Lazy Reading – DragonFly BSD Digest

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.