Category: Lazy Reading

This week is more eclectic than usual.

• How to boost your Vim productivity.  As usual, the comments on the link location are nearly more useful than the target story.  (via)
• Telegrams: still possible, even desirable, and legally binding.  (via)
• An in-depth explanation of host names from Matthias Rampke on the DragonFly users@ list.
• PreTTY Screenshots.  (via)
• The ultimate guide to analog control panels in sci-fi movies.  (via)
• My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Three
• “TIS-100, a game about rewriting corrupted code to fix a fictional ’80s computer.“
• On Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design.  (via)
• Goblinpunch, an endless supply of D&D-ish RPG ideas.  (also via)
• VoIP honeypot results.
• The Underhanded C Contest winners.  (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: Stairway to Stardom.  1980s public access TV performances.  Highlights one, two, and three.  (via private list.)

 

I started sparse because this was a busy week, but I’ve still got a pretty good amount of reading for you.

• Comparing code layout.  Not the code, but the visual arrangement.  This could certainly be explored further.
• Schemaverse, a space strategy game implemented entirely within PostgreSQL.  (via)
• The Cray 2 Computer System.  (pdf, via)
• How to Operate the Apple II Plus.  (via)
• “Analog“.  (via)
• noTCP.  (via)
• My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
• distribution, for ASCII histograms.  I can think of many times this would have been useful.
• Disinformation Visualisation: How to Lie with Datavis.  (via)
• How to pronounce hexadecimal.  Not the word itself, but the numbers derived.  Don’t actually do this.  (via)
• Penrose binning.  (via)
• Also, Go by Example.  Linked because I like the description for it at the source.
• The Words the Media Industry Prefers.  The narrative made me laugh.  (via)

We’re already 2/3 of the way to Christmas!

• UNIX history book recommendations.
• Networking for System Administrators, a BSD-friendly book I was slightly involved with, reviewed on Slashdot.
• How UNIX system administration is like filing your taxes.
• The history of computer data storage, in pictures.  (via)
• Ops books.  How much of Github is not-code?  (via)
• The Heirloom Laptop’s Custom Wood Composite.
• BrowserHack: NetHack ported to the web.  (via)
• Text adventure speed runs.  (via)
• People who could really break the Internet.  (via)
• This, everytime someone says “the cloud”  (via)
• The Forgotten Ones: Unisys SCAMP-D Mainframe.  Linking to it because that’s where “Master Control Program” came from.  (via)
• Textblade.  Sounds neat; I’d want to see it in action.  (via)
• The Philco 2000 Model 212’s retirement party.  (via)
• Good UNIX (History) books / material ?
• Copper vs. fiber.  (via)
• Used Thinkpad Buyer’s Guide.  (via)

Your unrelated tea links of the week: Do you even steep?  The actual title is different, but I like that part of the link more.  (Thanks, Jeff Ramnani)  Also: Tea With Strangers.  It’s exactly what it sounds like.  Unfortunately, it’s not in my city.  (via)

Spillover from last week, even.

• Big Changes at USENIX LISA in the last 5-10 Years.
• Open Source won, so what’s next?
• “The lack of diversity in the Valley isn’t an individual problem, it’s a systemic one.”   If you doubt the hive mind of Silicon Valley, look at We Put A Chip In It. (via)
• The Story of the ZX Spectrum in Pixels (volumes 1 & 2)
• Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet’s Least Favorite Tool.  Linked because they have a screenshot of Snowcraft.  (via)
• Found in previous link: Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?  Of course, I loaded that page and got a full-page overlay advertising video, so maybe news websites are the new restaurant websites.
• FreeDOS on your camera.  That’s two mysteries: Why FreeDOS?  Why still have a separate camera?  (via)
• How a bridge full of zombies reminded me of the great possibility of games.  I love this sort of discovery in games.  (via)
• Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?  (via)
• Mushroom Cultivation Revisited.  (via)
• The Zero, One, Infinity Disease.  First comment on the source link is good too.
• Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments.  (via)
• since.

Your unrelated video links of the week: 80s nostalgia is happening now that there’s a generation young enough to not have experienced it.  You can have the 1980s as a parody, or as the real, unmitigated awfulness.

Without meaning to, I’ve broken into full-on computer nostalgia this week.  Don’t know how it happened, but at least the links are interesting.

