Category: Lazy Reading

Preposted early; I’m traveling during the week so I have to throw all my extra tabs in quick.

• Computer graphic history at the Pixar Online Library.  Goes back to the 80s.  (via)
• thecookie.website.
• Cigarettes, Space Invaders and the birth of the game watch.  (via)
• Synergy, multicomputer mouse and keyboard.  (via)
• Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship.
• Essays on programming I think about a lot.
• The evolution of a Scheme programmer.  (via)
• On Liberating My Smartwatch From Cloud Services.
• A Better Cheatsheet.
• A virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron. I’m sorry.  (via)

Accidental topic: old-school games.

• Assignment 45, A Harry Flynn Adventure (1981).  Interesting cause it’s a magazine article with the program source, something you don’t see much past the mid-80s.
• Advanced Vim Workflows.  (via)
• Historical Games.  (via)
• PunyInform, Inform 6 for 8-bit computers.  (also via)
• Specification Writer job at Infocom LLC.  “part of a clean room reverse engineering project”
• Modern Board Game Research.  (via)
• Medieval Fantasy City Generator.  I linked to an earlier version years ago.  (via)
• IoDT The Internet of Dead Things Institute.  (via)
• Laura Michet Uses This.  Look at her custom SABER68 keyboard.
• March 2nd, 1943.  A reminder: accurate dates in the past are bonkers hard.
• Running servers and Fred Brooks on transforming programs to products.  Linked cause The Mythical Man-Month was right.
• AI Dungeon: Dragon mode.  (via)

I was a bit low on links last week; I made up for it this week.

• Mega Tiny Time Watch.  (via)
• Commander 16.  (via)
• Turning a £400 BBC Micro (1981) into a $40,000 disc writer (1987).  (via)
• study tip: quiz yourself in vim.
• Netpbm Animation Showcase.  You’ve probably used netpbm without knowing it.
• Don’t use food delivery apps; call restaurants direct.
• The Frink Is Good, the Unit Is Evil.
• Stephen Strowes Uses This.  “Network Measurement Researcher”.
• A Near-Ultrasound (NUS) Data Link.
• Should the Monster Play Fair?: Reception of Artificial Intelligence in Alien: Isolation.  (via)
• jklp: a 36-key ergonomic keyboard.  (via)
• Grinding Coffee with a TinyFPGA Board.  Last sentence is the most important.  (via)
• Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub.
• Perpetual motion machine compilation.  (via)
• The Open Book; build your own e-reader.  (via)

I need to always preview these posts, cause cutting and pasting text sometimes brings along formatting elements not visible in the editor, but play heck with the actual layout.

• D&D Map Sketcher.  (via)
• Web desktops.  (via multiple places)
• Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective.  (via)
• What Ever Happened To Hearing Aid Beige?
• 120,000pt Helvetica.  (via)
• Sloanstarter.
• Related: Robin Sloan’s delicious and expensive olive oil.
• Long Egg Production.  It’s in German, so I can’t tell what this is.
• Historic Tale Construction Kit.  (Thanks, Ben Collver)

Some retrocomputing as a mini-theme this week.

• Download files listed in a http index with wget.  Eventually you will need this.
• A Conversation With the Mysterious Dubstep Sensation Hannibal Rex.
• Stretching the c64 Palette.  (via)
• Announcing Perl 7.  (via)
• Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor.  (also via)
• Bluetooth (sound) latency is astonishingly bad.  50ms is all it takes.  (via)
• On Contact Tracing and Hardware Tokens.  This would be the right guy to evaluate this.
• modernish, a shell library?  I am not sure what to call it.  (via)
• General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS.
• NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software.  (via)
• Real VT102 emulation with MAME.  (via)
• Commodore SX-64 keyboard restoration.  (via)
• Linux Kernel Is Still Seeing Driver Work for the Macintosh II.  Of course this isn’t surprising to a BSD person.  (via)
• A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2.  (via)
• No lack of documentation.  Linked for the image, and for the note that Twitter threads are bad for information storage.  Don’t do it.

Your unrelated music of the week: Skratch Bastid.  (via)

Minor computer history theme this week.

• Odeon theaters in LEGO.
• The guy who created the View-Master also was the first to figure out plastic trash cans.
• Home Computer Cultures and Society Before the Internet Age.  (via)
• roguelike celebration 2020 is happening virtually.
• The Gigatron, a no-microprocessor retrocomputer.  Available as a solder-yourself kit.
• The Smithsonian’s Computer Oral History Collection.  Grace Hopper, others, recorded.  (via)
• The ACM has free access to its books for the next few days; go now, before it ends.  See the source post for this for some ideas on what to read.
• A special item in that list, the Antikythera Mechanism.  I had never seen recreations of the device before.  (via)
• The Return of the 90s Web.
• Comments on that last link.
• 5 days with the MX Ergo.  I link these things just for the X notes.
• Speaking of which, Input events on X have an old world and a new world.
• The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk.  The one thing from Xerox PARC that didn’t take over the world.  (via)
• Recent Database Tech.  (via)
• The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM.

