4 years ahead of me.

Your odd pile of GIFs for the week: more Jan Svankmajer animations than I’ve ever seen in one place. (via)

2019/12/012019/11/29

Lazy Reading for 2019/12/01

I’m going with high-concept material this week. If you have time for some thinking today, you’ll enjoy the links.

Sounds recreated from pictures, a video and an album. Making sounds exist that were never recorded – a sort of time travel. (via)
Transformative Tools for Thought. (via)
A primer on hardware security keys, which I recommend. (via)
SIMjacking, a new term to me. (also via)
A history of procedural text.
To Go Green, the Energy Industry Goes Open Source.
Yes I do want LEDs and Bluetooth in my d20s.
Various IF crowdfunds.
The Information is Beautiful Award Winners 2019. (via)
Don Libes’ Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool. (via)
Understanding and repairing the power supply from a 1969 analog computer. So pretty!
64 Bits ought to be enough for anybody. (via)
Notes on Ambient Privacy. (via)
Command and Conquer, a retrospective. Part of what defined RTS games. (via)
Sunless Skies, a review. Not defining a genre, but a mood. (also via)

2019/11/242019/11/21

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/24

Small computers is the accidental theme this week.

Remembering the TRS-80.
80s Corporate Airbrush-High Tech. Eighties! (via)
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? You could have a website, not just a social media identity, and be much better off for it. (via)
Beaker Browser, a peer-to-peer browser. (via)
Good signoffs. (via)
Open Library book sponsorships. (via)
ASCIIdent. All-ASCII characters, open world game. (via)
are.na, a site I am repeatedly stumbling into. A sort of blogging platform/visual recorder? I have only just started to look, but it seems like a good place to record an aesthetic, sort of like ffffound was, once.
The Teletext Archaeologist – A visual and interactive teletext history. (via)
Pocket Popcorn Computer. (via)
Review of Pinebook Pro. The hardware notes are most relevant, not the Linux whateverness. (via)
Ditching Event Platforms for the IndieWeb. (via)
The Invention of Forth. (via)
Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating.
Neovim and the state of text editor art in 2019. First explanation of “why NeoVim” that I’ve seen. (via)
Emacs: Fury Road. (via)

2019/11/172019/11/12

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/17

Happy birthday to my father, today.

ALL HAIL LORD ENKI. It’s like a giant version of Lazy Reading; I hope you have some reading time set aside. (via)
80×25.
Lesser Known Coding Fonts. (via)
Niche Museums. You may be happily surprised to find one of these near you. (via)
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in New York. A casual look appears to show an antist that works in tandem with robots to produce art. (https://warrenellis.ltd/isles/blog-diet-a-starter-list-for-your-rss-reader/)
Apple I Emulator as a Shader. How could I not link this? (via)
Terminal Phase: building a space shooter that runs in your terminal. (via)
Take Take Take: Rethinking How I Consume Free and Open Source Software. (via)
Tabs or spaces for indentation? Statistics on 3.8 million Perl files created in 24 years. (via)
Riana Pfefferkorn Uses This. Always interesting to see the personal computer setup for someone strongly focused on security.
FANGo. If you can’t not participate, you get to at least not conform.
Newstweek: note that this is from 2011.
three.js. 3 dimensions on the web. This would be sheer magic to 1998 me. (via)
200 word RPG challenge. Complete by the time you read this. (via)
80×25.
RSS-Bridge. Creates feeds from walled gardens. (via)
Today in Hoffman Lenses.
Formally modeling database migrations.
The Greatest OSR Blog Posts Known to Man.

