Category: Lazy Reading

Lots of variety this week; I’m happy with this link batch.

• Categories: models of models.  Pleasingly abstract.  (via)
• The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood.  Linked so that someone who never read Achewood can now go through its entire archive.  (via)
• The End of Oz.  Read this if you read any/all of the many, many Land of Oz books when young.  (via)
• Modding, Vim, i3, and Efficiency.  (via)
• I’ve made a rotary dial number input, because why not?  (via)
• Coffee Is Hard.  (via)
• The Best Cast Iron Skillet.  Secret tip from someone who has been using them for decades: treat them poorly, don’t spend money, they’ll be great.  It’s a chunk of iron.
• The Computer as a Communication Device.  I did not realize the role Hawaii played in causing packet communication.
• Computer Files Are Going Extinct.  (via)
• Betrayal At Krondor.
• I hate the X11 ICCCM selection system, and you should too.  (via)
• You know, we might as well just run every network service over HTTPS/2 and build another six layers on top of that to appease the OSI 7-layer burrito guys.  Linked mostly for that sentence.
• The lines of code that changed everything.

Your unrelated music of the week: The Mysterious Professor 950’s Otherworldly Beat Tapes.

A mix of complaints, history, and odd technical items.  The usual!

• Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets.  (via)
• Managing passwords using ed and gpg2.  Because: no tempfile.
• Adding redirection to the gopher protocol.
• How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last?  Readers of a certain age will remember how PGP was briefly export controlled; also remember that history rhymes.  (via)
• How my application ran away and called home from Redmond.  (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
• Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about audio.  (via)
• The tiniest FatMac.  (really a console and an emulator, but that’s fine.)
• Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual.  (via)
• 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs.  This is not the throwaway joke it sounds like.  (via)
• ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision.  Chessboards are natural placemarkers.  (via)
• Wackaging, a trend I hope will end.  (via)
• The Fantasy of Opting Out.  (via)
• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019.  (via)
• James Mickens’ Tenure Announcement.  It is exactly as wonderful as you would think.  (via)

Pre-posted in advance cause once again working through the weekend.

• BBSes: Partying Online Like It’s 1989.  (via)
• The 25th Interactive Fiction Competition is Open.
• After Dark has been ported to Twitter.
• Text Rendering Hates You.  (via)
• A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer.  Wonderful pictures, as always.
• Feast of Legends.  A RPG from the Wendy’s fast food chain.  It’s a legit PDF rulebook, and looks like a D&D-style product, but everything is themed to match Wendy’s food.  It’s bizarre.  (via)
• This to That, answering how to glue two different substances together.  Really!  (via)
• Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts, a long read about reading.
• Springer’s History of Computing series.  Seriously in-depth; this is research, not light entertainment.  (via)
• How to remove a part of a video using ffmpeg.
• “Night of the Lepus” was based on a book?  Excellent use of the interrobang, and also you should see this movie.
• Reminiscences on 5.25″ floppy drives of the early 1980’s.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Scratch.  I saw this in the theater a while ago, and I didn’t realize the whole thing was on Youtube.  It’s turntablism at its peak.  (via)

You may be able to tell one of my link sources changed RSS feeds, so I had some catchup to do this week.

• What is “DCC SEND startkeylogger”?  (via)
• Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case.  (via)
• Imaging Floppies.  (via)
• Just Delete Me.  (via)
• ReMarkable review.  Has anyone used one of these recently?
• Explanations, about X and beyond.  (via)
• Recent News in Narrative Games.
• What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre and When games grow and time passes.
• It’s almost XScreenSaver in clock form.
• Bits vs. Things.
• Gastropod facts.  I greatly enjoy this podcast.
• Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer.  Worth it for the pictures alone.
• Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe.

Lots of link diversity this week.

