Category: Lazy Reading

Today’s date is slightly confusing.

• A point to consider before retr0brigting.  Dirt as nostalgia.
• Ditherpunk 2 — beyond 1-bit.  I like the layout, not just the content.  (via)
• pineapple60, an ergonomic keyboard with trackpoint.  Made to fit in a Thinkpad.  (also via)
• Visiting Another World, about Gemini.  (via)
• Wonders of extraction: Coffee (part 1).
• 16th century automata.
• Unwinnability and Wishbringer.
• Starting FORTH.  (via)
• Of tea, cakes and computers, Georgina Ferry (Wuthering Bytes 2019).  I think I linked to another telling of this story years ago; the first business app was for a British caterer.  (via)
• Neopixel LED Skirt.  The bouncing ball animation is neat.
• I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You.
• Make the BeBox great again: TLS 1.2, inetd and more for PowerPC BeOS R5.  (via)

Another informal history theme, not uncommon.

• Amulets, cassette tape art?  (via)
• Early warning signs of shitty software.
• Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science, by Knuth.  (via)
• The History of Trackers.  (via)
• The Second Coming of Star Wars.  The video games.
• The quest for Wolfenstein 3D music on the Apple IIgs.
• Tomorrow is ENIAC Day.  75 years!  (via)
• MIDICSV.  Structured text and music, has potential.  (via)
• How and why I stopped buying new laptops.  (via)
• On Planetary in 2020.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1976: Adventure.
• The Animation That Changed Cinema.  30 minutes of good animation.
• Free MWL novel.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Best electronic music on Bandcamp, January 2021.

There’s a few links in here that you could lose hours to.  Those are the best!

• A 6502 (think Apple I) as a clamshell.
• “predicting the weather in the earth’s core is hard“.  Meaning, the earth speeds up and slows down, unpredictably.
• Colour & Shape: Using Computer Vision to Explore the Science Museum Group Collection.  (via)
• Simulating Zoom circa 1990.  The whole Slow Networks series there is fun.  (also via)
• Useful video clips of Turing Award winners.  Talking about innovations with the people that actually did them; Knuth on compiler writing, Hellman on public key encryption, etc.
• I wish every program that wanted ‘a SQL database’ would let me use SQLite.  Same.
• The Hidden, Destructive Legacy of ‘Duke Nukem’.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1975: dnd.
• Bluetooth trackball Mark II.  The ball is the trackball.  (via)
• Semi-related: The Computer History Museum’s short films sorted by topic.  You will also find some gems here.
• “The center of the Cloud is in Ashburn, Virginia”.   The Cloud, the Civil War, and the “War on Coal”.  (via)
• little sound dj, emulating a Game Boy just to make music.  (via)
• “TLS Mastery” first draft done!  Looking for technical reviewers.
• Generative Unfoldings, Opening April 1, 2021.  All open source generative art.
• Links about todo.txt.

 

I went analog for a number of things this week.  Not unusual!

• Working Off-Grid Efficiently.  (via)
• Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering.  (also via)
• reMarkable 2 – One Week Later.  Thinking about buying one.
• Adversarial.io, subverting image recognition.
• Sampler patches that are patches.  (via)
• Related: Best Hardware Experimental Synthesizer Releases 2020.  (via)
• Kinda related: Vintage audio cassette recorders.  (via)
• The Best of 2020, for role playing games.
• The History of Tea.  (via)
• The Default Router.  Everyone has encountered a WRT54G eventually.
• XTerm: It’s Better Than You Thought.  Chances are XTerm can do almost everything you need, faster.  (via)
• Top 10 Most Read Pieces of 2020 for the Public Domain Review.  The cover of Sketch-book of British Birds, found in “The Art of Book Covers (1820–1914)“, doesn’t look a century old.

Your unrelated music of the week: Xvious_exe by woob.  (via)

This is a good week for variety; I managed to get historical links, game links, music links, hardware… checking all the boxes except roguelikes, darnit.

• The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators.  Nicely explained.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games, a new year each week, and here’s the post schedule, and of course, 1971: The Oregon Trail.  (via)
• Tunguska: Ternary Computer Emulator.  (via)
• How Graphviz thinks the USA is laid out.
• 7-screen laptop, from a year ago.  (via)
• Christmas Cards The Unix Way – with pic and troff.  (video)
• Systems design explains the world: volume 1.
• Our alerts are quiet most of the time (as they should be).  I wish this was more common.
• The 100 Best Albums of 2020.  You will find something unexpected in there.  (via)
• Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM PC/AT 5170, Part 3.
• Embedding an SQL injection into a company name.  (via)
• The Immortal Soul of an Old Machine, 40th anniversary review of The Soul of a New Machine.  (via)
• Now here’s a geek watch.
• ASCII Weather Station.
• ECC RAM and why it’s useful.
• Intellivision returns.  (via)
• Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World.

