Lazy Reading – DragonFly BSD Digest

2018/06/172018/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/17

I’m going heavy on history this week.

“an imaginary mail order computer games shop in 1985“.
NeoVim, a refactoring of Vim.
“The Obscuritory, a blog about lesser-known, odder games and software.” (via)
Pulling the rug out from under an internet protocol.
Building the Commodore that should have existed. (via)
Via the previous link, the C256 Foenix Project. A Commodore 128 sequel.
The Arcade Flyer Archive, advertising material around arcade games. (via)
AtlTVHead, a project. (Video)
OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community. (via)
Webrings. Was there ever a BSD one? I don’t know…
Student events at SC18 this fall – sign up now to participate. That’s “SC” as in “SuperComputing” – they will have a Cray on display, for instance. (via)
“There’s real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al“. The argument isn’t valid, I think – you’ll get the same problem with new tools; it’s really reinvention, not improvement. (via)
Yore Computer, old UK computer magazine pages. (via)

2018/06/102018/06/08

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/10

It’s been a busy week and I didn’t have overflow from last week to help, so these are very fresh links.

With ARM Wide Open. Acorn, where ARM processors first showed up.
That led me to the BBC film Micro Men, a neat movie about not-Silicon-Valley early computing.
MXE11: run UNIX on a microcontroller. Pocket PDP/11. (via)
WiGLE, mapping of WiFi everywhere. There’s a certain amount of approximation, but still interesting. (via)
DungeonFS, both a FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawl. (via)
A few notes on daily blogging. Relevant to why I do this thing you are reading now.
How Instagram’s Feed Works. It bothers me that what you see is filtered by how you use their tools, not by what you actually like. (via)
The History of Telecommunications. (via)
OpenVMS/x86_64: Proof Points to x86-64 First Boot (May 29th 2018). As someone who still has a VAX running… I’m interested.
Stupid cmd.exe tricks: Changing directories with forward slashes instead of backslashes. I find this entertaining.
Six hacks for less(1). I don’t think of less(1) as configurable, but it is.
GitHub: quo vadis? This note gets it right: self host, self host, self host self host self host. We all have the tools; don’t let a startup sell them back to you.

2018/06/032018/06/01

Lazy Reading for 2018/06/03

Treat this week: footage of a college animatronic project I was slightly involved in. See below.

Maintaining Notepad is not a full-time job, but it’s not an empty job either.
Concise Computational Literature is Now Online in Taper. 1KB items only.
80s Home Robot History. The first example is classic open source.
Alphachat, economic film analysis. This podcast episode is talking about Tron/Tron Legacy. (via)
Ten years of Vim. (via)
30 years later, QBasic is still the best. I link to this story because years ago, in college, some of my roommates built an entire animatronic gargoyle project around it. I found the footage, recently. (via)
Vim 8.1 released. (via)
Hints for writing Unix tools. (via)
Reverse NES emulation. (via)
We Did Our First Kickstarter! And It Worked! Linking to it because the games are interesting, but also because it’s a viewpoint where he says “We’re getting older, enough so that the end of our careers is in sight. ” Not something you normally think of for an indie developer.
Eudora, BSD-licensed. (via many places)
WTFUtil, fun-looking terminal report screen. (via)
OnlineASCIITools.com. Exactly what it sounds like.

2018/05/272018/05/25

Lazy Reading for 2018/05/27

Another wide range; hope you have reading time.

Proposal for turning off standard I/O buffering.
Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip: digital logic implemented with I2L.
Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster. (via)
From previous link comments: Scalability! But at what COST?
Also: Taco Bell Programming, though that term is not as negative as my mental associations with it would seem.
More Instantly Better Vim (2013). Video. It’s Damian Conway, so it’s a little bit turned to 11. (via)
Free Software Needs Free Tools. Video based on this 2010 paper. (via)
You need deli cups. I do this. All lids match; it’s great. (via)
Inside printf. (via)
Playing Battleships Over BGP. (via)

Your vector graphics video of the week: TANK. (via multiple places)

2018/05/202018/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2018/05/20

A little more on building and less on rights this week.

