Category: Lazy Reading

I still have a backlog.  Geez.  I’m starting to worry I’m posting too much for anyone to read through.

• After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside.  Important to read to see the mind-boggling scale of money flowing into Linux; it’s a corporate UNIX at this point, with priorities determined by a number of major companies.  One year of Linus Torvalds’ pay is, I dare say, more than any other entire open source operating system project on the planet has received.
• Related: Something is rotten in the Linux Foundation.  The Linux Foundation gives employees non-disparagement clauses?   (via)
• Commodore 64 BASIC inside your USB Connector.  (via)
• “the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created“
• More terminal font discussion.
• Teacup holster.
• Le Chatelier’s principle.
• Today in History, Brought to You by Unix.  Always present on BSD, at least.  (via)
• Leaving Apple and Google: /e/ first beta.  (via)
• XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress.
• Xonsh: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell.  I link mostly because it’s neat to see new shells still getting created.  (via)
• Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply.  Thyratrons!
• Disk compression history.  Read so you recognize the algorithms used.
• Pixeldungeon.  A roguelike that runs most anywhere; might run on BSD?
• “There are two immutable truths about all wireless networks:“
• Enclose them all in super clear epoxy!  That… is a computer that won’t suffer moisture issues.

Your unrelated dragonfly image this week: Common darter.

I did finally clean out my “to post” email folder, at least.

• History of Gopher. (via)
• Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983.  (via)
• textbeat, write music in Vim or other text source.  (via)
• 2048 in the terminal.  (via)
• Can you use the terminal for everything?  A video, and relevant to the previous two links.  (via)
• The 30 Best Web Games.  I link it to show a sort of technology snapshot from 10-15 years ago.  (via)
• Good books for deep hacks.  Very In-depth reading.
• The origins of clip art.
• MIT-licensed vector clip art, related.  (via)
• The Ethical OS Playbook.  It’s “only” a PDF of questions, but definitely good questions to ask.  (via)
• Best RSS feed reader apps.  Well, services, but not everyone can run Tiny Tiny RSS.  Anyway, you should be taking full advantage of RSS.  (via)
• You can now pre-order the Edible Games Cookbook even if you weren’t in the Kickstarter.
• Stripping tabs in ‘here’ documents.  I wish I had known this years ago.
• The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software.
• Markov chains, explained visually.  (via)
• Hidden gems of xterm.  (via)

Your unrelated item of the week: Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza.  (via)

Done well ahead of time, knowing I’d be on the road this past week.

• A little bump in the wire that makes your Internet faster.
• A timesyncd total failure and systemd’s complete lack of debugability and Systemd’s DynamicUser feature is (currently) dangerous.  Yeesh.
• Pure Bash Bible: A collection of pure bash alternatives to external binaries.  (via)
• unabridged history of unix / linux?  Lots of reading suggestions.
• One simple general pattern for making sure things are alive.
• As Michael W. Lucas points out in his site redesign, Let’s Encrypt is great.
• Dislikes the Sea, but Will Venture Upon It If Necessary.  An adult looking back on his D&D papers from childhood.  (via)
• Polyhedra Viewer.  Sorta related, in a dice sort of way.  (also via)
• 24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one).  (via)
• Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?  New James Mickens!  (via many places)

 

 

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.