Category: Lazy Reading

Nostalgia mini-theme this week, or maybe “classical”?

• The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons.  Talking about Appendix N.  (via)
• tmp.out vol. 1.  Not a common sort of site nowadays.  (via)
• BASIC 10-liners for Atari.  Also no longer common.  (also via)
• Haiku activity report – March and April 2021.
• PalmOS on x86: API porting.  (via)
• Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh.  (via)
• Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster.  A good example of cost externalization.
• The fate of Imgur.
• The question of how to do non-annoying multi-factor authentication for SSH.  Not the answer, just the question.
• Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1987: Plundered Hearts.
• My Palm LiveDrive! and Palm LifeDrive in a Windows 2000 QEMU VM.

Fun reads, none too heavy.

• Colin’s Bear Animation, Revisited.
• Switched-On… hits and misses.  Also a meme, in vinyl.
• The Endless Acid Banger.  Makes me think of StarCon 2.  (via)
• Calendso, self-hosted Calendly alternative.  (via)
• Text Adventures: Past, Semiconditionally Modified Past, and Present.  (via)
• The Web Design Museum.  (via)
• Old Book Illustrations.  Exactly what it is titled.  (via)
• An Oral History of Street Fighter II.  (via)
• reHackable/awesome-reMarkable.  (via)
• The First PC to Die, Ever.   Player Character, 50 years ago. (via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2021 will be virtual.
• Yayagram.  (via)

Maybe hardware hacks is the sub-theme this week.

• Bluetooth, based on this guy.
• Walkie-talkies that work over IP but without a network.
• Yay!  Web Curios is back!
• Percy Ludgate talk, upcoming.
• WiFiStation: A WiFi interface for the Cidco MailStation.  Reliably bonkers.
• Palm PDA nostalgia on its way!
• What I learned of the VOIP hacker scene by setting up a SIP Honeypot.  Ongoing for years.  (via)
• Step Inside the Miniature Worlds of Tatsuya Tanaka.  (via)
• Squeezebox Keyboard.  Also bonkers.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1986: Uncle Roger.
• geminiquickst.art.  (via)
• Trying out learning more Vim on demand.
• The best version of the Unix Magic poster.  (via)

Some nice in-depth reading awaits you below.

• Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup.  A filtered list rather than a Github document, finally.  (via)
• The Magician’s Library.  (via)
• The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme.  Many of these links I’ve had previously – or wish I had.  This will eat some hours.  (via many places)
• IF talks at Flights of Foundry, happening now.
• The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike.  (via)
• Wendy Carlos demonstrates her Moog Synthesizer in 1970.  Linked for the lesson and for just looking at the equipment.  (via)
• Related: The 40 greatest synth sounds of all time, No 40: Wendy Carlos – A Clockwork Orange.  Kinda hard to see the rest of the series, but interesting to see what a synth lesson looks like now: screenshots.  (via)
• The Overedge Catalog: New Types of Research Organizations.
• Mac Chimes of Death.  The car crash was a crowd-pleaser.  (via)
• Everything VPN Is New Again.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1985: A Mind Forever Voyaging.

I lost the origin of some of these links this week; too many tabs open.  Sorry!

• Moog System 55, so many analog controls!  (via)
• Mike Beauchamp Projects.  I like the clock.  (via)
• Shrink, Reduce, and Implode: The Legacy Zip Compression Methods.  (via)
• The complete guide for open sourcing video games.
• A Gemini (and Atom and RSS) feed reader.
• Golem and My Other Seven Computer-Generated Books in Print.
• Don’t End The Week With Nothing.
• Anarchism in Practice Is Often Radically Boring Democracy.
• Equa! by James Chip.  Tabletop RPG as a set of equations.  This will scratch someone’s very particular itch.  (via)
• Recognizing and rectifying your mistakes as an engineering leader.  If you aren’t too sick of talking heads.
• Designing calculator apps.
• Internet routing can now vary based on things you wouldn’t expect, or ports matter for routing, not just destination.
• Different views of what are basic and advanced Vim features.  A questions for every time I link a Vim tutorial.
• Is the Psion 5 still usable in 2017?  (video, via)
• Turn your iPhone into a 90s pocket organiser.  (also via)
• Hacker Simulator.

Your unrelated music of the week: The Best Beat Tapes on Bandcamp: March 2021.

