Category: Lazy Reading

A little short this week to balance last week’s mega-Lazy.

• The Problem with SSH Agent Forwarding.  (via)
• rePalm, PalmOS reimplemented.  (via)
• vim.wasm.  (via)
• WatchMe, for monitoring sections of web pages.  (via)
• You might as well get an x86 CPU now, despite Meltdown and its friends.
• Text News, Gopher only, text only news.
• V7 Unix programs are often not written the way you would expect.
• Core Memory Shield for Arduino.  Awesome and sorta useless.  (via)
• AT&T UNIX in 1985.  (via)
• What X reads on startup, a long list.

I hope you have some time on your hands today.  There are hours of reading and watching linked below.

• Before Adventure, Part 3: Caves (1973), Before Adventure, Part 4: Hunt the Wumpus (1973), and Before Adventure, Part 5: Wumpus 2 and 3.
• The ultimate guide to analog control panels in sci-fi movies.  (via)
• Buster Keaton: Anarchitect.  Linked because the use of animated gifs to illustrate a silent movie career works astonishingly well.  (via multiple places)
• How to Read More.
• The Trove, possibly every RPG print volume ever?  (via)
• Mattel’s Dungeons and Dragons Computer Labyrinth.  (via)
• The Wu Tang Collection, all crazy older kung fu movies.  (also via)
• Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC).  (thanks, Ben Collver)
• Screen Share Disasters.  I tell people, always close other apps when presenting.  (via)
• Some followups to the GPS rollover that happened last week.  (via)
• Leap-years and leap-seconds.  Not only is time not constant, its rate of change is not constant – or predictable!  (also via)
• Trek Adventure, 1980.
• Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old.  I like the pictures.
• The 1973 Bourne shell in Unix version 5 was only 858 lines of C.  I like the pictures here too.

Your unrelated Kickstarter of the week: Lancer, an RPG.

 

Some old-school RPG and miniatures links mixed in this week.

• Modder Superior: The many free descendants of Doom.
• Opinion: We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.  Complicated systems replicate the social structure of the groups that build them.  (via)
• OpenTTD Compiled to WebAssembly.  (via) 
• Ampere EMAG 64bit Arm Workstation.  I don’t know if this is particularly good; I just like the growth in the ecosystem.  (via)
• Tinytetris – 80 x 23 Terminal Tetris.  (via)
• Archives for IT; UK computer history.  (via)
• The National Security Agency technical journal Cryptologs.  (via)
• 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs.  (via)
• Rustic Fantasy – With a Hey Nonny No.  Linked for the further reading suggestions within the text.
• Rolling Up Some Inspiration: An RPG Conversation with Kieron Gillen & Tim Se.
• Edible Games Book: about to print.
• The wait is over.  28 is here.  Minatures modification.  (via)
• Darklands.

Your unrelated music of the week: Principleasure: I.  Eighties sound, but modernized.

This is a compact list, but there’s plenty to see.

• NSA-B-GONE, a hardware kill switch for audio and video.
• UUCP Manifesto.  (via)
• PoC||GTFO Volume 0x19, PDF.  I read it for the pictures.  (via)
• Endlessh: an SSH Tarpit.  (via)
• The Squeal of Data.
• A Map of the Internet from May 1973.
• What does the N in nmake stand for?
• code integrity vs data security.
• honk preview.
• Storing UTC is not a silver bullet.  (via)
• <1mW Bluetooth LTE Transmitter.  11 years of broadcasts.  (via)
• Textworld.  (via)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

• Build your own spellbook.
• Dwarf Fortress is coming to Steam … with graphics.  (via)
• Freeciv-Web.  The newest web version of this game.  (via)
• Big Idea Famine.  (via)
• The beginning of Public-key cryptography: 1874.  (via)
• Supply Chain Security Talk.  Open source doesn’t make your hardware known.
• In most cases, the $100 chip will blow to save a 1¢ fuse, but occasionally, the 1¢ fuse will do its job.
• Op amp on the Moon: Reverse-engineering a hybrid op amp module.
• Vim anti-patterns.  (via)
• A View From A Room.
• Why Smalltalk Failed to Dominate the World.  (via)
• Fixing Unix/Linux/Posix Filenames: Control Characters.  (via)

 

Another good mix of deep dives / unique links this week.  Enjoy!

