Category: Lazy Reading

Last of the year!

• The Internet of Unprofitable Things. Making mistakes permanent in hardware. (via)
• Why Mastodon is defying the “critical mass”.
• How People Used to Download Games From the Radio. (via)
• Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora. Don’t support dead ends.
• On the attempts to resurrect Space Cadet Pinball.
• xclave: Hardware Testing in Mass Production, Made Easier.
• A Short History of Computer-Generated Visual Effects.
• Some new-to-me features in POSIX (or Single Unix Specification) Bourne shells.
• Cygwin and the Windows Subsystem for Linux, when to use one and not the other. (via)
• xterm full reverse.
• RSync the old is still new…
• A Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64. Fun to watch, oddly. (via)
• Git Your SQL Together (with a Query Library). The “SQL Truths” section is correct. (via)
• How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar. Goes with the “no standard for tar” link last week. This bug could be in other tar versions… or none at all.
• EmuTOS, a free operating system for Atari computers. (via) 
• Creating a (Non-Trivial) Lisp Game in 2018. Not the first language for game development. (via)
• Deorbital’s best games of 2018 named by Dante Douglas, Wasim Salman, David Shimomura, Amr Al-Aaser, Yussef Cole, and Shonté Daniels.
• The Very Slow Movie Player. (via)

I’m not planning a holiday gift guide this year, though they are fun to do.  You can always check previous ones; I try to link to stores rather than individual items.

• Six Ways to Level Up Your nmap Game.  (via)
• Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune.  The first real RTS.
• Choosing error codes based on a really nice #definedoesn’t necessarily lead to a readable message to the user.
• Xformer 10: The Atari 800 emulator has gotten a huge update.  That’s a big monitor.  A really really big monitor.
• HTTPS in the real world.  (via via)
• Wget is not welcome here any more (sort of).  I was bit recently by wget in a different way; currently using httrack for the same task based on advice from EFNet #dragonflybsd.
• Fun tip #2: Display trailing spaces using ed and Fun tip #3: Split a line using ed.
• Classic computer images for sale though it looks like only a C64 and Spectrum image are available.
• Kubernetes being hijacked worldwide.
• You Can’t Opt Out of the Patent System. That’s Why Patent Pandas Was Created!
• Announcing Yggdrasil Network v0.3.  I am not sure of the use, but I am interested by the implementation.  (via)

Involuntary vi theme this week.  Or ssh!  I have lots of links.

• Old mp3 players skins, a baroque mess.  (via)
• Buying a Commodore Amiga 30 years later.  (via)
• Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980.  It continues.  (via)
• What makes BeOS and Haiku unique.  Linking for nostalgia.  (via)
  
• Why, oh WHY, do those #? nutheads use vi?  (via)
• vi, my favorite config-less editor.  I had to switch to vi away from vim just to get it to stop paying attention to where I clicked in a terminal window and changing the insertion point.  (via)
• Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data.  (via)
• Open Source is Not About You.  (via)
• 2018 IFComp Winners.  (via) 
• UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8.  Maddening.  (via)
• Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune.
• Experiences with the Cray X/MP (2000).  (via)
• Retirement video for the Philco 212 Mainframe Computer.  (via)
• And now for some keyboards that are completely different.
• redo, buildroot, and serializing parallel logs.
• The New Illustrated TLS Connection.  (via)
• The needs of Version Control Systems conflict with capturing all metadata.
• How not to reconfigure your sshd.
• Safely allow commands through ssh.
• OpenSSH 7.9’s new key revocation support is welcome but can’t be a full fix.
• Up-to-date O’Reilly covers.
• Running a Gopher Server in 2018.  (via) 

Another cover-all-categories week.

• The Valley Girl of Oz, Bjork Bjork Bjork.
• Character by character TTY input in Unix, then and now.
• howto: create your own time zone.  (via)
• Guide to computing.  (via)
• Restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer, part 1, 2, 3, and 4.  There’s more than what I have linked.  (via)
• A book list for OS kernel developers and device driver writers (2006).  (via)
• git-secrets: Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories.  (via)
• SpamAssassin is back.  (via)
• FreePizza.io – free pizza for usergroups, meetups, hackathons, talks.  (via)
• Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust.  (via)
• “As far as I’m concerned, email signing/encryption is dead.”  It’s all web pages now for encrypted traffic.  (via)
• What MUDs Are You Playing?
• Raw Tty Input: Then And Now.  (via)
• Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow.  A GNU version of null mounts, sorta?  (via)
• How Many Computers Are In Your Computer?   (via)
• Vim in the Future.  (via)
• Related: Why Kakoune.
• Colin Raff animations.  (via)
• Modern day vacuum tube use.  More than just expensive amplifiers.
• mtime comparison considered harmful.  (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: A Guide to Breakbeats on Bandcamp.

The movies link should keep you busy.