Your unrelated music link of the week: The Wyrding Module: Typhonic Neural Tantra. (via multiple places)

2019/11/102019/11/07

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/10

Covering lots of ground this week.

youshouldhaveseenthis.com. Common meme language. (via)
youshouldhaveALSOseenthis.com. More.
How political events affect the files on your computer – timezone files, in this case.
Fraidycat, sort of like an RSS reader but it takes in everything. Watch this project; I am a big fan of Tiny Tiny RSS, but this is a much more accessible approach.
Space Cruiser Orion for the console.
So much for games on Linux. Related, and I can sympathize.
Major Mode for Reading EPUBs in Emacs. This will be handy for someone. (via)
Homebrew Cray-1A. How have I not linked this yet? (via)
Vim Splits and Vim tmux Navigator, two approaches to the same idea. (via)
Announcing sshign. Similar to gpg but less painful, I assume. (via)
Build your own X. (via)
A visit to the Large Scale Systems Museum. Every picture is pretty.
I’m Officially Part of the IndieWeb. Continuation from last week’s small theme. (via)
sql-murder-mystery. It’s exactly what it sounds like. (also via)
Team 6502. (via)
Internet Synthesis Protocol. Good MIDI is actually good. You can probably recognize crap MIDI music, but there’s been entire albums built using MIDI where you may not realize it.
Tangential to that: I think Zappa’s released more albums posthumously than when he was alive.
New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Orodruin: Ruins Of Eternity. Tolkien-ish doom metal.

2019/11/032019/10/31

Lazy Reading for 2019/11/03

I still feel bad about missing a week, even though that’s a self-imposed requirement. In penance, here’s a linkdump.

Cabinet Magazine is blogging and it’s wonderful in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
First, do no harm… with this software. The Hippocratic License. (via)
BBC BASIC on Twitter. (via)
Conceptronica. (via)
Software Rights, the book. (via)
Solid State: Minnesota’s High-Tech History. Public material, so freely streamed. (via)
Berlin Tea Festival 2019, later this month. I’d go if I was near. (via)
Pay attention to the difference between round() and floor(). (via)
(mini-section about owning your information for the next several links)
Historic Digital Places.
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours. (via)
Computer files are going extinct. (via previous)
Yahoo Groups going away. Well, technically still there, but not really.
Own your content on social media using the Indieweb. (via)
The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web. (via)
(mini-section over)
The Open Book Project. Open hardware e-reader – not yet complete, so for hacking, not using. (via)
uGlass: an AR module on your glasses. Low-cost, works on existing glasses – I like the idea.
Cutest oscilloscope I’ve ever seen.
Building the Ultimate Roguelike Morgue File, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
The Hissing of Vintage Tapes. Not mentioned but related: Cr02 tapes, or comfort noise, which I did not know exists in an RFC. It’s funny to think of having a standard way to present what is normally a defect.
An old-school shell hack on a line printer. (via)
This Time, There Really Are NO IPv4 Internet Addresses Left. (via) My main workplace is sitting on a public /24, which shows how long ago it was obtained.
Cluster SSH – Manage Multiple Linux Servers Simultaneously. Those who do not remember expect are doomed to recreate it. (via)
Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 4 – Final. (via)
Text Editing Hates You Too. (via)
The $15 Sous-Vide Cooker. Save $50, burn the house down, is what this says to me.
How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries for decades.
One Page Dungeon Generator. Fun just to reload and read and reload and read, like a super-short story generator. (via)

2019/10/202019/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2019/10/20

Lots of variety this week; I’m happy with this link batch.

Categories: models of models. Pleasingly abstract. (via)
The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood. Linked so that someone who never read Achewood can now go through its entire archive. (via)
The End of Oz. Read this if you read any/all of the many, many Land of Oz books when young. (via)
Modding, Vim, i3, and Efficiency. (via)
I’ve made a rotary dial number input, because why not? (via)
Coffee Is Hard. (via)
The Best Cast Iron Skillet. Secret tip from someone who has been using them for decades: treat them poorly, don’t spend money, they’ll be great. It’s a chunk of iron.
The Computer as a Communication Device. I did not realize the role Hawaii played in causing packet communication.
Computer Files Are Going Extinct. (via)
Betrayal At Krondor.
I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too. (via)
You know, we might as well just run every network service over HTTPS/2 and build another six layers on top of that to appease the OSI 7-layer burrito guys. Linked mostly for that sentence.
The lines of code that changed everything.