It’s teeny models week.  I am reaching outside my normal topics this week, too.

• Typology of LEGO Computers.  (via)
• Last Pole, the remnant of an international network.  (via)
• Tactical Computer Terminal.  Probably super-heavy, too.
• Political Compasses in Odd Topologies.  No, they don’t make sense, but I love graphs.  (via)
• Old computers made of paper.  (via)
• DIY Adafruit projects.  (via)
• Power Outage.  The PowerPC transition for Apple.  Topical for the long-rumored ARM move.
• Haiku R1/beta2 has been released.  Related to the processor discussion in that Power Outage article, through BeOS.  (via)
• Interaction Design.
• Reclaiming Keynes.  I am not necessarily Keynesian.  (via)
• Algonuts.  Peanuts via StyleGAN2.  See the about page for a good discussion of what this sort of reproduction means.  (also via)
• Exploded Fatmac.
• Bring That Beat Back, a book review.  (via)
• An Occult Psychogeography of Hawksmoor’s London Churches.  From Hell is one of the best comics ever, and I say that because of the artist.  (via)
• Heck, most everything from Top Shelf is good.
• The Small Web.  (via)

Hardware as the informal theme this week.

• Browse Minimally.  You know what I like most about lynx or links?  Lack of side effects.
• Ditch the Thinkpad, Save the Keyboard.
• Pulse Motor Runs on Wacky Power Sources.  Potato.
• PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000.  As the page says, “ultra-rare”.  (Thanks, Erik Blomberg)
• Naming the Net: The Domain Name System, 1983-1990.  (via)
• Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America.  Free ebook for the next month; lots of history in there.  (via)
• The tz database vs astrological records.  Not really “versus”, but strange to think how exacting this nonscience can be.
• The Shareware Scene, Part 4: DOOM.  I remember this.  Seismic!
• The surprising persistence of RSA keys in SSH.
• Structuring and Formatting Your Plain Text Files (Without a Markup Language)
• How to use tmux to create a multi-pane Linux terminal window.  Does not have to be Linux, of course.
• The Lovecraftian Bundle.

This week’s Lazy Reading supported, kindly, by Tse Gratis volunteering a bunch of links.

• OpenVMS: Rollout of V9.0 and Beyond.  Still going?  (via)
• Compiling for the Z-machine version 3.
• <blink>
• What sort of SSH keys our users use or have listed in their authorized keys files.  An anthropological survey, in a way.
• Big Box Collection.  Software boxes.  (via)
• Buy Your Own Nuclear Reactor Control System.  (via)
• Obscure PDFs.  Surely there are gems in here.  (via)
• Like for instance “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
  The Unix Legacy“.  By Rob Pike in 2001.
• Roam Research.
• Desk setup from the guy who created i3.  (via)
• How I would put voice control in everything.  Sensible!  (via)
• History of UNIX Manpages.  (via)
• The Tse Gratis section:
  • 100 Lines of C, in a Closet.
  • Minimalist HTML.
  • Open source tools for sailing off-grid.
  • The world in which IPv6 was a good design.
  • aArray.

 

No theme, cause I’m nicely spread out this week over topics.

• Historical rediscovery: Zarf’s Old Time Religion search.
• The Shareware Scene series: Part 1: The Pioneers, Part 2: The Question of Games, and Part 3: The id Boys.
• Recruiter Spam.  I am quite familiar with this.  (via)
• The Adventurer-Dense to Adventurer-Sparse Spectrum: Vance to Tolkien.  I have several Vance books out from the library I want to get through.
• Zork 1977 Source Code Released.  Linking late to this cause I wanted a good analysis, not just a link like most people had.
• Atom Adventures (1981).  Linking cause the screenshots and map make me nostalgic, even though I never had that game or even architecture.
• Feynman videos.
• Ways of Seeing, which I am surprised I have not linked before.
• Bible + D&D.
• Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY.  (via multiple)
• A minimal .vimrc.
• The FLOPKEY, possibly the slowest keyboard ever.  (via)
• My New Old Apple IIe Computer.  Oh, what a lucky guy.  (via)
• ReActiveMicro.  Found via previous story.
• Regular Expressions for Regular Folk.  (via)
• jrnl – the command line journal.  (via)
• “gundial“.

Apple ][ theme this week, barely.

