Lazy Reading – DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

A new version of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music – you will find something new and interesting, guaranteed. (via)
Every Noise At Once, related.
Social Reunion Tour. I always liked Tumblr.
Innovation vs. Preservation.
New Adventures in DNSSEC and DANE. (via)
Bluetooth d20.
Turning off DOT in FireFox.
Phoneswarm, archived. (via)
Today in “IP Over Avian Carriers” news: So that’s where 44100hz came from.
Project-wide search in Vim. (scroll down)
The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, Revisited.
Old School Bloggers. I could be one of them.
In praise of xlogo. (via)
Click, whir, ping: the lost sounds of loading video games. (via)
Anime Floppies. (via)

Your unrelated music post: The Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp: August 2019.

2019/09/082019/09/06

Lazy Reading for 2019/09/08

This week is a nice mix between useful and entertaining.

2019/09/012019/08/30

Lazy Reading for 2019/09/01

I am starting to think I need an Apple ][ tag.

COLOR vs COLOUR in the Acorn.
World’s oldest orrery. Source has pictures in the attachments.
Vintage Tech, a series of Believer columns about older technology like ballpoint pens, and fortune cookies; enjoyable reads.
John Cleese, advertising for Compaq. (via)
Purposeful noise in 3D rendering.
Black Box Record Club, Vinyl Me, and Vinyl Moon, all record delivery services. (via)
Secretly Public Domain: Update. Further details on a significant change in knowledge.
Mining Bitcoin on an Apple II, a highly impractical guide. (via)
Juiced.GS, a quarterly Apple II journal.
Chaos Communication Camp 2019 video. (via)
No CLI Ads. (via)
Ola Bini’s Letters from Detention. The reason I link to the commentary is the pull quote; the idea that “[C]ode and architecture are more important than laws.” Laws are public; code often isn’t. Which is an argument for open source, certainly.
Many ways to pop balloons. Not sure if that’s the actual intent.
ASCII-Mapper. (via)
Bookhunter, the comic. (via)
The Sound of D&D.
Transporting a portable system: Unix to an IBM minicomputer (1983) [pdf]. (via)
Turing Tumble – Build Marble-Powered Computers. Like Rocky’s Boots, but physical. (via)
Obscure plugin game consoles. (via)
The Hathi Trust, another source for out-of-copyright books comparable to Gutenberg. (via)
GNOME Terminal Cursor Blinking Saga. (via)

2019/08/252019/08/23

Lazy Reading for 2019/08/25

I’m covering all my areas of interest this week, or nearly so.

Famous computer history quotes, some probably new to you.
The Bit Player, a movie about Claude Shannon, and a review of it.
A new Cyriak video, Breakfast. Another attempt to describe fractal infinity, I think. (via)
D&D plus Shakespeare. (via)
The Design of Dungeons and Dragons. Talking about the books themselves, not the game. (via)
Noise Machines, including the nonrepeating sound of a data center. (via)
Oddball analog smartphones.
Voyager 1 and 2 are still talking, still active, and possibly the highest-latency communication problem possible. (via)
Old video game advertisements. (via)
Absolute scale corrupts absolutely. Lots of great pull quotes in this.
Tumblr, the Day After. As a counterpoint to the last link, WordPress and Tumblr are two social networks that do not financially depend on either damaging privacy or encouraging outrage.
Waldenponding, a term new to me.
Paul Ford Uses This. I’ve linked to his excellent writing before.
Chesses, variations on chess. Immediately understandable, and playable if you have a second player right there. (via)

2019/08/182019/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2019/08/18

Again, way behind cause of being online only irregularly over the last week. There’s still plenty to look at – August is made for Lazy Reading.

