Category: Lazy Reading

The “Weird Coding Experiment…” link is a good one.

• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I).  The ‘effective strategy’ part makes sense to me.
• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II).
• Give Up GitHub – Software Freedom Conservancy.  (via)
• Walkmellotron, combining the best features of the Mellotron and the Walkman.
• The Old Computer Challenge V2: back to RTC.
• Retrospective: Wizardry.  I never played this; always Ultima.
• 1970s desktop email notifier.
• SourceHut is committed to making IRC better.  IRC generally has the same learning curve (and power) as vi.
• Microsoft To Ban Commercial Open Source from App Store.  I can’t tell if this is misinterpreted panic or Microsoft attempting to stop open source from being a paying job.
• The modifiers vs. the keepers.  I think 3-shift keyboards should make a return.  (via)
• Weird Coding Experiment: A Virtual Retro PC… that plays Sierra games!?  If you want a retro computer and don’t have room in the house.  (via)
• Upscaling Sierra graphics. (same source as last)

Whee!

• Mesopotamia, a nice online version of a museum exhibit.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games bonus article: Amnesia.
• MNT Pocket Reform, the smaller version of something I’ve linked before.
• The least friendly keyboard ever, but certainly interesting.
• The Internet as a Public Good.
• GitHub Copilot and open source laundering.  This applies to AI art too.
• A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt).  Linked cause I wondered out loud “why that change, in version 36?”
• Dangit, Git!?   (via)
• A strategy to defeat AI chessbots.
• The Dwarf Fortress Development Plan.  Some of this sounds more like writing an epic novel than a game, which is good!   They have a dirt-simple Patreon, too, and graphics are on the way?  All news to me.
• Plan 9 was almost a music disk, too.  (via)

Your unrelated cartoon of the week: Mega.

Mini-theme of old games.

• The Nethack Challenge: Dungeons, Dragons, and Tourists.  (via)
• I’ve played dopewars on Slack.  Linked because dopewars is really a variant of unique-genre game Taipan.
• Clarus returns home.  (via)
• 3 More Fonts for Working with Plain Text.  I find Source Code Pro works very well.
• I posted about arttime before; the author helpfully reminded me version 1.5 is out.
• Rebecca, Michael recommend the Gateron Black Ink V2 keyswitches.
• David Ahl places all his classic computing publications into the Public Domain.  I loved those books.  (via)
• Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games).
• Dial-a-story.
• CaptionIt, live subtitles on a heads-up display, open source.  (via)
• Dinosaur Pictures and Facts.  My favorite dinosaur.  (also via)
• Game Design Mimetics.  (also via)

This is a week of fun links.

• Cyberdeck Cafe.   All custom terminals.
• My PSU just won’t do.
• So long, home T1 line; hello, hacking the T1 router.  A good T-carrier explanation.
• Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?  (via)
• A Web Around the World, Part 11: A Zero-Sum Game.
• Interactive Art Museum.  Pleasing webgubbins.  (via)
• A Trail Tale.  A very nice presentation of an Appalachian Trail hike; something I’d like to do someday.  (also via)
• Porting Doom to A/UX.  (via)
• Artvee, public domain art search engine.  (via)
• Fun With Power Monitoring on the Apple IIe.
• Installing a payphone in my house.  The last paragraph is the best.  (via)
• Regular expressions are effectively a (hard) programming language.
• How is Voyager still talking after all these years?
• Frogress Bar.

Mini-theme of hardware this week.

• Electronic Catan LCD Tiles.  (via)
• Watchy, open hardware and software watch.
• Modal dialogs and other things that steal keyboard focus are dangerous.  That makes me so mad.
• DuskOS.  Linking cause “low impact computing” has turned into “postapocalyptic computing” for some people.  (via)
• Catalogs and Context.  (via)
• What happened to Perl 7?  (via)
• Related: perl v5.36.0 has been released.  (via)
• Access the Tesla API with Perl!
• BBQ20KBD.  (via)
• Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 MK3.  (via)
• 50 Years of Text Games crowdfunded book launch teaser.
• XModem in 2022.  (via)
• The Thompson MO5, I’ve never seen before.  Plus free BASIC.  (via)

This was done very early; I have been rigorous at cleaning up open tabs.