Making a Laptop From Scratch. Note the protocol used to fetch the document. (via)
25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. (via)
Mutt and HTML Email. (via)
Software Engineering Takeaways.
The Game of Everything, Part 10: Civilization and the Limits of Progress.
Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System. (via)
Limbo X86 PC Emulator for Android. I want to try multimaster Hammer2 on multiple phones in emulation. No, it’s not a good idea, but it would be a fun idea. (via)
The fanciest convention badge I’ve ever seen.

2018/05/132018/05/12

Lazy Reading for 2018/05/13

I’ve got some real esoteric sources this week.

The Ultimate Postgres vs MySQL Blog Post. (via)
25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2018) (via)
F-Droid app recommendation thread? I have a bunch of old phones to repurpose, if you can’t tell.
Just time zones.
ZSH, tmux, Emacs and SSH: A copy-paste story. (via)
The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons. (via)
Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay. (via)
How we make gods. (also via)
The Game of Everything, Part 8 and Part 9.
Telephone World. (via)
The Bread Code. Okay, maybe Github isn’t the right place for everything. (via)
Origins of the finger command (1990). (via)
The Ocelot arcade system. Vector graphics! (via)

Your rights-oriented hardware project of the week: NeTV2, a Bunnie Huang project. A neat device worth funding on its own, and worth having to show what capabilities are being denied us by law.

2018/05/062018/05/04

Lazy Reading for 2018/05/06

A theme of rebellion this week.

The NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1. They’re going to start using ANSI C. (via)
Real accounts on Instagram are still run by bots. Guess what the next spam/SEO target is.
“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – noting that quote found in this newsletter, as a reason to have your own operating system tools.
A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture, an IEEE event for those worried about the end of Moore’s Law. (via)
I love the idea of reprogramming semi-disposable hardware into something better.
Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web. Video. Don’t give your data to other platforms; you will never get it back.
You Know How GET Requests are Meant to be Idempotent? (via)
LISA18 CFP now open.
Using only open-source software on Android. (via)
Making a Window Manager (part 1). Not what you think it is. (via)

2018/04/292018/04/29

Lazy Reading for 2018/04/29

No accidental theme this week.

Mermaid: Markdown-like generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text. (via)
Quarterstaff: The Infamous Puzzle and Quarterstaff: “Deathbots” vs. “Ordinary living things”.
Early days: the VIC-20 Programmer’s Reference Guide. (via)
Encrypted Gopher. (via)
SSH Client Configuration Tricks. (via)
Computer historian job opening at the National Museum of American History. (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 7: Civilization and Government I (Despotism, Monarchy, and the Republic).
Flickr Commons, hopefully surviving the smugmug acquisition. (via)
Xenographics: Weird but (sometimes) useful charts. (via)

2018/04/222018/04/20

Lazy Reading for 2018/04/22

Accidental theme this week… video games, though not strongly.

Eaten by a Grue, the Infocom podcast. There’s a lot to listen to here. (thanks, swildner)
Urbigenous Library. There’s a lot to read here.
Modern-Day BBSing on an Epson CP/M-based Laptop from 1984. (via)
Jengo, a new point-and-click game.
Dwarf Fortress dwarves to be given memories, dev shows no remorse.
Home automation notes, not really BSD-related.
The Game of Everything, Part 6: Civilization and Religion.
“Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?” On Linux, where reinventing wheels in the system is a constant. (via)
Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook. Linked for the source link commentary, not for the selling page.
Weekly Command: going over Git history with tig. (via)
Zulip, an open source team chat. (i.e. Slack and Teams category) (via)
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Data Visualization. (via)

2018/04/152018/04/13

Lazy Reading for 2018/04/15

No theme grew this week.