Never fast enough. (Scroll way down) There’s a nonlinear payoff for software speed … for tools.
Related: Fast Software, the Best Software.
Also related: Performance Matters.
On the flip side of that, limiting and slowing social software is a good idea. (via)
freemium.cc, free tools for makers.
https://thehistoryofweb.design/. The URL is perfectly descriptive. (via)
Typography Terms. Gadzook! (via)
Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1. (via)
Why Checklists Fail. Linked cause checklists are usually super-effective. (via)
The Roguelike Toolkit (RLTK), implemented for Rust. The comments in the source page have some interesting further links.
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity – Episode 22: Goatbusters.
The Last Working Olivetti Mainframe Sits In a Tuscan High School. Comments led me to this neat-looking Olivetti calculator from the year before I was born. (via)
There are even bots crawling gopherspace.
We all spend half our day using a keyboard. Do you use any specific keyboard? Which one? Why? Far more suggestions than you need.
USB-C Easy Bake Oven. Interesting for how power is handled. And cookies. (via)
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019. (via)
I chanced upon an ancient cache of code… (also via)

2019/08/112019/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2019/08/11

I have some neat history items mixed in this week.

ASCII table and history (or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?) (via)
As Flash dies a little more.
Beginner Problems With TCP & The socket Module in Python. Linked cause it shows why MTU size matters. (via)
My Top 20 Interactive Fiction, 2019 Edition. With links to play.
Monsters and Manuals’ 1500th Anniversary: Half Time After the Time? Linked for the best-of links in the article; that’ll give you some reading.
‘A Humument’ is a completely novel project. A meaningless book, extrapolated into 300+ works of art. (via)
Scanimate News. This was TV/computer graphics in the early 80s. (via)
Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research. Linking to the summary; continue on if the thread is interesting.
The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online. One of the reasons I don’t use Cloudflare.
Level Design Patterns in 2D Games.
disquiet.com. Lots and lots to listen to. (via)
Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses.
ASCII art RPG Stone Story launches into early access. I’m stretching it with the ‘roguelike’ tag here.
Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware. (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Blarf: Cease and Desist. (via)

2019/08/042019/08/02

Lazy Reading for 2019/08/04

This week’s material filled up fast. It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, so let’s see what next week brings…

“Anyway my point here is that all of crypto should be run entirely by tweens.” Look for the Utility Token section, though it’s all fun.
How to calculate leap second variation for the year 3000. (via)
Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now. (via)
Text size control in st.
DLX400 typewriter as a Keyboard. Neat but it must be annoying; those aren’t great keyboards.
Fast Software, the Best Software.
“Don’t put it on GitHub“, something we all should know. (scroll down to last third)
Creepy pumpkin. It doesn’t have to be a pumpkin; this could apply to all sorts of things!
Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural? You’ve played both, I’m sure.
An xargs lesson. (via)
The Legacy of the Unix Wars is still around us. (also via)
What I want out of my window manager.
Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors. (via)
Slacking on security. I don’t think Slack is a healthy product to use.
Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I’m sure that won’t backfire.
Astronauts Falling on the Moon. No achievement so amazing you can’t trip and fall in the middle of it. (via)
LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance. I think the computer in The Story of Mel, mentioned here before. (via)

2019/07/282019/07/26

Lazy Reading for 2019/07/28

I get indirectly cranky, this week.

Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1. Roguelike! (via)
Pressing Forward. “The grassroots mechanical keyboard scene”. I did not know about the Hall Effect, or the X1 keyboard, both of which are interesting.
sc-im, a terminal spreadsheet. Like Visicalc all over again!
Design tools are holding us back. I like the note on how toolschains are becoming too ultra-specific. (via)
The Internet and My 53 Years Online.
Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
Secretly Public Domain. This means there’s now a huge amount of books, free to read, that couldn’t be reliably identified before.
The Builder’s Remorse. “once it was handed over to the corporation, everyone lost control”. Collectively no-one’s fault.
Size and the Inert Sandbox. About Frontier: Elite.
Tabletop Whale. “An original science illustration blog”. (via)
The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction and Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat. Video games, in an experience I bet we all share.

2019/07/212019/07/20

Lazy Reading for 2019/07/21

Accidental theme: heavy metal.

