Lazy Reading – Page 19 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2018/03/182018/03/17

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/18

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In the U.S., we drink green beer and wear kilts, cause nobody’s terribly sure what Irish means within an American context anymore.

Can you identify this VMS roguelike? (thanks, Erik Blomberg)
An amusing story about a practical use of the null garbage collector.
A potential way to have spaces in filenames and not break the Unix command line.
QueryParser. Well, at least Uber has a positive side effect. (via)
Sortix. (via)
Light Phone 2. Linked to mostly because of the e-ink screen. (via)
futures of distributions, “programmer-archaeologists”. (via)
Tidelift. Related to the previous link: a sort of umbrella organization to create financial incentives for open source maintenance. (via)
Looking back on the Jupiter Ace (Forth Minicomputer). (via)
Unix folklore: using multiple sync commands. (via)
Actually using ed. (via)
Pulled from the last item’s source link: people who use acme seem to be devoted to it – even more than vi/emacs users.
But there’s always ed. (also via)
While on the editor kick: Spacemacs, an enhanced Emacs.

Your unrelated mollusk-related death metal of the week: Slugdge.

2018/03/112018/03/07

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/11

Old games – but not too old, for this week’s theme.

Those pesky Makefiles.
Star Control lead devs fire back at Stardock lawsuit. I link to this just to point to the excellent open source game Ur-Quan Masters, which is available on every BSD.
Liberating a X200. (via)
The Worlds of Ultima.
Anime Floppy Discs. (via)
Fashion shows are better at the future than movies, according to this jwz post – and I agree.
The Basic Toolbox. A good checklist.
SPHINX, 1987.
Adding Colors to man. (via)
Freedombox. Not necessarily endorsing this setup, but running your own server is an excellent, excellent idea.
Shaolin Chamber 36. Soundtrack music. (via)
Related: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, one of the best kung fu movies.
Shell readability: main and Shell readability: function parameters.
The world of Linux Handhelds in 2018. That and the source link comments take you to some tiny hardware, which is my reason for reading.
Wing Commander II.
What free software is so good you can’t believe it’s available for free? A good chunk of what’s named here is immediately available to you via ports/dports/pkgsrc, without advertising or nagging, or the need to register in some megacorporation’s app store. Think about how nice that is, for a minute.. (via multiple places)
How to tell when a company thinks they dominate part of a market: they drop interoperability with other protocols.

2018/03/042018/03/03

Lazy Reading for 2018/03/04

Overflow that started 2 weeks ago. Maybe I should go intraweekly for Lazy Reading?

The Multics history of Unix. I link it for the Dennis Richie anecdote. (via)
Unix: Building a Development Environment from Scratch. (PDF, via)
A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification. Outlook.com is huge and poorly configured – it’s the AOL email of the 2010s!
Whatever Happened to the Desktop Computer? (via)
bhgv/Inferno-OS_Android – an Android port of Inferno OS. Phones seem a natural location for this. (via)
What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications. Uses Debian, but applies to any packaging system. I like the “strong guarantee” language. (via)
Analysis of SSHFS performance for large builds.
Keyboard notebook – sized to fit under your keyboard, a good/simple idea. Kikkerland is like the U.S. version of Atypk.
The Remarkable Number 1/89. (via)
VF-1, a commandline Gopher client. (also via)
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. A Rolling Stone article from 1972 that ends with code. (via)

2018/02/252018/02/23

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/25

10 months until Christmas!

Five ways to instantly improve blah blah your productivity blah. Useful techniques, described with humor. I need to use the “Analogue Day” one.
Be Newsletters, the archived index.
What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death. It used to be Moore’s Law that drove replacement, not the choices of the manufacturer.
Vim Anywhere. (via)
We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms.
Ex Libris, about the New York Public Library. (via)
Fall of Voodoo. So that’s what happened to 3dfx.
Custom game system hardware.
An Introduction to Digital Computers, a film. Digital as in “not analog”, 1969. (via)
https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/ – I am entertained by the URL, and I understand why this applies to most package managers… but it doesn’t take into account the metadata leakage that https would prevent. (via)
Aaaand here’s the counterpoint, which I agree with: Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories. (via)
Futures of distributions. (also via)
Predictive command line usage, a PDF. That seems odd. (via)

2018/02/182018/02/17

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/18

The links this week aren’t necessarily long, but they are definitely “make-you-think” material.