I lean more to the fun topics this week.

• Command Line Interface Guidelines.  (via)
• Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 2: Colonization.
• Bombadillo, a non-web browser.  Gemini, Gopher, finger.  (via)
• The Bastard Operator From Hell Complete WWW Archive .  Well, not complete.  (via)
• How Tough is a First Level Fighter?
• Low spec Computers.  (via)
• The Control Room: A Media Archaeology.  (via)
• Mousephone.  Phone Mouse.
• The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra.  (via)
• Ghoulstorm part 1 and part 2.
• A Gopher client on the Nintendo Switch.  (via)
• The death and life of postmaster@anywhere.

This is one of my more backwards-looking Lazy Reading posts.

• Digital Tools I Wish Existed.  (via)
• Floppy Emu Update: Apple II Copy-Protection.  (via)
• AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer (2008).  I linked to this back in 2011, but this is a new, updated version.  (via)
• Hexographer, for making hexmaps quickly.  (via)
• The return of Bobby Tables, LLC.
• I Love ED on CP/M.  (via)
• The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge.  More good books there.
• Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace, a documentary about Jan Svankmajer.  (via)
• ALGOL 60 is 60.
• The Colors of Noise.
• Technically, nobody really agreed what time it was until a few decades ago.  (Read the rest of the thread while you are there; there’s a lot of interesting history.)

Your unrelated music of the week: High Command, recommended by the thrashiest band of recent times: Power Trip.

I don’t have to work today for the first time since I am not sure when.  For that, you get links links links.

• My Raspberry Pi Desktop.  (via)
• Text-only websites.  There’s a lot of links to follow there.  (via)
• The secrets of Monkey Island’s source code.  (via)
• Connection Interrupted, image data corruption in motion.  (via)
• The Benefits of Collecting.
• How Mozart became a bad composer.  There is so much in the public domain that I don’t realize.  (via)
• Your computer isn’t yours.  Apple tracks what you run, when.  (via)
• Mini Arcade.  (via)
• Retro games – How I fixed the Atari 2600 awful music.  (via)
• Evaluating Precursor’s Hardware Security.
• Booting from a vinyl record.  (via)
• Beepbox.co.  (via)
• epr — Terminal/CLI Epub reader.  A few seconds of search doesn’t show a BSD port, though.  No, wait, I was wrong.  (via)
• Permissive IPs.  That’s Intellectual Property, and mentions a bunch of tabletop industry things I wasn’t familiar with.
• A few ways to make money in FOSS.
• Improving on QBasic’s Random Number Generator.
• Pen plotter SVG Snowflake generator.
• Fun with Crypto Ancienne: TLS for the Browsers of the Internet of Old Things.
• A review of Envision glasses, a proper use of Google Glass technology.  (via)

Literally most of the tabs I have open right now, in front of you.

• The Definitive Guide to the Doctor Who Theme Music.  (via, via)
• Sinister Sounds of the Solar System.  (also via)
• Well There’s Your Problem Podcast.  Actually stills and audio about engineering disasters.  (via)
• Woodpecker dubstep.
• Softbody Tetris, Fuzzy Edition.
• A Visual History of Internet (IPv4) Address Allocations.  (via)
• The JavaScript Ecosystem.
• Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator.  (video, via)
• Why I Teach vim.  (via)
• Vimcal.  Not totally sure why Vim is in the name but what the heck.  (via)
• My Obsession with Chess.  Incidentally, McCloud’s Understanding Comics has an excellent explanation of closure that goes far beyond comics.   (via)
• Pinafore, for Mastodon instances.
• What is a System-on-Chip (SoC), and Why Do We Care if They are Open Source?
• The Backbone: Conclusion.  Story of the Internet.

Surely some of these are repeats?

• CSVs: The good, the bad, and the ugly.  (via)
• This seems like a good form factor.
• present: ‘a terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects’.  (via)
• A book about books bound in human skin.  (via)
• Rare Alphonse Mucha illustrations.  I saw some of his work close up recently.
• 20 double-edged potions for the ingenious adventurer.
• Miscellany ? 89: 2020, year of the asterisk.
• The Video Game Source Project.  (via)
• Exploding Whale, remastered in 4K.   (via)
• computecuter.com.  Exactly what it sounds like.
• Return to Plan 9.  (via)
• Computer Unit 1979.  (via)
• Text Editors III: Emacs.
• Thinking out loud about Vim.  Equal time.
• Efficient text editing on a PDP-10.  I link, others get into it: I’m so happy!