A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database. Found while researching tz formats.
Buster Keaton: slapstick anarchism. A continuation of an article I linked before.
An Illustrated history of Easter Eggs. Delightful! (video, via)
crontab converter for different time zones in unix?
lowRISC has open source-related job openings.
History and effective use of Vim. (via)
Apollo Guidance Computer: Dipstiks and reverse engineering the core rope simulator.
Elements of Programming is now free. (via)
deconstruct files. An excellent deep dive, from the deconstruct 2019 conference, for which there’s a summary.
Our switches can wind up in weird states after a power failure. Linked cause I experienced this over a miles-spanning network, over and underground.
“This week I was forced to accept that XMPP and IRC are both goners.“
The history of headbanging: “Heavy Metal.” Not enough music links, but it did lead me to the best version of War Pigs I’ve ever heard. (via)
You don’t need to know… A familiar screen.
Local 1Password iOS Vaults No Longer Free. The important part is the last quote. (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Grando by OHMYGOD.

2019/07/072019/07/06

Lazy Reading for 2019/07/07

No unplanned theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.

Inside the Race To (finally) Bring Pinball Into the Internet Age. (via)
A Fun Saturday Survey: UNIX Pronunciation.
Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer. (via)
Learning Synths. (via)
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Sixteen – The Tide Turns.
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Seventeen – Ape Expectations.
XScreenSaver 5.43 is out.
evangelion UI. (via)
At one point, Nashville had two time zones, simultaneously, based on political affiliation. (read contents of patch)
More Wumpus history.
ROMchip, a journal of game histories. (via)
The Past, Present, and Future of AI Art. (lost the source, sorry)
[Full-time] Operations Engineer at Internet Archive. A worthwhile job.
How I dropped Dropbox. Worthwhile for thinking about pulling out of any service.
How NTP Works. (via)
Fractal drawing tools. Tools to draw fractals, not tools made of fractals.

Your listening link of the week: Kerrang’s 50 best metal bands of the last decade. You (may have) heard it here first on #1. (via)

2019/06/302019/06/29

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/30

I’m going to be very busy over the next week, so I am not sure how consistent my posting schedule will be, or how much I will be able to build up for next weekend. We’ll find out together.

Getting 2FA Right in 2019.
The TTY demystified. (via)
Ranger, a console file manager with VI keybindings. Linked to show how vi keybindings are another common item. (via)
Into the Personal Website-Verse. (via)
The Simple Genius of Checklists. (via)
A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans.
“Free with DRM is not the same thing as free.” Microsoft-purchased ebooks stop working next month. (via)
Adventures In Interactivity. Text adventures!
Some UNIX humor. Puns, not humor.
Seattle Mechanical Keyboard Meetup, later this month. (via)

2019/06/232019/06/21

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/23

Lots of topic range this week; no theme grew out – but that’s better in some ways!

On Dat://
There’s a Relational Database in Your Unix CLI. (via)
xsv, a command line tool for CSV tables, via comments on previous.
Amiga BBS Online in 2019. (via)
Notes from the quest factory, a followup on that autogenerated story I linked to a few weeks back.
Some notes on Intel’s CPUID and how to get it for your CPUs.
The Edible Games digital cookbook is arriving for backers now.
The joy of offline walking.
ISA history.
GEOS history.
Jan Svankmajer: The Animator of Prague.
Death of a robot. (via)
Using the TRS-80 as a journalist. (via)
Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War.
Sufficiently advanced software.
Work on foundational software.

2019/06/162019/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/16

Inadvertent theme this week: games. Yet somehow I didn’t include a roguelike? Dang.

Why USB plugs aren’t/weren’t reversible.
10 Awesome Ways to Upcycle Old Devices With a Raspberry Pi. Some nice connecting of analog controls on these projects. (via)
A bug so cool that the development team was reluctant to fix it.
Open Source Game Clones. I seem to link to this every two years or so. Still iffy on it. (via)
Notes on recent games: nifty little experiments.
The fate of an archive. Linked cause I still have a pile of CRO2 bootleg music cassettes that I don’t think exist digitally, anywhere.
The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent.
The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons. (via)
A Gopher server in sh. (via)
Textreme. The Most! Exciting! Text! Editor! EVER! (via)
tokyo60 keyboards. (via)
HHKB layouts, related to the last link.
Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Vol.6. (via)
Day of the Tentacle, a history.
A Very Brief History of Gamebooks (up to 1979).
Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002). Also, the 2015 followup. It may surprise nobody that the average answer is “bunch of terminals and a web browser”. (via)
Advent of Computing: Episode 5 Notes – How much has UNIX changed? (via)

2019/06/092019/06/07

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/09

This week’s inadvertent theme: decoration.

Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Thirteen – Welcome to the Bird Hole.
PuTTY Excel List Suggestions.
The Adafruit PyGamer, a New Maker-Friendly Handheld Console. (via)
The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects. (PDF, via)
The Satellite Map. (also via)
An interesting report on newly used domain names and their usage in spam.
Writing Content vs. Writing Writing.
Onlines stores turning back into brick-and-mortar.
Handy Keymaps in Vim. (via)
At least one Vim trick you might not know. (via)
I haven’t customized my Vim setup and I’m not sure I should try to (yet).
Some things about where icons for modern X applications come from.
1975 vintage PC ad: Sphere 1. (via)
The Tar Pipe. Breaking down a near-unconscious process. (via)
Markov chain keyboard changes as you type. (via)
hello android. Think about how relatively calm the boot experience is for any BSD.
A Tiling Desktop Environment. (via)
Favorite PuTTY color scheme?
Hi, welcome to my TED talk. jwz and others talking about Netscape.

2019/06/022019/05/30

Lazy Reading for 2019/06/02

I’ve got some unique links this week.

“We’ve run the simulation a million million times… and every time, the Dark Lord wins.” Mageframe, a story told by AI (apparently not just another Markov Chain) with your seeded information. Explanation here; I suggest this is art you should participate in.
Return to Nib’s Knoll. Another early-Internet sense of place, buried away.
href.cool. Old-style web directory. (via)
What I’m Thinking About 1995. Makes sense if you listen to the author’s podcast.
As A Service. “Half a century ago it was called timesharing.”
Twisty Little Passages, a sorta-RPG, sorta-roguelike … book?
Fast FVP, the task sorting method.
110 days of Early Multics Emacs History. (via)
Cthulhu Dark, “A Rules-light system For lovecraftian Horror”. I like how compact it is; a 3-page PDF. (via)
Related: the original Call of Cthulhu rules. I’ve never had to type out Cthulhu before.
30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web. (via)
The Software Arts, an “alternative history of software that places the arts at the very center of software’s evolution.” (via)
The 25¢ Apple II Real Time Clock. The author shows up in the comments of the source link, 38 years later.
Espruino ISS Notifier. Yep, it’s a Space Station Detector.

2019/05/262019/05/24

Lazy Reading for 2019/05/26

Accidental theme of the week: old-school non-UNIX operating systems.

John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician. You may know his name from Conway’s Game of Life. (via)
I will probably never give my shell dotfiles the major reform they could use.
Tarn Adams Uses This. Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity Episode Twelve – Pressure Cooker.
ssh in https. Sneaking ssh in a port where https is already in use; clever.
Playdate. The online game delivery is the real news; it’s more of an art project platform. (via)
When you have reached Acme. The minimism of Vim, the overgrowth of Emacs, the brain-melting esotericism of Plan9. (via)
RETRO: a Modern, Pragmatic Forth Programming Environment. (via)
Retrocomputing for the masses. ZX80 recreation in the RC2014.
Serenity OS: A love letter to ’90s user interfaces, with a custom Unix-like core. (via)
Atari 800 vs. Commodore 64 – The Brief Tale of Two 8-Bit Home Computers. (via)
Gopher and the Lynx Web. Don’t overcomplicate! (via)
TempleOS: 1 – Installation. (via)
OpenVMS/x86_64: VMSI announces first boot of VMS on x86 architecture. (via)
IBM 360 Model 20 Rescue and Restoration. (via)
Gallery of Programmer Interfaces. I have not heard of many of these. (via)

2019/05/192019/05/17

Lazy Reading for 2019/05/19

Cobbled together early cause I have an unexpectedly busy weekend, so you are getting a straight dump of everything pending I had in RSS, Thursday night.