Your unrelated music of the week: The Mysterious Professor 950’s Otherworldly Beat Tapes.

2019/10/132019/10/11

Lazy Reading for 2019/10/13

A mix of complaints, history, and odd technical items. The usual!

Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets. (via)
Managing passwords using ed and gpg2. Because: no tempfile.
Adding redirection to the gopher protocol.
How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last? Readers of a certain age will remember how PGP was briefly export controlled; also remember that history rhymes. (via)
How my application ran away and called home from Redmond. (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about audio. (via)
The tiniest FatMac. (really a console and an emulator, but that’s fine.)
Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. (via)
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs. This is not the throwaway joke it sounds like. (via)
ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision. Chessboards are natural placemarkers. (via)
Wackaging, a trend I hope will end. (via)
The Fantasy of Opting Out. (via)
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019. (via)
James Mickens’ Tenure Announcement. It is exactly as wonderful as you would think. (via)

2019/10/062019/10/04

Lazy Reading for 2019/10/06

Pre-posted in advance cause once again working through the weekend.

BBSes: Partying Online Like It’s 1989. (via)
The 25th Interactive Fiction Competition is Open.
After Dark has been ported to Twitter.
Text Rendering Hates You. (via)
A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer. Wonderful pictures, as always.
Feast of Legends. A RPG from the Wendy’s fast food chain. It’s a legit PDF rulebook, and looks like a D&D-style product, but everything is themed to match Wendy’s food. It’s bizarre. (via)
This to That, answering how to glue two different substances together. Really! (via)
Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts, a long read about reading.
Springer’s History of Computing series. Seriously in-depth; this is research, not light entertainment. (via)
How to remove a part of a video using ffmpeg.
“Night of the Lepus” was based on a book? Excellent use of the interrobang, and also you should see this movie.
Reminiscences on 5.25? floppy drives of the early 1980’s.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Scratch. I saw this in the theater a while ago, and I didn’t realize the whole thing was on Youtube. It’s turntablism at its peak. (via)

2019/09/292019/09/27

Lazy Reading for 2019/09/29

You may be able to tell one of my link sources changed RSS feeds, so I had some catchup to do this week.

What is “DCC SEND startkeylogger”? (via)
Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case. (via)
Imaging Floppies. (via)
Just Delete Me. (via)
ReMarkable review. Has anyone used one of these recently?
Explanations, about X and beyond. (via)
Recent News in Narrative Games.
What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre and When games grow and time passes.
It’s almost XScreenSaver in clock form.
Bits vs. Things.
Gastropod facts. I greatly enjoy this podcast.
Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer. Worth it for the pictures alone.
Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe.

2019/09/222019/09/20

Lazy Reading for 2019/09/22

Lots of link diversity this week.

GPS – A Hollywood Actress, a Player Piano, and Hip-Hop. (via)
Percy Ludgate, the missing link between Babbage’s machine and everything else.
The Light Phone 2. I don’t know how good or bad it will be, but with an e-ink screen, the battery life must be spectacular. (via)
The Gongfather’s Almanac, for Dungeon Crawl Classics. (via)
251 words you can spell with a calculator and hex colors that are also words. (both via)
Instagram Hates The Internet. The company made a conscious decision to break hyperlinking.
The Turkish lira’s currency code is an unexpected source of problems with computer programmers.
ASCII table and history. Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal? (via)
Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk. (I think via)
Chaosnet for Unix. Pre-Ethernet, for Lisp machines. (via)
tine – a modern clone of the Amiga ED display editor. (via)
corpypastas.
The Vim-Inspired Editor with a Linguistic Twist. Kakoune. (via)
Syncstop, hardware USB data block.
The Strange Alchemy of D&D’s Genre Emulation. Note to self: find Jack Vance books.
What Remains Technical Breakdown. A new NES game, including physical media. (via)

2019/09/152019/09/13

Lazy Reading for 2019/09/15

Way eclectic this week. Enjoy! I will be working, as I haven’t had a day off in 3 weeks – but don’t be too sorry for me, I chose this. The magic of pre-scheduling posts fixes it.