• Finger: the First Social Software.  DOOM news was distributed that way.  (via)
• Some things that make languages easy (or not) to embed in Unix shell scripts.
• My programming language odyssey.
• IntyOS – An Operating System for the Intellivision.  Never went anywhere but that’s OK.  (via)
• “The Canary in the Coal Mine…” A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge.  (via)
• Round.
• Wizard Zines.  (via)
• Recommend Me Books, Part 347.
• XScreenSaver 6.04 out now with 2 new hacks.
• Uncurled, 30 years of open source project experience summed up.  People need to write more overarching summaries like this.  (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• arttime, ASCII art + terminal clock.  (via)
• A tip: ctrl-A and ctrl-E move your cursor to the start or end of your command line, non-destructively.  It’s taken me 3 years to learn to use that instead of erases-the-whole-line ctrl-U.

Your unrelated music for the week: KUTMAH – Original Production Beat Mix.

No mini-theme emerged this week.

• A Web Around the World, Part 9: A Network of Networks and Part 10: A Web of Associations.
• Book review: Practical File System Design with the Be File System.
• The Central Question.  Touches on ARPANET.
• Net Losses.  Count up how many of these you have used.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Animated Series.  Realistically bad!
• The History of Computer Communications.  (indirectly via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2022 Call for Proposals.  Paid.
• VCR Virus warnings.  (via)
• Glitcher – breakcore generator.  (via)
• mdehling/sun-fb-logos: A collection of Sun framebuffer logos for your viewing pleasure .  This will entertain at least one reader I am sure.  (via)
• Rust: A Critical Retrospective.
• Duck Chess.  Makes sense.  (via)
• Rockbox, linked as a reminder after reading this accurate gripe on how iPhone music playing isn’t as good as dedicated music hardware.

Still working on cleaning up RSS backlogs, so this was done early.

• Chonky Palmtop is a DIY portable Linux computer with a split keyboard and 7 inch display.  I’ve linked to this before.  (via)
• r/ErgoMobileComputers/, from comments at the previous link.  The e-ink setups are interesting.
• Porting Zelda Classic to the Web.  Interesting for the game and the method.  (via)
• MVC — Xerox PARC 1978—79.  (via)
• Emulating the Space Invaders look and feel.  Recreating analog issues.  (via)
• Gopher on the Palm Pilot and the pitfalls of PalmOS connectivity.
• Pendragon, an RPG I never ever encountered.
• Triple Entry Blogging.
• Increasing the surface area of blogging.
• VCF East XIII — David Walden — Remembering the BBN ARPANET Project.  (Youtube, via)
• Signs of Life, art show and technology experiment.
• Korg MS-20.  (via)
• The failure of the idea of X resources, and What goes into an X resource and its name.
• Termtris on a terminal.

Your unrelated noise music of the week: GROAR by Juanjosé Rivas.  (via)

Old-school week, at least more than normal.

• Principia Apocrypha: Principles of Old School RPGs.
• Now that computers have more than 4MB of memory, can we get seconds on the taskbar?
• Obsidian.md.  (via)
• waxy.org turns 20.
• MNT Reform, an ARM laptop with open hardware.  (via)
• Those HTML Attributes You Never Use.  (via)
• Minskytron Refurbished.
• Inside the Apple-1’s shift-register memory.  Photos!
• “Let’s go find out!“
• Dreamhold, an introduction to interactive fiction.  (via)
• The Early History of Smalltalk (1993).  The corporate shell of Xerox, where Smalltalk and PARC came from, is just a few miles from me.  (via)

 

The music edge cases story is great.

• Revisiting the INMOS Transputer.  (via)
• Replicate Filesystem with Rsync.
• Spammers in the Public Cloud, Protected by SPF.
• Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music.  (via)
• Tonight we’re gonna log on like it’s 1979 (Telenet, Dialcom and The Source).
• Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board.  Great photos.
• Six One Sentence Monsters and Six More One Sentence Monsters.
• A Web Around the World, Part 7: Computers On the Wire.  I may have missed some recent parts of this.
• Puzzle dossiers and boxes, 2022.
• Old School Essentials, classic D&D revisited.  (via)
• Tetrageddon.  (via)
• Library of Short Stories.  (also via)
• Storytelling.  Early sequential art.

 

A historical focus this week but then again that’s not uncommon.

