Lazy Reading – Page 21 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2017/06/182017/06/16

Lazy Reading for 2017/06/18

The weather’s nice but the links aren’t stopping!

The future of education is plain text. (via)
Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source. (via)
Getting a working toilet in a video game. (via)
Harvey OS, a descendent of Plan9. (via)
Pointer Overflow Checking is in LLVM.
Shanzhai Archeology. I like the multi-SIM phones. (via)
200-odd developer tools.
How is GNU `yes` so fast?
The smell of bad software.
‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book structures. (via)
What the jot command can do for you.
How gaming got its dice. (via)
Apple IIe Design Guidelines [pdf]. The human interface section is still relevant. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mister Hayden Comics.

2017/06/112017/06/09

Lazy Reading for 2017/06/11

All over the map today.

$3,200 per month for 5 megabytes of space: the first hard drives.
csv,conf,v3, a cleverly named data conference. (via)
Silicon Graphics’ IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop. Nostalgia! (via)
C64 Yourself. C64 palette applied to a picture. (via)
Strategy headroom in roguelikes. (via)
WiFi232 – An Internet Hayes Modem for your Retro Computer. (via)
ESR Shares A Forgotten ‘Roots Of Open Source’ Moment From 1984.
Plan9-9k: 64-bit Plan 9. (via)
Leave Britney’s Command and Control Server Alone! Many places linked to this, but this is the best link text. (via)
How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran. (via)
Best Board Games of Essen 2016. Complex games, too. (via)
Warren Ellis’s podcast subscription list.

Unrelated link of the week: I Love Butter Tarts. If you’ve never encountered a butter tart, you should. Found via the Midland Butter Tart Festival, which I am disappointed to have missed.

2017/06/042017/05/30

Lazy Reading for 2017/06/04

A lot of this was picked up during the previous long U.S. holiday weekend.

A Brief History of the ATM and As cash becomes quaint, are ATMs on path to obsolescence? (via)
The evolution of the laptop computer. Clickbaity and not comprehensive, but fun to look at the pictures. (also via)
A tip for catching process state changes.
The Pacification of the Nerd.
The forgotten joys of the screen saver. (via, of course)
Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers. (via)
Decalogue, by Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer’s movie “Lunacy” is the most disturbing? distressing? film I’ve ever watched. (via)
Speaking of which, Svankmajer was an influence on the Quay Brothers, whom I was talking about with someone else recently. Surely you’ve seen Street of Crocodiles?
userland xnr jit.
open-adventure, the original, ported. (via)
Writing a Unix Shell. (via)
Compiler Optimizations are Awesome.
Tron B-Roll. Most evocative to those who remember computer graphics pre-texture-mapping.

2017/05/282017/05/26

Lazy Reading for 2017/05/28

All these links came together at once, after I cleaned up a lot of browser tabs.

The Making of Freeciv WebGL 3D. (via)
For those times when downloading over the Internet is too slow.
Your choice of Telnet/SSH terminal client, and why? A perennial question.
A brief history of IPv4 address space exhaustion. (via)
Little Things I Like to Do with Git. (via)
AmigaOS 4: Google Cloud Print driver released. (via)
Tracking down a segfault in grep. The sequel: Digging deeper. (via)
How Your Data Is Stored. Eventual consistency, explained. (via)
Urban Exploration Resources. You’ll want to search or just dig.
Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D. (via)

2017/05/212017/05/20

Lazy Reading for 2017/05/21

The weather’s nice, so the links are light. Well, they were, then I got some reading done, and now we have a good-size list.

Rule #1: Interop is all that matters. This is what gave us the Internet, really. (via)
Nethogs, the tool.
SIGGRAPH 2017 : Technical Papers Preview Trailer. See what will appear in movies and triple-A games a year from now. (via)
The Restoration of Early Unix Artifacts. (via)
The Computer Cook Book. (via)
Internet Histories, a n in-depth examination of exactly that. First issue. The introduction has a great Tim Berners-Lee quote. (via)
Please insert next floppy.
Many pet rabbits will die in Second Life on Saturday. As the source link says, “At least nobody will ever make real food depend on the cloud, right?”
Modern OS/2 released. (via)
The Unix Webserver. Interesting to see as a concept, but not necessarily a good idea as implemented. (via)
A list of “highly-specific one-person’s-passion” websites. One of my favorite things to see on the Internet. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Roads & Kingdoms Breakfast. Food and a story every weekday.

2017/05/142017/05/12

Lazy Reading for 2017/05/14

Reader suggestions always make me happy.