• 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.  It’s divided into sections, each one alphabetical, so if the first group doesn’t interest you, there’s more.  Be ready to scroll to find a section that’s all martial arts, or an interview of Benoit Mandelbrot, or the classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot.  (via)
• Learning When Values are Changed by Implicit Integer Casts.
• Metadata that you can’t commit into a VCS is a mistake (for file based websites).
• What Does It Take to Keep a Classic Mainframe Alive?  (via)
• Another look into The Psychotherapy of Racter.  Linked because Racter is a sort of anti-Eliza.
• Ten Great Adventure-Game Puzzles.
• “I do not understand your concern…“
• Goodness, Enumerated by Robots. Or, Handling Those Who Do Not Play Well With Greylisting.  From a BSD person but not BSD specific.
• David A. Wheeler’s 6502 Language Implementation Approaches.  i.e languages on an Apple ][ mostly.  There’s some really interesting links down at the end of that article.  (via)
• For example, Applesauce.
• Oddball epoch dates and also microfortnights.
• DKIM provides sender attribution (for both spam and not necessarily spam).
• Revisiting the Unix philosophy in 2018.  Maybe clickbaity a bit.  (via)
• I AM A COMPUTER.  (via)

Oddball and quirky links, the best part of Lazy Reading.

• Exploring the Future Beyond Cyberpunk’s Neon and Noir.  (via)
• WebPerl.  (via)
• 808, the trailer.  (via)
• The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.  (also via)
• Letter of Recommendation: Detroit Techno.  (also via)
• “1970 January -1 and December 35“.
• “The El Paso time zone rebellion“.
• The Periodic Table of Data Structures, PDF.  (via)
• The original Unix ed(1) didn’t load files being edited into memory.
• Using nmap on your home network.
• The ‘Tapper’ videogame patent.
• “Unexpected objects to find Unix“.
• PRACTICAL COMPILER CONSTRUCTION.  (indirectly via)
• The BNC Connector and How It Got That Way.  (via)
• The Single Board Computer Database.  (via)
• Cambridge UNIX historians (Cambridge, United Kingdom)  Go, if you are near.  (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Justin Broadrick interview.

I still have a backlog.  Geez.  I’m starting to worry I’m posting too much for anyone to read through.

• After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside.  Important to read to see the mind-boggling scale of money flowing into Linux; it’s a corporate UNIX at this point, with priorities determined by a number of major companies.  One year of Linus Torvalds’ pay is, I dare say, more than any other entire open source operating system project on the planet has received.
• Related: Something is rotten in the Linux Foundation.  The Linux Foundation gives employees non-disparagement clauses?   (via)
• Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector.  (via)
• “the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created“
• More terminal font discussion.
• Teacup holster.
• Le Chatelier’s principle.
• Today in History, Brought to You by Unix.  Always present on BSD, at least.  (via)
• Leaving Apple and Google: /e/ first beta.  (via)
• XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress.
• Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell.  I link mostly because it’s neat to see new shells still getting created.  (via)
• Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply.  Thyratrons!
• Disk compression history.  Read so you recognize the algorithms used.
• Pixeldungeon.  A roguelike that runs most anywhere; might run on BSD?
• “There are two immutable truths about all wireless networks:“
• Enclose them all in super clear epoxy!  That… is a computer that won’t suffer moisture issues.

Your unrelated dragonfly image this week: Common darter.

I did finally clean out my “to post” email folder, at least.

• History of Gopher. (via)
• Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983.  (via)
• textbeat, write music in Vim or other text source.  (via)
• 2048 in the terminal.  (via)
• Can you use the terminal for everything?  A video, and relevant to the previous two links.  (via)
• The 30 Best Web Games.  I link it to show a sort of technology snapshot from 10-15 years ago.  (via)
• Good books for deep hacks.  Very In-depth reading.
• The origins of clip art.
• MIT-licensed vector clip art, related.  (via)
• The Ethical OS Playbook.  It’s “only” a PDF of questions, but definitely good questions to ask.  (via)
• Best RSS feed reader apps.  Well, services, but not everyone can run Tiny Tiny RSS.  Anyway, you should be taking full advantage of RSS.  (via)
• You can now pre-order the Edible Games Cookbook even if you weren’t in the Kickstarter.
• Stripping tabs in ‘here’ documents.  I wish I had known this years ago.
• The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software.
• Markov chains, explained visually.  (via)
• Hidden gems of xterm.  (via)

Your unrelated item of the week: Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza.  (via)

Done well ahead of time, knowing I’d be on the road this past week.

• A little bump in the wire that makes your Internet faster.
• A timesyncd total failure and systemd’s complete lack of debugability and Systemd’s DynamicUser feature is (currently) dangerous.  Yeesh.
• Pure Bash Bible: A collection of pure bash alternatives to external binaries.  (via)
• unabridged history of unix / linux?  Lots of reading suggestions.
• One simple general pattern for making sure things are alive.
• As Michael W. Lucas points out in his site redesign, Let’s Encrypt is great.
• Dislikes the Sea, but Will Venture Upon It If Necessary.  An adult looking back on his D&D papers from childhood.  (via)
• Polyhedra Viewer.  Sorta related, in a dice sort of way.  (also via)
• 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one).  (via)
• Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?  New James Mickens!  (via many places)