There’s some good reading/projects linked in here, so if you have free time, this can keep you busy.

• Psion Series 3 palmtop EReader.  That’s 25 year old hardware?
• BBC’s In Our Time podcast on Alan Turing.  (via)
• 808303.studio.  Surely I’ve linked this already?  (via)
• The Museum of Obsolete Media.  (thanks, swildner)
• The 100 best fantasy books of all time.  I thought it was another corny listicle, but on the other hand I’ve loved every book I’ve read on that list, and there’s a lot more I didn’t know about.  (via)
• 15 Sci-Fi Books That Forever Shaped The Genre.  Ditto.  (also via)
• The Web Key Directory, based on this.  I need to use it.  My source link for this works as a sort of how-to.
• Unraveling the JPEG.  (via)
• New Nixie tube manufacturing.
• dimensions.com – reference drawings for everything.  (via)
• Configuring Windows for key-based SSH access.  For reference.
• A curated non-violent games list.

Your unrelated music of the week: KUTMAH: Isolation Tapes v.006.  There’s a lot more good music from this person.

 

Change your clocks, depending on what time zone you are in.

• Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User.
• I did not realize org mode has its own website.  (via)
• a truly naked, brutalist html quine.  (via)
• Bookmark alignment chart.  (scroll to end)
• What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It?  (via)
• List of Generative Art and Live Coding Tools.  (via)
• Results from 20 years of experiments summarized.  Food experiments, done by a scientist.  (via)
• Writing a Book with Unix.  (via)
• Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is and covers.
• Telemelt, group console playing simulator.  (via)
• I Solved British Square.
• Internet Ascendant, Part 2: Going Private and Going Public.
• Stereoscopic computing: converting Quake and Doom.

 

Two shopping months until Christmas!

• I’ll take “problems we solved correctly in the 80s” for $100, Alex.
• Come Internet With Me: Zettelkasten method.
• Building a computer in Conway’s game of life.  (via)
• MONOSPACE, less than 1kb of code.  (via)
• archive.assembly.org, so many short films, related to the last link.
• The HTML5 accelerator card.
• Basic Unix Tools – dd.
• Why I Chose Emacs as My New Text Editor.  (via)
• Replacing FreshRSS With Miniflux.  (via)
• SSH 2FA with Google Authenticator and Yubikey.  (via)
• 2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online for Anyone to Read.  i.e. USENET.  (via)
• introducing the i.webthings directory.  Find some spare time before following that link; there’s a lot there.

I guess history is a micro-theme?

• Think Twice Dice.  (via)
• Happy Birthday, Ethernet.  Still interoperable, 40 years later.  (via)
• How we ran a Unix-like OS (Xv6), on our home-built CPU with our home-built C compiler.  Sorta UNIX.  (via)
• “Myst” demake for Apple II.  (via)
• Ars Electronic 2017.  Follow the art links.
• Spamtoberfest.
• Related, Hacktoberfest needs to stop.
• IFComp 2020 games are up.
• Transport Tycoon.
• New Object Storage Protocol Could Mean the End for POSIX.   (thanks, Matthew C)
• Retry Mock Toys, Or, model rockets are fun.
• The Digital Future of Tabletop Games.  (via)
• Dispatch 09 — Synthetic Reality & The Metaverse.  (also via)
• A Nixie Tube Watch.  Exactly as clunky as it sounds.
• Welcome to your Bland. (via)

Hardware is the mini-theme this week, I think.

• Open source job with a cool title: Director Of Product, Disinformation at Wikimedia.
• Boring title but huge impact: Software engineer for BIND 9.
• Elite – the annotated source.  Quite readable, even if you don’t know assembly.  (via)
• Glitch techniques.  (via)
• Hacking a gopher client into the Alpha Micro.  I don’t even recognize the computer!  (via)
• Built To Last.  A story about COBOL.  (via)
• ScummVm now runs Colossal Cave Adventure.  (via)
• Open@RIT.  There’s a name you should recognize on the advisory board.
• David Fletcher’s photogrammetry models of London.  (via)
• Playing chess by email.  Used to happen by snail mail!
• Guided Tour of the Precursor Motherboard.  Followup from last week.  It has a self-destruct mode – seriously!
• How to multiply currents: Inside a counterfeit analog multiplier.  Linked for the cool analog computer picture.
• Roguelike Celebration T-shirts.
• Admiral Grace Hopper also drew.  (via)