Lazy Reading – Page 20 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2017/11/052017/11/03

Lazy Reading for 2017/11/05

All over the map again, but that’s what Lazy Reading is for.

OpenVMS: State of the Port to x86_64 – October 2017 Update. PDF. (via)
The Roguelike Celebration – a festival about roguelike game design. (via)
More Taste: Less Greed? or: Sending UNIX to the Fat Farm. (via)
books chapter fifteen.
A Net Before the Web, Part 1: The Establishment Man and the Magnificent Rogue.
A Net Before the Web, Part 2: Service to Community.
TAOS Operating System. (via)
The Physics of Bread. I am not sure what to think of Modernist Bread. (via)
An ode to pack: gzip’s forgotten decompressor. (via)
The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons. (via)
“tag: eyes, computers”, very much so.
miniwebproxy. A good idea.
Tiny Wearable 8-bit VT100 Console. This I would want to make. (via)

2017/10/292017/10/27

Lazy Reading for 2017/10/29

This is another one of those ‘wide variety’ weeks, so settle in; I am confident at least one of these links will grab you.

ASCII: A Love Letter. (via)
Leveling Up. There’s a book offer there.
The Inside Story of Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor. Written by one of the people involved. (via)
A survey of CPU caches. (via)
Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform. (via)
Vim after 15 Years. (via)
MNT Reform: DIY portable computer. (via)
Show HN: Vixl44 – Create pixel art inside your terminal using vim movements. (via)
Mastodon 2.0. (via)
F-Droid 1.0 released. (via)
Screen Savers. Screen savers are arguably unnecessary at this point, so they have become a sort of art form, separated from their original utility. I like that. (via)
A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986. (via)
The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and rewriting a running GUI. Read the comments. (via)
Alan Kay Demos the Original, PARC GUI from Rescued Disc. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Lynda Barry is the funk queen of the galaxy, a fantastic cartoonist, and now the best ever advice columnist.

2017/10/222017/10/20

Lazy Reading for 2017/10/22

Some overflow, some new.

books chapter thirteen, books chapter fourteen
Why I’m Using Bitmarks on my Products.
The 68000 Wars, Part 5: The Age of Multimedia.
Star Control 2 creators finally making sequel. Don’t forget the original game is effectively free and available.
Comprehensive Guide about Vim. (via)
Gameboy hello world. (via)
Connector Alignment Chart.
Inside the vintage Xerox Alto’s display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working. (via)
The PorPor Books Blog: SF and Fantasy Books 1968 – 1988.
Termination of Transfer tool. (via)
Web Audio Modem. (via)
Retro Pi Cases. Put a Pi in a teeny Amiga 500. (via)
Technology that is perfect despite being obsolete? (via)

Your unrelated shirt design of the week: Mickey Mouth.

2017/10/152017/10/14

Lazy Reading for 2017/10/15

I have more links to post but I just plain ran out of time.

The /bin/true Command and Copyright. (via)
Pencil and Paper Games. (via)
A Little Story About the `yes` Unix Command. (via)
Open Source Game Clones. I linked this years ago, but it’s updated. Still iffy on it. (via)
Pixels camp 2017. (slides)
Who implemented the Windows NT blue screen of death?
Apple2fpga: Reconstructing an Apple II+ on an FPGA. (via)
A Eulogy for Eudora.
The Scrolling Orbs. Trackballs predated mice – significantly.
The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia. (via)
A DDoS threat that didn’t happen.

Your crazy update of the week: The Beacon Project.

Less crazy/better idea: The Church of the SubGenius | A Documentary. Pledging.

2017/10/082017/10/05

Lazy Reading for 2017/10/08

I am all over this week.

On Being Operationally Incompetent. Harsh but true. (via)
Floating Point Visually Explained. (via)
Unapplied Linguistics. (via I lost it, sorry)
CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics). A free economics textbook, which I find oddly interesting both for the topic and because it’s a specific effort to produce a freely available comprehensive textbook.
A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author. (via)
The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress. Miiiight be able to run a BSD. (via)
The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981. (via)
Practical Self-Defense against the Scourge of Dot-Files.
Computer – Journal of the IEEE Computer Society. Circa 1970s.
Retro ThinkPad announcement.

2017/10/012017/09/30

Lazy Reading for 2017/10/01

Unofficial gaming theme this week.