• Shell productivity tips and tricks.  (via)
• Drawn.ca, back again.
• The Shingled magnetic recording NAS debacle.  SMR sounds bad.
• Read man pages with vim.
• ARM-ed Mac: We Have An Answer.
• What’s your favorite terminal command ?
• More about Sir Thomas Urquhart.
• SSH hacks | a little sanity for remote workers.  (via)
• Apple //c Scene From ’80s Bond Film “A View to a Kill” Perfectly Re-Created With Applesoft BASIC.
• War Stories: How Prince of Persia slew the Apple II’s memory limitations.  There’s more in that series.  (via)
• And here’s Prince of Persia for you to play.  (via)
• Ten Years of Open Source Hardware.  (via)
• When Parallel: Pull, Don’t Push.
• Pandoc links.
• Understanding the Internet vs. Telephony.  Intertwined but very different.
• A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained.

A little short, I’m a little tired.

• Historical computer humor.
• 28mag, about Warhammer miniatures.  (via)
• Structuring and Formatting Your Plain Text Files (Without a Markup Language).
• Setting up your own tilde club (unix).
• All of the Online Family Games. (via)
• I don’t quite understand this attack and Is this attack a case of “why not?”
• edwood, a “Go version of Plan9 Acme Editor”.  Entertained by the name.  (via)
• Two months with Powershell on a UNIX.  (via)
• 98.css: A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs.  (via)
• The Era of Fragmentation, Part 2: Sowing the Wasteland.  Videotex!

My sadly neglected RSS reader is overflowing.

• Chesses 2.  I posted about Chesses 1 some time ago; this is more.  (via)
• Paper Models of Polyhedra.  (via)
• Open Source Fonts Are Love Letters to the Design Community.
• The Original Internet Bottleneck.
• Gopherus – a DOS (and multi-platform, console-mode) gopher client.  Getting pretty obscure here.  (via)
• Curses City, a simple ASCII Sim City style game using ncurses.  (via)
• Internet Histories, Volume 4, Issue 1.  Parts available online.  (via)
• Tempestas II, A Clock style Barometer.  No display – physical sliding parts.
• pheriday 3: infrastructure.  Installing Netscape 6, with screenshots, on current hardware for fun.
• The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer.  (via)
• Roam, real hypertext.
• This Super-Clean Smart Screen Puts a Newspaper on Your Wall.  Neat looking but of course expensive.  (via)
• Wolfram Style Cellular Automata with Vim Macros.  See comments at source link.
• A Definitive Guide to Enabling Italics in Vim and tmux.  (via)
• UI design is fun!  (via)
• The Implied Appendix N.

 

No theme this week.

• New “Prohibition Orcs” today.
• Aggregate internet links with mlvpn.
• A USB Loader for the Cidco MailStation.  “worst use of Thunderbolt”.
• riftty.  Think about the name, and you can guess what it is.  (via)
• My home DSL link really is fast enough to make remote X acceptable.  This is the future we really sorta wanted.
• Preparing Presentations with Markdown.  (via)
• Repairing a vintage 40-kilovolt xenon lamp igniter.  Not as dangerous as it sounds.
• ESP8266 Network Display.  “For whatever”.
• The Hunt of the Unicorn, rediscovered.
• gifcap – screen recordings via browser.  (via)
• “Dusted off my GPD Pocket PC…”  (via)
• Vim rendered on a cube for no reason.  (via)
• “Please resend the virus“.
• Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup.  A Google Doc, which is a new-ish trend in “public rich media”, for lack of a better phrase.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the day: Horse.

Random this week, but that’s not so different than usual.

• • Bach’s prelude in C major written in sed.  (via)
  • Kill the Newsletter!, newsletter to RSS converter.  (via)
  • 100+ legal, free literature download sites.
  • Katherine Cox-Buday Uses This.  Someone who thinks hard about their setup.
  • ARM-ed Mac: Not Again Or For Real This Time?  Written by someone who would know.
  • The Computer-free Automation of a Jukebox.  (via)
  • How to version control LibreOffice spreadsheets.
  • Text Processing in the Shell.  (via)
  • reMarkable 2.  Sorta feeds my small computer obsession.
  • Two types of command-line interfaces.  (via)
  • Understanding X mouse cursors (and their several layers of history).
  • 4 More Fonts to Help You Go Beyond Courier.
  • Vim plugins that I use.
  • The 68000 Wars, Part 6: The Unraveling.
  • Sci-fi type based on spaceship form.  (via)
  • Zork II (1981).
  • Goblin Filthomancer.
  • Old computer ads.
  • The Delco Magic line of aerospace computers.
  • How to use Gmail more efficiently.  (via)
  • This is how science happens.