• GPS – A Hollywood Actress, a Player Piano, and Hip-Hop.  (via)
• Percy Ludgate, the missing link between Babbage’s machine and everything else.
• The Light Phone 2.  I don’t know how good or bad it will be, but with an e-ink screen, the battery life must be spectacular.  (via)
• The Gongfather’s Almanac, for Dungeon Crawl Classics.  (via)
• 251 words you can spell with a calculator and hex colors that are also words.  (both via)
• Instagram Hates The Internet.  The company made a conscious decision to break hyperlinking.
• The Turkish lira’s currency code is an unexpected source of problems with computer programmers.
• ASCII table and history.  Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?  (via)
• Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk.  (I think via)
• Chaosnet for Unix.  Pre-Ethernet, for Lisp machines.  (via)
• tine – a modern clone of the Amiga ED display editor.  (via)
• corpypastas.
• The Vim-Inspired Editor with a Linguistic Twist.  Kakoune.  (via)
• Syncstop, hardware USB data block.
• The Strange Alchemy of D&D’s Genre Emulation.  Note to self: find Jack Vance books.
• What Remains Technical Breakdown.  A new NES game, including physical media.  (via)

Way eclectic this week.  Enjoy!  I will be working, as I haven’t had a day off in 3 weeks – but don’t be too sorry for me, I chose this.  The magic of pre-scheduling posts fixes it.

• A new version of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music – you will find something new and interesting, guaranteed.  (via)
• Every Noise At Once, related.
• Social Reunion Tour.  I always liked Tumblr.
• Innovation vs. Preservation.
• New Adventures in DNSSEC and DANE.  (via)
• Bluetooth d20.
• Turning off DOT in FireFox.
• Phoneswarm, archived.  (via)
• Today in “IP Over Avian Carriers” news:  So that’s where 44100hz came from.
• Project-wide search in Vim.  (scroll down)
• The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, Revisited.
• Old School Bloggers.  I could be one of them.
• In praise of xlogo.  (via)
• Click, whir, ping: the lost sounds of loading video games.  (via)
• Anime Floppies.  (via)

Your unrelated music post: The Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp: August 2019.

I’m covering all my areas of interest this week, or nearly so.

• Famous computer history quotes, some probably new to you.
• The Bit Player, a movie about Claude Shannon, and a review of it.
• A new Cyriak video, Breakfast.  Another attempt to describe fractal infinity, I think.  (via)
• D&D plus Shakespeare.  (via)
• The Design of Dungeons and Dragons.  Talking about the books themselves, not the game.  (via)
• Noise Machines, including the nonrepeating sound of a data center.  (via)
• Oddball analog smartphones.
• Voyager 1 and 2 are still talking, still active, and possibly the highest-latency communication problem possible.   (via)
• Old video game advertisements.  (via)
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely.  Lots of great pull quotes in this.
• Tumblr, the Day After.  As a counterpoint to the last link, WordPress and Tumblr are two social networks that do not financially depend on either damaging privacy or encouraging outrage.
• Waldenponding, a term new to me.
• Paul Ford Uses This.  I’ve linked to his excellent writing before.
• Chesses, variations on chess.  Immediately understandable, and playable if you have a second player right there.  (via)

 

Accidental theme: heavy metal.

• A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database.  Found while researching tz formats.
• Buster Keaton: slapstick anarchism.  A continuation of an article I linked before.
• An Illustrated history of Easter Eggs.  Delightful!  (video, via)
• crontab converter for different time zones in unix?
• lowRISC has open source-related job openings.
• History and effective use of Vim.  (via)
• Apollo Guidance Computer: Dipstiks and reverse engineering the core rope simulator.
• Elements of Programming is now free.  (via)
• deconstruct files.  An excellent deep dive, from the deconstruct 2019 conference, for which there’s a summary.
• Our switches can wind up in weird states after a power failure.  Linked cause I experienced this over a miles-spanning network, over and underground.
• “This week I was forced to accept that XMPP and IRC are both goners.“
• The history of headbanging: “Heavy Metal.”  Not enough music links, but it did lead me to the best version of War Pigs I’ve ever heard.    (via)
• You don’t need to know…  A familiar screen.
• Local 1Password iOS Vaults No Longer Free.  The important part is the last quote.  (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Grando by OHMYGOD.

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)

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.

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.