Is stockpiling AMD Bulldozer-based hardware from 2012 a good idea for those that care about privacy and security, since those CPUs don’t have PSP/Intel ME?
ECC Memory & AMD’s Ryzen – A Deep Dive. (thanks kerma on #dragonflybsd for this and the previous link)
Scrum makes you dumb. I don’t know if he’s setting up the right enemy, but it’s a good analysis of organizational silos. (via)
Memoir of a Homebrew Computer Club Member. Seriously homebrew, from that story. (via)
New D&D magic spells, designed by neural network. (via)
Related: same but for heavy metal band names.
Sexy Emacs. Sexy Vim. (via)
The Vim Learning Curve is a Myth. (via)
U.S. frequency allocations, with detail. (PDFs, via)
Zomg lots more anagram stuff. Lots.
The early Windows phone devices were liquid-cooled, sort of.
Zip Files All The Way Down. Oh, so that’s what a quine is? (via)

2017/05/072017/05/05

Lazy Reading for 2017/05/07

Accidental topic this week: text interfaces!

PuTTY 0.69 has been released. (via)
Made by the same author: Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. Like Minesweeper times one thousand. (via)
Random ASCII spaceship generator.
Telnet MapSCII.
terminal emulators’ processing of escape sequences. I’ve Ctrl-S’d myself a few times, I’ll admit. (via)
ZX Spectrum Next. Actually contains a ZX chip. (via)
BSD author Michael W. Lucas is having a flash sale on his fiction. It may be over by the time you read this.
The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software. A podcast episode, with some speakers I really like. (via)
Securing Telnet with SSL. (via)
Apple ][ clone and lawsuit history, some of which is new to me.

Your unrelated video of the week: DOUBLE KING. (via multiple places)

2017/04/302017/04/27

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/30

April over already?

Adventure Games and Eigenvalues. (via)
The fish shell is awesome. (via)
How SSH got port number 22. (via)
The web’s best hidden gems.
The real reason why UNIX commands are short.
The History of Computer RPGs. (via)
The beauty of links on Unix servers. Many don’t understand hard links.
Programming thought experiment. Anything that works its way up to Forth is definitely starting from scratch.
Three horrible Internet trends. “Rent-seeking” is the correct phrase. (via)
How Game Titles Work. Note that it’s part 1 of several. (via)
Glob Matching Can Be Simple And Fast Too.
Early Nintendo programmer worked without a keyboard. (via)
Bug in monitor.

2017/04/232017/04/21

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/23

Eclectic! I cover everything this week: computer history, modern pessimistic computing, odd hardware, strange software stories, comics, and tea.

Tmux and Vim – better together. (via)
Free Fonts Are Getting Better, But What Does That Mean? Destruction of value!
vuln disclosure and risk equilibrium.
How Google eats a business whole. Google’s Featured Snippets are often not wrong but also not right.
Build a Better Monster. (via)
Binary Keyboard.
That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator.
Ireland and England’s ‘best’ teas, reviewed by an American.
“There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically.” (via)
Operating In Obscurity. QNX, OS/2, and others.

Your sorta-a-comics-link of the week: Liartown USA, the book.

2017/04/162017/04/15

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/16

A little heavy on the history this week. And no tea!

Commodore 64: For the Love of a Machine. (via)
Fun at the UNIX Terminal Part 1.
Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment. More places named in the source link comments.
A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017. (via)
A link at the same place brought me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
Hottest Editors.
Upgrading a Vectrex to 32 Bits. (via)
Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM.
The secrets of password aging on Unix systems.
on the title of “git commit murder”
Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine

Your unrelated food link of the week: Eating In Translation. This person seeks out new places, eats there, and makes notes, and has been doing it for more than a decade. The result is the most in-depth informal food guide I’ve ever seen. It’s NYC focused, but not exclusively.

2017/04/092017/04/07

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/09

A slightly UK-ish tilt this week, by accident of course.

2017/04/022017/03/30

Lazy Reading for 2017/04/02

I’m very UNIXy this week.