HyperRogue, the non-Euclidean roguelike, is a mind-melting masterpiece.
A crapload of animation links.
LANCER, a new mech RPG. Wait, here’s an update.
Quondam: Finished! “The most difficult adventure game ever made.
Unlocking Braden’s Potential. (PDF, via)
Parallel processing with unix tools. (via)
A 1979 War-Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Complete. (via)
The History of Email. (via)
PocketBeagle – A $25 open-source USB-key-fob computer. (via)
Building the plasma. (via)
Gravitational Teleport, fancy ssh. (via)
Email: a lost relic of the before-before times.
Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
The Beauty of Unix. (via)

Unrelated images for the week: this and this.

2017/09/242017/09/22

Lazy Reading for 2017/09/24

Thinkpad theme, I guess.

More shell, less egg. (via)
Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming. (via)
What’s behind the Linux umask? Well, UNIX umask.
Another ThinkPad Retro sighting. No Thinklight? Well, maybe it’s backlit.
Thinkpad X62. (via)
“HTML email, was that your fault?”
Vim Hates You. (via)
The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page! (via)
X and NeWS history. “As the guy who single-handedly prevented X from becoming an ANSI standard…”(also via)

2017/09/172017/09/16

Lazy Reading for 2017/09/17

I start a new job tomorrow!

Fixing up TS-440s rigs. An interesting hobby.
TODO Group Open Source Guides. (via)
What’s So Bad About Posix I/O? (via)
Xtermcontrol: change colors, title, font and geometry of a running xterm. (via)
ANES: emulate a classic Mac on a classic Amiga. (via)
Dwarf Fortress bugs. There’s so much simulated in the game that the bugs sound like broken reality, not programming problems. (via)
The Universal Aggregator. Everything into maildir! (via)
Inbox-zero via shell mail. (via)
The only safe email is text-only email. (via)
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. There’s a lot to read here. (via)
books chapter twelve
30 interesting shell commands for the Linux shell. I link this just because I’m amazed that someone built a ‘tac’ program, not because these commands are all equally useful. (via)

2017/09/102017/09/07

Lazy Reading for 2017/09/10

Whee!

Save 418. (Thanks, Tim Darby)
this code very fast. (via)
An early (earliest?) Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
books chapter eleven
The Zork CPU. The software engine turned into silicon. Can that be done for SCUMM? Does that even make sense? (via)
An Introduction to Managing Secrets Safely with Version Control Systems. (also via)
Every Programmer Should Know. (via)
Rochester vs. Cupertino. I live in Rochester, and the portrait it paints is accurate. Kodak made a lot of lives better in ways we don’t expect of tech companies today. (also via)

2017/09/032017/09/01

Lazy Reading for 2017/09/03

Seventies/Eighties computing, this week.

books chapter ten
Eclipses and decibels.
Twenty-plus years on, SMTP callbacks are still pointless and need to die.
Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons. First comment in the source link is great.
The Icewind Dale Problem. Related to previous link. (via)
The Enduring Legacy of Zork. (via)
Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading. (via)
Noticed in the same place, in an article about VERB and NOUN buttons: People are patching the code for the Apollo 11 guidance computer. People apparently can’t help patching code.
Interface, a decent non-serif, non-monospaced font. (via)
So You Want to Read… A Guide to Sci-Fi and Fantasy Subgenres. (via I lost it, sorry!)
The Return of the Cray files (2013-2016) (via)
Arithmetic for Beginners. (via via)
1976 word processor error messages. They sound exactly right. (via)
Having Played Every Adventure From the 1970s, Some Thoughts. (via)
6502cloud – Bringing the 80’s to the cloud. (via)
Software development 450 words per minute. (via)
The Light Phone. (via)

2017/08/272017/08/25

Lazy Reading for 2017/08/27

I finally used up my overflow links.

Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software. (via)
Moore’s Law, from Rodney Brooks and from ACM. (via)
All you need to know about Unix environment variables.
A Unix Person’s Guide to PowerShell. (via)
Nodes of Yesod: ZX Spectrum Next – developer blog episode 2.
Steve Jackson’s Ogre rumbles onto PC in October. Linked solely because I found the original asymmetric board game fascinating. And never played it.
Getting an Amiga 1000 Online. (via)
How to Hand Letter Like an Architect. I took several technical drawing classes … 20 years ago? It still affects my handwriting.
Debugging DNS. (via)
Best option for modern X server on Windows?
books chapter nine
Carry a Little More to Waste a Little Less. Good advice, but get a folding utensil set; it’s much easier to deal with.
The HERE IS key. (via)

Your odd video link of the week: what if the Doctor Who theme was composed by John Carpenter, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, or Tangerine Dream? (via)

2017/08/202017/08/20

Lazy Reading for 2017/08/20

This is overflow from last week’s overflow.