• Gameboy Emulator for Emacs.  (via)
• Systems Software Research is Irrelevant.  2 decades old but relevant.  (via)
• What you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands” only.  (via)
• Running a Modern Gopher Server.  (via)
• Command Line Space Mines Simulator Game ported from BASIC to LDPL.  Linked because of the source images.  (via)
• chunkwm — a tiling window manager for macOS.  (via)
• From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners.  (via)
• Teletype Model 33.
• Writing a Book with Unix.  (via)
• Seven Unix Commands Every Data Scientist Should Know.  (via) 
• Random numbers in the 1950s, from ERNIE, to quantum now.  (via)
• Stoic Electronics.  I love this look, though it has no formal name.  (via)
• Related: America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s.  That stuff was expensive and durable.  (via)
• Also related: I took this picture myself, while cleaning up a shelf of books in a library at work.
• Browsing a remote git repository.
• Explaining Code using ASCII Art.

Final link of the week: The story that was made for me: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL.

There’s some extended reading in these links; I hope you have some time on your hands for a deep dive today.

• Warp: playing offline.  Saving an architecture to play a game.
• SET THE FLUX CAPACITOR FOR 12/30/1899.  (via)
• PC Speaker to Eleven.  (also via)
• Listening to the internet…
• Quotes from 1992.
• Wikimedia is hiring.
• A touchpad is not a mouse, or at least not a good one.
• Related: Making more use of keyboard control over window position and size.
• The IBM PC.  Harvard Business Review on open platforms.
• Lighting up my DasKeyboard with Blood Sugar changes using my body’s REST API.  (via)
• bd, bn, bp, ls, w, e, & me.  Buffers over files in Vim.
• Emacs X Window Manager.  I am losing track of what controls what.  (via)
• Previous: NeXT computer hardware emulator.  (via)
• MIT Hacker Tools.  Generalized how-to-use UNIX tools.  Much better than the usual overview articles you see, probably because it’s an actual course.  (via)
• Computer hardware notes.  A collection of one person’s hardware anecdotes, stretching from Crays, decades ago, to modern events.  (via)
• Betamaxed, about version control systems.  An even-handed appraisal, not just an anecdote.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: DOCTOR WHAT.  (via)

Unofficial theme this week: me commenting on almost every link.

• An odd MIME Content-Disposition or two. I like seeing the analysis of parts of traffic people never usually see.
• My one-liner Linux Dropbox client. Not saying to do this specifically, but the tool integration is nice. (via)
• Pathfinding for Tower Defense. That whole Red Blob site has some interesting learning activities. (via) 
• The oral history of the Hampsterdance. Nostalgia for something that was always transitory. (via)
• Flashing my Lenovo x230 with Coreboot. I understand why people do it, but I’d be so nervous about creating a laptop-shaped brick. (via)
• We are now closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.
• National Inventors Hall of Fame honors creators of Unix, power drills and more. Power drills and UNIX have a history, though I am sure this was an accidental coincidence. (via)
• Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment. (via)
• Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps. Linking for alternatives, not for ethics. (via)
• ActivityPub: The “Worse Is Better” Approach to Federated Social Networking. (via)
• The New Social Media. Also about federation. (via)
• Google and Facebook are about advertising and not about it at the same time. (via)
• How to Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Need.
• DAN64, an AVR based 8-bit microcomputer. Crazy but neat. (via)
• Your USB Serial Adapter Just Became a SDR. Software Defined Radio if you didn’t know. (via)
• HelenOS 0.8. New to me. (via) 
• Building a Spotify player for my Mac SE/30. I love the FatMac shape. (via) 
• ATDT relief. I admit I have done something similar to this with Asterisk and callfiles to exit meetings. (via)

Unofficial theme: DOOM

• Plaintext parts of email are fading away (in spam and non-spam).
• Solving murder with Prolog. (via)
• Fancy Vim Plugins. This is the first time I’ve seen a focus on the visual effect of the plugins rather than the underlying task. Something you wouldn’t expect for a terminal-style editor – and a good idea! (via)
• Reflections on DOOM’s Development. (via) 
• DOOMBA. (via)
• How DOOM fire was done. (via)
• Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES. (via)
• A Most Unusual Osborne 1. (via)
• Why it’s time to reappraise the humble Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via) 
• Comparing Architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium and X86-64. (via) 
• The old guard of Mac indy apps has thrived for more than 25 years. I link that because I’ve used several of the programs named, and they are excellent, excellent examples of doing something well. (via)
• XScreenSaver 5.41.
• These products seem designed to confuse.
• Most people don’t realize how much wifi pollution there can be. (via)
• Christian Gingras: The Man Who Fixed Robotron. (via)
• How Atari created the iconic Star Wars arcade game. The cabinet design was as important an element as the game itself, I think. (via)
• Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6. (via)
• some images i saved to my laptop in 2018. (via)

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)