• Great Moments in Taxonomy. Several links to follow.
• Team Tsathogga / City of Spires setting primer, for Severed Fane.
• Dungeons and Desktops, a history of computer RPGs.  (via)
• The Elusive Shift, early D&D from wargaming to roleplay.  (also via)
• Bent? is an alive, unstable Japanese noise box.  (via)
• Infinite Mac, an instant-booting Quadra in your browser.  I got system7.app to crash playing Marathon so that is accurate.
• Spacewar! is 60 Today!
• Why the fascination with retrocomputing?  (via)
• The Tao of Acme.  (via)
• Retro Lite CM4: a Compute Module 4 gaming console.  (via)
• Webinar –  Ethernet’s Emergence from Xerox PARC: 1975-1980.  These are not historians, but the actual people who created and implemented it.  (via)

I thought I was going to be short this week, and then started cleaning out old open browser tabs…

• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever used.
• Note taking in Emacs with howm.
• Eponymous Laws Part I: Laws of the Internet.  (via)
• TORI Nixie Calculator.  Every maker buzzword in a single product.
• Preserving more of the history of logic programming (especially source code).  (via)
• Related: softwarepreservation.org.
• Stevie Wonder and His Dream Machines.  Related to all the synth links I post.  (via)
• The Art of the For… Next Loop.  (via)
• TZDB and some challenges of long data.  (via)
• In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard – KickStarter Launch.
• Wi-Fi Memories.
• Lumon.
• Majestic Fantasy, old school D&D.
• Swords and Wizardry, same.
• WebAssembly in my Browser Desktop Environment.  (via)
• cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display.  (via)

 

Mini-theme: 4-part writeups.

• Comas Channel.  Food manufacturing; somewhat hypnotic.  (via)
• Yocto boot2qt for the Seeed reTerminal (Qt 6).  (via)
• Electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos has a website.  (indirectly via)
• A Web Around the World, Part 6: Routing Calls.
• Recent narrative games: winter 2021 edition.
• [Review] Rackham Vale (and the Four Eras of OSR Publishing).  Linked for the indie RPG publishing history, which has mostly passed me by.
• 22 years of Emacs.  (via)
• SGI320/540 Visual Workstations.  An extremely specific site.  (via)
• Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal.  (via)
• The Cube Rule of Food Identification.  (via)
• Four Tiny Essays On SF/F.  (via)
• Hard Drive History.
• Mouse Museum.  (via)

If you were hoping for a mini-theme of synthesizers, you are in luck.

• Chonky Palmtop.
• What’s your favorite vim shortcut/hack
• My New Old Apple Macintosh SE/30 Computer.  (via)
• Emulating Vintage Mac Compilers.  (via)
• The problem of keeping track of hardlinks as you traverse a directory tree.  Linked cause this was a pain for HAMMER2, too.
• Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition).
• Becoming Universal: A New History of Modern Computing.  (via)
• The Sinclair QL.  (also via)
• The Casio QA-100, a simulated synth/sequencer.  (via)
• The Casio MT-40/MT-41 and sleng teng riddim, the start of dancehall.  (via)
• Original Jungle Samples.  (via)
• Making Portishead’s “Dummy”: The Production Experiments of a Trip-Hop Classic.  (via)
• An Improvement on the Pomodoro Technique.
• All desktop calculators are wrong, so I had to build my own.  (via)

This was done early; there’s been a lot of interesting reads on the feeds, so to speak.

• Ask Tilde: What small internet protocols do you like?
• 2022 IGF nominees: on history, intimate and/or personal, miscellaneous, fireworks.
• Animation Storage, animations from the 60s-70s.  (via)
• Aleister Crowley, sysadmin.
• A Web Around the World, Part 3: …Try, Try Again, and Part 4: From Telegraphy to Telephony.
• Year 2038 problem is still alive and well.  (via)
• Yarchive, a lot of archived USENET.  There are some gems in the computer section, like this.  (via)
• The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language.   Easier to debug, less memory control.  (PDF, via)
• The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB).
• Precursor: From Boot to Root.
• Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy.  (PDF, via)
• Ubuntu limits the console kernel log level even on servers.  I’d rather have noise than missing info.
• Refurb weekend: Texas Instruments Silent 700 Model 745 teletype.
• 50 Years of Text Games: HUTSPIEL and Dr. Dorothy Clark.