Can we please do useful things with software? (via)
Morrow Micronix Operating System User’s Manual (1983) Section 1.1 is called “Confusion Relief” and it gets better from there. (via)
Cultural items as clickbait. Pictures!
Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator. Use with a tiling window manager for maximum tile level. Tile-ception! (via)
HyperCard On The Archive. (via)
a repo upon the deep
The world in which IPv6 was a good design.
Where TCL and TK went wrong. (via)
The NOVA filesystem. (via)
The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design. (via)
The quitting economy. (also via)
My 100 Favorite Programming, Math, Physics and Science Books: Part Seven. I have book 33 on this list and really like it.

Your web game of the week: Sword Shop. Unity, so not sure where it can run other than Windows, unfortunately. (via)

2017/08/132017/08/13

Lazy Reading for 2017/08/13

Overflow!

Toward A More Useful X Keyboard. (via)
My $169 development Chromebook. (via)
Class Apples, an album made entirely on the Apple ][ – in 2017. (via)
CES, 1987. “2 new Betamax players hitting the market this summer…” etc. etc. (via)
Programming in the 1960s. A slide deck of personal experience. (via)
books chapter six, books chapter seven, books chapter eight.
Unix: dealing with signals.
How are users choosing their passwords on the internet?
Everything is an HTTPS interface. (via)
Better spelling with aspell. a reminder that a spell checker can always be available.
Let ‘localhost’ be localhost. I guess people need to be reminded. (via)
Text Editor Performance Comparison. (via)
The Return of the Hipster PDA. (via)

2017/08/062017/08/06

Lazy Reading for 2017/08/06

You may be able to detect a subtle bias based on my early design education, this week.

Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures. (via)
9 great mechanical keyboards for coders. Never thought I’d see a HP Enterprise site referencing Axe Cop… (via)
A Sublime-like minimap for console vim. (via)
“Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate”: A Cultural History of the Punch Card (1992) (via)
The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. (via)
Humanscale, reissued. For my money, Niels Diffrient was the best task chair designer. (His Freedom chair was much better than the Aeron chair so beloved of startups about to run out of cash.)
Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea & Human Health. A national Canadian tea site? Unexpected.
Malicious crossenv package on npm. (via)
Related, sorta: Random Stack Overflow code importer. (via)
Apollo Team Announces the (Amiga) Vampire V4. (via)
Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark. (via)
Why I’m Learning Perl 6.

2017/07/302017/07/19

Lazy Reading for 2017/07/30

Apparently this is the week where I comment about my links.

The Internet of Things – A disaster for no good reason. Comparison of old smoke detectors vs. new. You may already have an inkling of the outcome.(via)
Powershell 6.0 Roadmap. Interesting because it’s both Microsoft admitting people want a shell, and it’s Microsoft committing to creating a cross-platform shell.
RFC8200: A revision of IPv6. (via)
50 days of postmarketOS. (via)
The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017. Jetbrains-customer specific, probably, but: note how many developers don’t use version control or issue trackers. It seems like those would be the most elemental tools? (via)
DOS Game System Project. Real hardware, not emulated.
AmigaOne X5000 review: The beloved Amiga meets 2017. (via)
This 10-Pound Keyboard From The 1980s Is Making A Comeback. The urge for buckling-spring keyboards hits the mainstream. (via)
Linguistics and Programming Languages. (via)
Unix-like personal webpage. I like the scanline effect. (via)
moving to https.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your life?
What is a fantasy map? A scholarly article at the British Library. (via)
Fantasy Cities, a Javascript city map generator. (also via)
Do people write insane code with multiple overlapping side effects with a straight face?
Kingsway, a mix of a Win95 desktop and a fantasy roguelike. (via)

Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: I find this … Inspirational? Hilarious?

2017/07/232017/07/21

Lazy Reading for 2017/07/23

I’ve got some esoteric stuff this week.

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse. The description of Amdahl’s Law is something not enough people realize. (via)
Pushing DNS into the Cloud.
Relive WW2 Lorenz decryption. (via)
books chapter four and books chapter five.
Build-from-a-kit mechanical keyboard, and odd but pretty controller. (via)
Nyan routing. (via)
Well Played vol 6,2 – european videogames of the 1980s. Free download of the issue. (via)
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About IPv6. Video from ARIN, so pretty authoritative. (via)
URLS are UIs. (via)
White Spots. The idea of using VR to visualize transmitter location is interesting. (via)
That’s a Big Microscope…
UNIX: How random is random? Depends on current operating system, which this article glosses over.
Visual Subnets. Click “How’s this work?” on the side if it’s not clear.
Introductory bullshit detection for non-technical managers. This is excellent for project planning overall, not just the BS part. (via)

Unrelated audio link of the week: Alan Lomax recordings are up on Bandcamp.