Have You Played… Event[0]? Sounds like a simulation of IRC.
TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO GOOD, REALLY BAD HEAVY METAL ALBUM COVERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. (via)
The Best Metal on Bandcamp: March 2017. A palate cleanser from the last link.
Google Open Source Docs. Everyone releases their code, but not their methodology, which is arguably as important. (via)
Windows disk-loading/code-swapping. I remember this from Apple ][ days; there is no modern equivalent that I can think of.
The creator of Dwarf Fortress doesn’t really like to play games like Dwarf Fortress. (via)
Research UNIX V8, V9 and V10 made public by Alcatel-Lucent. (via)
Related: What’s the earliest UNIX (or unix-like) OS that is both easily available and can run on x86?
How to learn Unix/Linux and Lesser known but still handy Linux commands. Essentially command line tool education.
Zero Terminal. Another item for my teeny computer fetish. (via)

Your useful tip of the week: Setting the root login’s ‘full name’ to identify the machine that sent email. This makes so much sense. (via)

2017/03/262017/03/24

Lazy Reading for 2017/03/26

Old-school UNIX and games this week.

Managing an open source project. (via)
There was a Coke machine connected to the ARPANET in the 70’s. The local version of this has a Beastie on the front. (via)
Swan – GNU/Cygwin Xfce Desktop. At first glance, “XFCE for Windows” is a much more clear title. Plus the inevitable bash shell, which seems to be a good enough simulation of Unix for most people. (via)
Making Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with 253 cooks and no head chef.
OCR typography, a more extensive subject than I expected.
Sunsetting SixXS. Time for service providers to put up.
No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I hate modal popups. (via)
Xfce bug: “default desktop screen causes damage to monitor” Cat problem, and not the one in /bin. (via)
Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg. (via)
A Second Life for very old C programs. (via)

2017/03/192017/03/17

Lazy Reading for 2017/03/19

Technical details week for Lazy Reading.

Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencast is a shell wrapper for ffmpeg that allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)
802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
Today in OBEY.
Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.

Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)

2017/03/122017/03/11

Lazy Reading for 2017/03/12

I had overflow from last week, so I have a good list for you, despite being offline for days.

Your Code is Junky. I haven’t thought about FrontPage in years, and that’s on purpose. It was a trainwreck.
Raiders of the Lost OS: Reclaiming a piece of Polish IT history. I have never heard of CROOK. (via)
meaningful short names.
missing features as features
The Collapse of the UNIX Philosophy. Drinking game: drink every time the author or commenters at the source link conflate bash and UNIX, or Linux and UNIX, or assume a quirk solved in 1985 is a relevant worry today, etc. You’ll be drunk very soon.
Adobe Illustrator is 30 years old. Linking mostly for the side-by-side image of the tool palettes over the years.
USG is a firewall for your USB ports. firmware firewall – you can still have malicious software in the data portion of the USB drive. (via)
Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2. gettimeofday() – about as simple as it gets, and used constantly. (via)
selfie – compiler, emulator, and hypervisor (C and MIPS) all bundled together. (via)
Computers and art meet face-to-face.
(related comics link)

Your unrelated tea link of the day: defining what it means when you read “mug of tea” vs “cup of tea”. You’d think it was interchangeable, but the meanings diverge. (PDF, via)

2017/03/052017/03/03

Lazy Reading for 2017/03/05

A little meta, this week.

Why Nothing Works Anymore. Occam’s Razor applies; most people undervalue design vs. cost. (via)
I miss Delphi
There’s more than one way to kill a Unix process
Sniffing out Unix processes using pgrep
cloudbleed hero graphics. You know what Cloudbleed is, correct? It’s hard to illustrate, is what it is.
1000 links later. The Digest is generally a links site, and my experience matches what he’s saying.
The PDP-10 group on GitHub. (via, via)
Doing Presentations. I have an employee who can’t stop reading text verbatim off his slides, facing the screen… which means I can’t stop falling asleep at about slide 20 or so. (via)
An annotated digest of the top “Hacker” “News” posts. Accurate. (via)
./code –poetry. (via)
Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces. (via)
comment free codex. Comment quantity is starting to matter even more than quality.
There’s no IPv4 ranges left to allocate, but there’s some ranges that aren’t being used by their owners, and are given back. Here’s where the remaining scraps of recovered IPv4 space are tracked. It at least delays the inevitable. (via)
Eli5: What is POSIX?
A time-proven zsh prompt.
About the Newton MessagePad 2xxx ROM card. (via)

Your unrelated tea link of the week: In Sri Lanka’s Tea Paradise, A Social Enterprise Is Brewing. I actually heard about the quality of the tea (very good) before I heard about the way the company was formed. Consider where your next tea purchase comes from, in light of this.

2017/02/262017/02/23

Lazy Reading for 2017/02/26

Another diverse link week, hooray!