The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing. Paul Ford. The story abounds with good quotes, and good summaries of the strangeness that was LISP, or Plan 9, or etc. (via)
That led me to the Squeak website, cause I always had a vague desire to learn Smalltalk, someday.
Best Practices for Cache Management.
Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch.
WinAmp, recreated in Javascript. Feature-filled. (via)
Paradise OS. (also via)
Linux’izing your Windows PC into a dev machine. I don’t like this trend of running Windows and pretending it’s not. (via)
Tough love, or stultifying ossification? I don’t know.
The Bandcamp 2017 Year in Review. Bandcamp is a good idea even if all it does is avoid streaming audio monoculture.
Spectre Mitigations in Microsoft’s C/C++ Compiler. I link to this to show that the mitigation methods users rely on are secret, cause it’s not open source. So this researcher has to rely on evaluating the output rather than the code itself.
Edible Games. Exactly what the name implies. (via)
Can’t get UNIX v7/x86 to work in virtual machine.
How to redesign a tech logo. Monoculture, like I said.

2018/02/112018/02/09

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/11

Some really fun things this week.

A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files. A fun, crazy read. (via)
Miniature Macintosh Plus. Also crazy. (via)
Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, going on now.
Centralise Your Bash History. (via)
Computer Role-Playing Games Book released. (via multiple)
The Case for Automatic Updates. (via)
X’s network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure . (via)
How Facebook Is Killing Comedy. And why I keep this all on my own blog. (via)
OpenSC2K – An Open Source Remake of SimCity 2000. (via)
From the same source, openra.net, a Red Alert remake.
Backblaze 2017 Q4 and 2017 yearly report. (via)
spectre and the end of langsec. (via)
Plan 9 Public Grid. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the day: Verse.

2018/02/042018/02/02

Lazy Reading for 2018/02/04

I finally worked through my Lazy Reading link backlog.

Computer-generated books, a list.
Every Icon, eventually drawing every 32×32 monochrome image possible. I remember a 8×8 physical hardware version of this called All Possible Images, some years ago. Google doesn’t remember it, though, or chooses to give me links to API docs instead.
Frankenbook, Shelley’s Frankenstein with additional essays and annotations worked directly into the original text. This is something web pages were built for. (via)
MacTote, for lugging your FatMac around. (via)
Grandma’s Zelda map. (also via)
Actual screenshot.
Towards LaTeX in the Browser. (via)
Unix influence in history. (via)
The UNIX Operating System: A Model for Software Design. Via this page. The target is behind a paywall. The mention of Kernighan as an author, though, made me wonder if he had published it separately. He hasn’t, but I did find his books page at Princeton.
My Delorean runs Perl. (via)
The revival of blogging. English translated version.
The vi input model. (via)
Mycroft II, an open source voice assistant. Are there more like this?
How’s your soldering technique?
Welcome to Armageddon! An excellent roguelike history from an excellent magazine.
Why create a new Unix shell? (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: see the last paragraph of this Don Hertzfeldt interview; it’s important. “Every time you pay to watch something you’re casting a vote. You’re saying, ‘Hey go make more of this, please.’ Audiences have all of the power to shape what gets made and what doesn’t.”

2018/01/282018/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2018/01/28

I’m already filling in next week’s Lazy Reading links, there’s so much.

An Open Letter to the Perl Community. Getting from Perl 5 to Perl 6. (via)
chart.business. (via)
Teaching an Almost 40-year Old UNIX about Backspace. (via)
khal, a terminal calendar. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
10 PRINT, a book about a single-line Commodore 64 program. (via swildner)
Wireguard, a possible IPSec/OpenVPN replacement. (via)
ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation. “decentralized social network protocol”, and a first step out of the walled garden. A very pleasant-to-read specification, too! (via)
My favorite games of 2017. This will eat some hours of your time.
This week in references: echoes, breakbeats, the new sound of music. The “Breakbeat Deconstruction” video is pleasant auditory history.
Drummer From Another Mother, a Moog Music product. Listen, it’s the sound of analog! (via)
USB Killer, now with pyrotechnic payload.
The Screenless Office. (via)
System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware. (via)
Meanwhile is now available on Steam! Plus extra DLC comic! Meanwhile is a physical comic built as a maze, or perhaps nonlinear book, and here it is in software.

2018/01/212018/01/19

Lazy Reading for 2018/01/21

Almost all of this was done within 24 hours of the last Lazy Reading. No idea why there were so many good candidates for reading, but I’m happy about it.