2017/07/162017/07/12

Lazy Reading for 2017/07/16

There’s some meaningful links buried in here, among the trivia.

Undefined Behavior in 2017.
Unix’s mysterious && and ||.
Almost one and a half billion seconds since 1970.
The 555 chip storage ottoman. (via)
Avery’s laws[1] of wifi reliability. (via)
48-Year-Old Multics operating system resurrected. (via)
Why I Hate Slack and You Should Too. (via)
Big Fucking TV can’t find the Fucking Shit Router. (via)
XScreenSaver 5.37 is out. XScreenSaver makes for some fun live backgrounds in Android, I found.
The Emacs Operating System. (via)
Block-breaking game in vim 8.0. (via)
Old school PC fonts. (via)
A rift in the NTP world. (via)
Roland McGrath bows out as glibc maintainer. 30 years is a long time. (via)
Hyperproductive development. (via)
The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler. (via)

2017/07/092017/07/07

Lazy Reading for 2017/07/09

This wrote itself a week ago.

More dialing, more weirdness.
The Internet On Dead Trees. I remember a number of these products.
If you’d like to pay too much for ancient Radio Shack electronics, now’s your chance! (via)
books chapter two, a followup to books chapter one which I thought I had linked before, but maybe not. Anyway, the same numeric chapter from a number of text books, described.
And I delayed long enough to add books chapter three.
The Internet Phone. Most inconvenient way to browse the Internet ever? (via)
Stopping the Internet of Noise. RSS still works, and works well! (via)
Urban and suburban camouflage.
Trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor. (via)
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself. (via)
Bashfill – art for your terminal. (via)
Skip grep, use awk. (via)
The origin of HTTP POST explained in a dinosaur comic.
Not-butters. (sorta via)
IFComp 2017 is open.
Get My Books Cheap. Not me, Michael W. Lucas’s books – his fiction work, along with a number of other authors.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Animated Short Films. An animator’s favorites, if the above list of links hasn’t kept you busy enough..

2017/07/022017/06/30

Lazy Reading for 2017/07/02

A bumper crop of odd links today! Reading for a long weekend, or at least it’s a long weekend for most North American readers, I think.

The joy of reading role-playing games. I may have spent more time reading rulebooks than playing the actual games. (via)
Endless Orchard, a map of (U.S.) public fruit trees. Dunno if there’s an equivalent for any part of Europe. (via)
Summertime, and the lemonade is easy. Optimized Lemonade Stand strategy.
Programming Games. Not programming a game, but games you play that are structured like programming.
books chapter one. Ted Unangst summarizes a bunch of coding books – but just the start.
Dear Lazyweb, tell me about colo and the followup, Colo, again.
Retro ThinkPad: It’s Alive. Hoping to buy one to replace my aging X220 at work, if the stats are right. (via luxh on #dragonflybsd) Related to this historical post which I have linked before.
Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes. (via)
efficient music players remain elusive.
WiFi232 with a Macintosh 512ke. Related: the Lobste.rs BBS.
Nodes of Yesod: ZX Spectrum Next – developer blog episode 1.
Old usenet maps. Remember, the originals were done by hand. (via)
Canon Cat Resources. A business application appliance with a built-in Forth interpreter, and built by Jef Raskin of original Macintosh fame. An odd and powerful machine from another timeline. (via)

2017/06/262017/06/23

Lazy Reading for 2017/06/26

Only half a year until Christmas!

Base-4 fractions in Telugu.
Custom Built “Commute Deck”. (via)
VMS Software’s OpenVMS Rolling Roadmap. VMS won’t die. (via)
One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Xerox Alto. (via)
Git remote branches and Git’s missing terminology.
Same source – Git’s rejected push error.
Archive it or you will miss it. (via)
The cutest palm-sized Apple II Computer. (via)
Rations for various RPG Races. (via)
Neural networks can name guinea pigs.
This is Spinal Map. (via)
Burrowing a Gopher Hole. The state of Gopher in 2017.
Statistical Analysis of Yorkshire Pudding. One could create a sort of “ur-pudding” based on this, I suppose – but I bet it would the least interesting variation.

Your unrelated video link of the week: time for sushi. A followup to going to the store and late for meeting. (via)