Category: Lazy Reading

Nicely esoteric this week.

• “It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering”*…
• DFaaS (Dumpster Fire as a Service).
• Server names: One of the remaining places where IT managers can be a little silly.
• Platform Studies at 10.
• Books that explain (parts of) how the world really works.
• Tips for using tmux more effectively.
• How did you get it to run on a gameboy?  More oddities at the source link.
• Where Vim Came From.  (via)
• Related, same source: An incomplete history of the QED Text Editor.

This is a straight dump of open browser tabs.  You can tell what motivated me to set up the Mastodon account for the Digest this week, from some of the content.

• Save RSS and Atom!  The source link has mention of a number of resources.
• The history of design systems at Clearleft.
• Inside Out.  View Source as an important tool.
• The web’s transition from nomadism to feudalism.
• Facebook killed the feed.
• 10 Common Git Problems and How to Fix Them.  (via)
• State Sponsored Trolling.   (via)
• The Cyberdeck: a homebrew, 3D printed cyberspace deck.  (via)
• Two-factor auth and SMS hijacking.
• Amazon sells Bitcoins now!  There’s two levels of joke in that link.
• News for the tz database.  (via)
• DJ rig with two Amiga 1200 PCs.  (via)
• What OpenStreetMap can be.  (via)
• Commodore 64 SID replacement using a Teensy 3.6.  (via)
• A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future.  I consciously avoid Sourceforge material now, it’s so toxic.  (via)
• Freeciv 2.6.0 released.  And playable on the web.  (via)
• Friday Furnace.
• A Mansion Filled With Hidden Worlds: When the Internet Was Young.
• LambdaMoo.  (via)
• Life in System Administration.
• Taskbook: Like Trello but for the Terminal.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: LOCAL58 – Show for Children.

Short, perhaps, but blame my traveling.

• “Why use OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps?”  Better reasons than I expected.  (via)
• Frank’s Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses.  (via)
• Kermit Project.  Found via previous link.
• A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling.  Trolling is not the right word.  (via)
• Tariffs in a Nutshell.  Linking because the author knows what he is talking about.
• WebAmp: WinAmp 2 in Your Browser.  (via)

I’m going wide-topic this week.

• The Toy That Talked Back.  The Speak and Spell.
• About Star Wars in ASCII, which I’ve linked directly to before.
• Edible Games Cookbook: Play With Your Food.  A Kickstarter.
• Command-line file-based dedup.  (via)
• Genealogy of Elizas.  Actual site here.  (via)
• Stamping copyright information onto academic papers.  The pdftk usage is what I find interesting here.  There’s a LOT of tools out there for automatic PDF manipulation.
• Command line audio players.
• Bread is lighter than whipped cream.
• Break down of a C64 demo effect.  (via)
• One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla.  I’ve seen people keeping vanilla beans in safes.  (via)
• A WinRAR joke.
• Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents.  The very first sentence is fun.

Another wide range; hope you have reading time.

• Proposal for turning off standard I/O buffering.
• Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip: digital logic implemented with I2L.
• Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster.  (via)
• From previous link comments: Scalability! But at what COST?
• Also: Taco Bell Programming, though that term is not as negative as my mental associations with it would seem.
• More Instantly Better Vim (2013).  Video.  It’s Damian Conway, so it’s a little bit turned to 11.  (via)
• Free Software Needs Free Tools.  Video based on this 2010 paper.  (via)
• You need deli cups.  I do this.  All lids match; it’s great.  (via)
• Inside printf.  (via)
• Playing Battleships Over BGP.  (via)

Your vector graphics video of the week: TANK.  (via multiple places)

A little more on building and less on rights this week.

• Making a Laptop From Scratch.  Note the protocol used to fetch the document.  (via)
• 25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest.  (via)
• Mutt and HTML Email.  (via)
• Software Engineering Takeaways.
• The Game of Everything, Part 10: Civilization and the Limits of Progress.
• Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System.  (via)
• Limbo X86 PC Emulator for Android.  I want to try multimaster Hammer2 on multiple phones in emulation.  No, it’s not a good idea, but it would be a fun idea.  (via)
• The fanciest convention badge I’ve ever seen.