Conserve the Sound, “vanishing and endangered sounds”. (via)
Why does Twitter allow third-party clients? Another walled garden approach winding to its end stage.
z, a tool for navigating by regex. Odd, but powerful. (via)
Ikea-style instructions for programming algorithms. Not sure if this makes them clearer, or not. (via)
Seashells, piping CLI output to the web in realtime. (via)
Why does”=” mean assignment? (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 5: Civilization and War.
Why SQLite Does Not Use Git. (via)
XScreenSaver 5.39 is out. New hacks!
The NES homebrew scene.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Belfry WebComics Index. Very 90s. (via I lost it, sorry)

2018/04/082018/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2018/04/08

Accidental theme this week: Social media is a dead end.

ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard. I… could have sworn I already linked to this but I can’t find it. (via)
gokrazy – Go userland. Every language eventually reinvents the wheel this way. (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 4: Civilization and Geography. First 3 parts linked last week.
It’s Time for a RSS Revival. (via)
Growth At Any Cost. Facebook is designed to take your data and give it to others. It will never not do that. Don’t participate.
Cracks in the Wall. Blogging is better than social media, but of course I would say that. (via)
And here’s some more reinforcement of that idea. (via)
A 1970s disk drive that wouldn’t seek: getting our Xerox Alto running again. I like the platter shots.
An oral history of the L0pht. Part 1, with subsequent parts linked. (via)
The definitive resource for imagemagick scripts. I have needed this many times. (via)
AlterEgo: A Personalized Wearable Silent Speech Interface. Neat but creepy creepy creepy from the illustations. (via)
dotdrop, dotfile management. (via)
Prince of Persia from Apple ][ to BBC Master. (via)

Your unrelated food link for the week: King Arthur test kitchen disasters. Summarized annually on April Fools Day, every year.

2018/04/012018/03/30

Lazy Reading for 2018/04/01

Accidental theme this week: games.

AI Anecdotes, with highlights. (via)
The history of documented Unix facilities. (via)
Web OS, open sourced. Originally what ran on Palm handhelds. I got to try an unreleased Palm phone just before they folded – it was slick. (via)
The quest to save Stephen Hawking’s voice. He can literally speak from beyond the grave, if you think about it. (via)
A Look Back at PLATO. (via)
Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix. (via)
The Handheld History Collection. (via)
The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization and Part 2: Playing Civilization and Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress.
The making of Dark Castle. That game fascinated me. (via)
Edible Dice. Yep, can buy them. (via)
Stop cherry-picking, start merging: Index.
groups.io. Way, way better than dealing with Yahoo or Google ‘free’ group products, which is an unavoidable feature of many non-tech groups. (via)

Your unrelated cookbook link of the week: “Texture – A hydrocolloid recipe collection”.

2018/03/252018/03/23

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/25

Oddball links week.

10 Vintage Computers. (via)
New ThinkPad Guts Bring Intel Core I, DDR4, USB 3 to Cult Laptops. I could update my much-loved x220… (via)
Vim Clutch. I thought I linked to something like this before. (via)
The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign. Somewhat insane. (via)
Molly-guard, a phrase I had never heard before.
Hypercard Zine. (via)
Shell readability: strict mode.
Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System originating in Serbia/Kosovo. (via)
We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team.
Animations based on Simon Stålenhag paintings! (via)
90s Police Car Dashboard Computer now runs XScreenSaver.
RPG Books as Imagination Training, RPG books as fiction.
TODO Group Guides. (via)
Early portable computers.
Yak Shaving. We’ve all been there.

2018/03/182018/03/17

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/18

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In the U.S., we drink green beer and wear kilts, cause nobody’s terribly sure what Irish means within an American context anymore.

Can you identify this VMS roguelike? (thanks, Erik Blomberg)
An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector.
A potential way to have spaces in filenames and not break the Unix command line.
QueryParser. Well, at least Uber has a positive side effect. (via)
Sortix. (via)
Light Phone 2. Linked to mostly because of the e-ink screen. (via)
futures of distributions, “programmer-archaeologists”. (via)
Tidelift. Related to the previous link: a sort of umbrella organization to create financial incentives for open source maintenance. (via)
Looking back on the Jupiter Ace (Forth Minicomputer). (via)
Unix folklore: using multiple sync commands. (via)
Actually using ed. (via)
Pulled from the last item’s source link: people who use acme seem to be devoted to it – even more than vi/emacs users.
But there’s always ed. (also via)
While on the editor kick: Spacemacs, an enhanced Emacs.