• Tiling by squares.  I hope you like math.  (via)
• “whatever it is, it’s already over“, which led me to “The planned unplanned outage“.
• The NMFECC Cray Time-Sharing System (1985) [pdf]  (via)
• Programming Languages in 2014.  (via)
• A history of the Amiga – The demo scene (2013)  (via)  The links in the source article are best.
• 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators.  (via)
• BeOS Demo Video (1998)  (via)  I miss BeOS.
• The Full History of Board Games.  (via)
• Turning the Arduino Uno into an Apple II.  (via)  Notes how awesome the 6502 processor was.
• The Apple ][ Watch.  Holy crap, this is cool.  It wouldn’t be easy to duplicate, but so very worth doing.  (via)
• An object of infinite length but finite volume.  (via)
• Modern alternatives to PuTTY?
• Dealing with key-based authentication on Windows with Putty
• How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union.  The source for this story has more interesting link material.
• Can someone explain containers to me?
• Glass Hands (Violent Motion, 2).  “(I’m still holding out for a director’s cut of Iron Man where Tony Stark struggles for an hour to place a screen protector on his faceplate without trapping any dust under the plastic, but I’m not holding my breath.)“
• What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand?  For the readers that don’t have English as their first language.  Or maybe those that do.  (via)
• The Task Continuity Model.  Incidentally describes my method of building up articles for this very Digest.  (via)

Your unrelated tea link of the week: The man who drank too much iced tea.  He wasn’t drinking that much, which makes me a bit worried about my own hot tea consumption.  (via)

Your unrelated psychedelic rock video of the week: Lightning Bolt’s The Metal East.  If you find the art interesting, start looking for Fort Thunder comics.  (via)

This is the Lazy Reading mix I like – some history, some commentary.

• How to make your Unix prompts more useful and interesting.
• An exploration of the mtr utility.
• Sweet 16: The 6502 Dream Machine. (via)
• SMS cards: The technology inside IBM’s 1960s mainframes.  (via)
• Vim is a Game.  (via)
• DoS by lightbulb.  (via)
• Public vs. private cloud.
• Euclid’s algorithm in the Shell.  (via)
• The Joys of Unix – Cryptolog in 1978  (via)
• The Web’s Grain.
• The day the rabbits died.
• How many IP addresses can a DNS query return?  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Perfect cup of tea renders all other tea pointless.  A sloppy joke, so let me share these recipes for masala chai and hobnobs instead.  I’m hungry.

 

The temperatures climbed up to almost not freezing this week!  It feels so warm.

• exa, a modern replacement for ls.  I like the website.  (via)
• Value of windowing is questioned.  (via)
• Good PuTTY defaults for a happy SSH’ing life  (via)
• The History of Graphic Design and Computational Form.  Long, with many excellent examples.  (via)
• Stirring Tea.  (via)
• What Blogging Has Become.  Think of this site.  (via)
• All My Blogs Are Dead.  Why I self-host whenever possible.  (via)
• Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.  Wrong, in 1995.  (via)
• Futures of Text.  (via)
• The Sierpinski triangle page to end most Sierpinski triangle pages.  (via, including the link text)
• GPG and Me (via many places)
• Trinity, KDE3 continued.
• MATE, Gnome2 continued.
• What laptop to [sic] you use?
• “…then came Cisco, and the rest is history”: a ‘history friendly’ model of the Local Area Networking industry.  Why there’s so many “Cisco shops”.  (PDF, via)
• Chinese DNS Poisoning.  It’s China, which means Chinese Government DNS Poisoning.  (more)  (via)
• How to be an open source gardener.  Excellent, excellent advice.  (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: The Chemistry of Cookies.

Lots of in-depth reading this week.  Put on something warm/drink something warm (especially if you are in the northeast US) and start reading.

• Making a C64/C65 compatible computer in an FPGA.  (via)
• Joe Chip’s problem was never his door.  (via)
• A Whole New World.  (via, via)
• CORE 2015, the magazine from the Computer History Museum.  (PDF)
• Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch.
• Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software, a paper.  (via)
• Chart of similar operations with sed and awk.  (via)
• A Tale of Two Zippers.  (via)
• 10 fancy zsh tricks you may not know… and Six hacks for less(1).
• “Why are there so many goddamn package managers?”  (via)
• The Last of the Typewriter Men.  (via)
• Where to buy amazing tea online.  Maybe a bit pretentious.
• It’s a UNIX system.  I know this.  (via)

Your unrelated quote of the week:

“If we had Smart Dogs right now, they’d have screens instead of ears, and they wouldn’t be able to bark in a somewhat indecipherable but yet still full of meaning way, they’d just have a whole bunch of notification icons that would come out of their butt and would all be red circles with numbers in them.”

Your unrelated link of the week: Drone over Niagara Falls.  That’s about 70 miles from here; I’ve been there many times.  That may give you an idea of the snow buildup/cold level here recently.