No theme this week cause I really did touch all the themes.

• The Smallest Keyboard.  to smol
• About Deformin’ In The Rain.
• Spaceship builder.  (via)
• Saying goodbye to my Commodore 64.  Linked cause of the hardware mods.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1981: His Majesty’s Ship “Impetuous” and 1982: The Hobbit.  I never encountered these games, but they are better than I would have expected for the time.
• Diagrams for Penrose Tiles.  (via)
• When you have too much memory for SheepShaver.
• Cursed Keyboard Image.
• System Shock, a deep dive.
• Phonoptic Readers, pattern-based optical sounds.
• Souped-Up Gopher.  (via)
• Dungeons and Directories.  (via)

Mini theme this week: sound.

• Leave it to the phone companies to make simple ideas complex.
• Mini weather station with e-ink display.   A good use case.
• The Data Sonification Archive.  Data represented by sound.
• BOTTLED AUTHORS: The predigital dream of the audiobook.
• The Pixel Vision 8, for 8-bit games.
• Loop Hero, a roguelike where you build the map too?  (via)
• Kepler was once so wrong that he was right.
• List of split keyboards.  (via) 
• Resurrecting Fortran.  (via)
• The first(?) negative leap second might come in 2031.
• The Emoji That Nearly Weren’t.  (via)
• Remember optical disk caddies?  Ugh.
• How to Think Bayes.  This underpins what most people call “AI”.
• Rebuilding James Bond’s Apple IIc – A Software Forgery.  (via)
• Newsreader, free font for longer-form reading.  (via)

Double links is the sub-theme today.

• PLATO Adventure (1979).  Adventure/Zork was everywhere.
• Plus an incomplete guide.
• Wing Commander III.  The graphics have aged remarkably well.
• Lotus 1-2-3 at arbitrary terminal sizes.  (via)
• Similar: Troubleshooting my Commodore 128’s 80-column mode, part one.
• Trainspotting, A story of trains, computers, and two images.  (also via)
• And then: Mystery Solved.
• Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life.  (via)
• My Life in E-ink.  (via)
• Oh, the intellectual property rights you’ll extend.  Copyright and the problems that come with its overextension.  (via)
• Sorta related: Internet Archive Infrastructure, a video.  (via)
• A Vim Guide for Advanced Users.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1980: MUD.  Oh, it’s getting good.
• Over the weekend: Commodore 128DCR keyboard extension, updates to Be-Power.  Linked to remind me to find a gopher client.
• TEXT ADVENTURES.  A description of Twine.  (via)

Long shot question: Are any of you in France and able to get this chocolate mold directly at a lower price?  Valrhona doesn’t sell square molds into the US market.

• Just one more turn: Dragon’s Lair. A quarter eater, as I called it when that mattered.
• Laura Jedeed Uses This. Not your normal tech equipment descriptions.
• Split Keyboards Gallery. (via)
• Troubleshooting a Commodore 1541 disk drive.
• Retr0brighting my Commodore 128 keyboard.
• Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller. Linked for pictures as usual.
• Electronic Plastic, electronic games. (via)
• Link: Taking This Serially and also What signal a RJ-45 serial connection is (probably) missing.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1979: The Cave of Time.
• In Defense of Interactive Graphics. (via)
• XScreenSaver version 6 beta 2. Eh, also a BSD link.
• The Sound of Fractals & Photographs. Not an article about it, but actually the sound. (video, via)
• Mixdown’s Greatest Drum Machines Of All Time: Part One. There’s more past that. (via)

If you enjoy the weekend reading, or even the weekday posts, consider my Patreon.  It’d be nice if it bought me some good coffee.

• The Public Domain Review’s Caption Contest.
• Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer.  (video, via)
• Typographische Jahrbücher, 1902.
• What else hath God wrought?  “lo”, one of my favorites.  (via)
• 72 encounters from the City of Spires.
• Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step).
• History of the PDF format.  (via)
• Stores for Commodore 128 components.
• 50 Years of Text Games: 1977: Zork and 1978: Pirate Adventure.
• MacLynx beta 3 — really!
• The Plain Text Tools I Use (2021 Edition).
• Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program.  Very much a transitional machine between early analog and modern.
• “Basic Computer Games“, an updated version of the book.  (via)

Your unrelated to anything at all image of the week: Saskatchewan!

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.