Your unrelated mollusk-related death metal of the week: Slugdge.

2018/03/112018/03/07

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/11

Old games – but not too old, for this week’s theme.

Those pesky Makefiles.
Star Control lead devs fire back at Stardock lawsuit. I link to this just to point to the excellent open source game Ur-Quan Masters, which is available on every BSD.
Liberating a X200. (via)
The Worlds of Ultima.
Anime Floppy Discs. (via)
Fashion shows are better at the future than movies, according to this jwz post – and I agree.
The Basic Toolbox. A good checklist.
SPHINX, 1987.
Adding Colors to man. (via)
Freedombox. Not necessarily endorsing this setup, but running your own server is an excellent, excellent idea.
Shaolin Chamber 36. Soundtrack music. (via)
Related: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, one of the best kung fu movies.
Shell readability: main and Shell readability: function parameters.
The world of Linux Handhelds in 2018. That and the source link comments take you to some tiny hardware, which is my reason for reading.
Wing Commander II.
What free software is so good you can’t believe it’s available for free? A good chunk of what’s named here is immediately available to you via ports/dports/pkgsrc, without advertising or nagging, or the need to register in some megacorporation’s app store. Think about how nice that is, for a minute.. (via multiple places)
How to tell when a company thinks they dominate part of a market: they drop interoperability with other protocols.

2018/03/042018/03/03

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/04

Overflow that started 2 weeks ago. Maybe I should go intraweekly for Lazy Reading?

The Multics history of Unix. I link it for the Dennis Richie anecdote. (via)
Unix: Building a Development Environment from Scratch. (PDF, via)
A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification. Outlook.com is huge and poorly configured – it’s the AOL email of the 2010s!
Whatever Happened to the Desktop Computer? (via)
bhgv/Inferno-OS_Android – an Android port of Inferno OS. Phones seem a natural location for this. (via)
What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications. Uses Debian, but applies to any packaging system. I like the “strong guarantee” language. (via)
Analysis of SSHFS performance for large builds.
Keyboard notebook – sized to fit under your keyboard, a good/simple idea. Kikkerland is like the U.S. version of Atypk.
The Remarkable Number 1/89. (via)
VF-1, a commandline Gopher client. (also via)
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. A Rolling Stone article from 1972 that ends with code. (via)

2018/02/252018/02/23

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/25

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)

2018/02/182018/02/17

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/18

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.

2018/02/112018/02/09

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/11

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.

2018/02/042018/02/02

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/04

I finally worked through my Lazy Reading link backlog.

Computer-generated books, a list.
Every Icon, eventually drawing every 32×32 monochrome image possible. I remember a 8×8 physical hardware version of this called All Possible Images, some years ago. Google doesn’t remember it, though, or chooses to give me links to API docs instead.
Frankenbook, Shelley’s Frankenstein with additional essays and annotations worked directly into the original text. This is something web pages were built for. (via)
MacTote, for lugging your FatMac around. (via)
Grandma’s Zelda map. (also via)
Actual screenshot.
Towards LaTeX in the Browser. (via)
Unix influence in history. (via)
The UNIX Operating System: A Model for Software Design. Via this page. The target is behind a paywall. The mention of Kernighan as an author, though, made me wonder if he had published it separately. He hasn’t, but I did find his books page at Princeton.
My Delorean runs Perl. (via)
The revival of blogging. English translated version.
The vi input model. (via)
Mycroft II, an open source voice assistant. Are there more like this?
How’s your soldering technique?
Welcome to Armageddon! An excellent roguelike history from an excellent magazine.
Why create a new Unix shell? (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: see the last paragraph of this Don Hertzfeldt interview; it’s important. “Every time you pay to watch something you’re casting a vote. You’re saying, ‘Hey go make more of this, please.’ Audiences have all of the power to shape what gets made and what doesn’t.”