I’ve got some real esoteric sources this week.

• The Ultimate Postgres vs MySQL Blog Post.  (via)
• 25th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2018)  (via)
• F-Droid app recommendation thread?  I have a bunch of old phones to repurpose, if you can’t tell.
• Just time zones.
• ZSH, tmux, Emacs and SSH: A copy-paste story.  (via)
• The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons.  (via)
• Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay.  (via)
• How we make gods.  (also via)
• The Game of Everything, Part 8 and Part 9.
• Telephone World.  (via)
• The Bread Code.  Okay, maybe Github isn’t the right place for everything.  (via)
• Origins of the finger command (1990).  (via)
• The Ocelot arcade system.  Vector graphics!  (via)

Your rights-oriented hardware project of the week: NeTV2, a Bunnie Huang project.  A neat device worth funding on its own, and worth having to show what capabilities are being denied us by law.

A theme of rebellion this week.

• The NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6.1.  They’re going to start using ANSI C.  (via)
• Real accounts on Instagram are still run by bots.  Guess what the next spam/SEO target is.
• “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – noting that quote found in this newsletter, as a reason to have your own operating system tools.
• A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture, an IEEE event for those worried about the end of Moore’s Law.   (via)
• I love the idea of reprogramming semi-disposable hardware into something better.
• Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web.  Video.  Don’t give your data to other platforms; you will never get it back.
• You Know How GET Requests are Meant to be Idempotent?   (via)
• LISA18 CFP now open.
• Using only open-source software on Android.  (via)
• Making a Window Manager (part 1).  Not what you think it is.  (via)

No accidental theme this week.

• Mermaid: Markdown-like generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text. (via)
• Quarterstaff: The Infamous Puzzle and Quarterstaff: “Deathbots” vs. “Ordinary living things”.
• Early days: the VIC-20 Programmer’s Reference Guide.  (via)
• Encrypted Gopher.  (via)
• SSH Client Configuration Tricks.  (via)
• Computer historian job opening at the National Museum of American History.  (via)
• The Game of Everything, Part 7: Civilization and Government I (Despotism, Monarchy, and the Republic).
• Flickr Commons, hopefully surviving the smugmug acquisition.  (via)
• Xenographics: Weird but (sometimes) useful charts.  (via)

Accidental theme this week… video games, though not strongly.

• Eaten by a Grue, the Infocom podcast.  There’s a lot to listen to here.  (thanks, swildner)
• Urbigenous Library.  There’s a lot to read here.
• Modern-Day BBSing on an Epson CP/M-based Laptop from 1984.  (via)
• Jengo, a new point-and-click game.
• Dwarf Fortress dwarves to be given memories, dev shows no remorse.
• Home automation notes, not really BSD-related.
• The Game of Everything, Part 6: Civilization and Religion.
• “Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?”  On Linux, where reinventing wheels in the system is a constant.  (via)
• Pinebook: An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook.  Linked for the source link commentary, not for the selling page.
• Weekly Command: going over Git history with tig.  (via)
• Zulip, an open source team chat.  (i.e. Slack and Teams category)  (via)
• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Data Visualization.  (via)

No theme grew this week.

• Conserve the Sound, “vanishing and endangered sounds”.  (via)
• Why does Twitter allow third-party clients?  Another walled garden approach winding to its end stage.
• z, a tool for navigating by regex.  Odd, but powerful.  (via)
• Ikea-style instructions for programming algorithms.  Not sure if this makes them clearer, or not.  (via)
• Seashells, piping CLI output to the web in realtime.  (via)
• Why does”=” mean assignment?  (via)
• The Game of Everything, Part 5: Civilization and War.
• Why SQLite Does Not Use Git.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 5.39 is out.  New hacks!
• The NES homebrew scene.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Belfry WebComics Index.  Very 90s.  (via I lost it, sorry)