Stupid Hackathon 2017 – results under Project. (via)
using yubikeys everywhere
Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself. I have seen all of these happen. (via)
Getting started with vim. (via)
The many faces of grep. grep, egrep, fgrep.
Finding the Lost Vikings – Reversing a Virtual Machine. (via)
Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2. (via)
SHAttered. Every vulnerability has to have a cool name and website now. (via)
I found the best anagram in English, Moore’s law beats a better algorithm, and Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring, a series on anagrams that goes into glorious depth.
Puzzle Zapper Blog, from the previous link.
PuTTY 0.68 has been released, useful everywhere. (via and via)

Your unrelated item of the week: How Wegmans inspired the most rabid fanbase in the grocery world. I live in the town where Wegmans started. “Grocery fanbase” is a relative thing, but: yes, they are that good.

2017/02/192017/02/17

Lazy Reading for 2017/02/19

It’s Lazy Reading Science week!

RC40 card cipher
mplayer ktracing “In my ongoing quest to find the most inefficient software that still appears to work…”
How New York City Gets Its Electricity. Smart meters have been possible for years… Electricity companies are just not interested. (via)
Posix Has Become Outdated. Note that I don’t necessarily agree. (PDF, via)
Computer Science Professor Stages a Play to Teach his Family Perl 6. (via)
Why Wang went wrong.
swayvm, a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, for Wayland. (via)
I LOVE PROGRAMMING, the sticker. (via)
Laws of the Universe: Perlin Noise.
Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming.
A new version of Producing Open Source Software is out. (via)
JS/UIX, “an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers”. (via)
newspaper subscription experiment
How I got three errors into one line of code and followup.
Same author and related: Automatically checking for syntax errors with Git’s pre-commit hook
Pipelining your laundry, and the ensuing silliness

Your unrelated link of the day: Assault Trombone. Even if this was lethal, I couldn’t take it seriously. (via)

2017/02/122017/02/10

Lazy Reading for 2017/02/12

It’s all twofer links this week.

The many faces of DOOM’s afterlife. A good example of what open source can do for the lifetime of a software project. (via)
The forgotten joys of turtling in strategy games. (also via)
Perl6 One Liners. (via)
How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text. (via)
Whatever happened to Winamp? Arguably one of the better programs ever put together. (via)
Shut Up & Sit Down, tabletop board/card gaming reviews. There’s far more out there than I ever realized. (via I’m not sure at this point, sorry.)
A pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus Vim for programming. (via)
The TTY demystified. (via)
THE GRAY-1, A HOMEBREW CPU EXCLUSIVELY COMPOSED OF MEMORY (also via)
The BD Software C Compiler (BDS C). From 1979. (via)
Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics. (also via)
How piracy can accidentally encourage IPv6 adoption.
Dwarf Fortress and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Interface.
Free Online Courses at openculture. Get past the page ads, and there’s got to be something in that very long list that interests you. (lost source, sorry)
Cards Against Silicon Valley. The description of the game is more fun than the game, but then again maybe so is what it’s parodying. (via)
Vim’s 25th anniversary and the release of Vim 8. (via)

Your unrelated entertainment activities of the day: Places to Telnet. (indirectly via)

2017/02/052017/02/03

Lazy Reading for 2017/02/05

You weren’t planning to do anything else today, right? Find some headphones.

The future of iOS is 64-bit only: Apple to stop support of 32-bit apps. Following a trend. (via)
Four Column ASCII. (via)
From the previous link source’s comments: “The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968“, a PDF from this repo.
A Quick Look at the SoftIron OverDrive 1000. Multiprocessor ARM is starting to show up in non-Pi shapes.
How computer terms came from physical parts of the Mark I. Neat pictures, too! I know I’ve seen the moth one before. (via)
How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros. Someone do this with BSD flavors. (via)
Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Molecular Tschunk Spheres. Sounds mathematical, but actually related to Chaos Communication Congress and food. Read the ‘small scale hack’ at the end. (also via)
Printer Security. (via)
Electrocuted CERN weasel joins McFlurry hedgehog at dead animal exhibit. (via)
From free software to liberal software.
Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures. (via)
CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim. (via)
The Enviable Pedigree of UNIX® and POSIX®. (via)
Dial-A-Grue
Level Up Your Game: The Untapped Potential of Roguelikes. (thanks, Brandon Gooch)

Your unrelated link of the week: Bandcamp Daily. Curated daily presentations about a band or type of music, where the enthusiasm for any given esoteric sonic whatsit oozes through the writing and samples are there to back it up. Of course I would like it. Recent highlights from just the past few days: a history of doom metal; Kid Koala’s new album, and whatever this is.