Category: Lazy Reading

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.

Being home sick in the middle of the week gave me a head start on all these links.

• Tea – Instead of Coffee.  Some cheap purchasing links in the comments.
• The Obfuscated Fibonacci; Or, a Curious Connection in Computation.  (via)
• BASIC Computer Games, 1978.  I loved this book, and especially the illustrations.  (via)
• A comment link from the previous story led me to DiscoRunner.com, a “multi-dialect BASIC interpreter”.
• Brands are not your friends.
• The Classic Super Star Trek Game. (via)
• Modern C, a PDF.  (via)
• Learning to love the command line.  (via)
• Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide.  (via)
• Stop Playing Monopoly With Your Kids.
• The last twenty years building the web no-one asked for in two wireframes.  (via)
• The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale.  (via)
• osh, the V6 UNIX sh.  (via)
• Fractal Flowchart.  (via)
• Pterosaur, Vim within Firefox text fields.  Not new, but I like the screencast example.
• Has modern Linux lost its way?  Another variation on the “Linux is a mess compared to any BSD” argument – not that I’m discounting it.  (via)
• Cosma.org’s computer preservation page.  (via)

I’m… not sure what happened this week.  I read the same amount of material, went through my RSS feeds, and this is the only stuff that looked linkable.  Sorry!

• This Industry Is Still Completely Ridiculous.  (via)
• Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix.  (via)
• .bashrc generator.  (via)
• The next Internet is TV.  (via)
• Robot Supercut.  Kinda clickbaity, but I like the footage.  (via)
• GnuPG needed funding, got funding.  (via)

 

Happy Groundhog Day!

• Early Copy Protection on the Apple ][.  (via)
• If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It.  I’ve linked to other stories on these computers before.  (via)
• Never Trust a Corporation to do a Library’s job.
• A homebuilt MOS 6502 based microcomputer system.  For those of you who thought the Hemingwrite link was interesting last week.  Plus, is the 6502 the best chip ever for homebuilding?  It sure crops up a lot.  (via)
• The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge.  (via)
• “Pretty much everything AOL touches dies.”  I link to it because I once worked for Time Warner.
• “Networking for Systems Administrators” is now available on Kindle.
• Long Live Grim Fandango.  (via)
• The Queen of Code.  (via)
• The Media Archaeology Lab.  (via)
• Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk.  I agree that there’s less tools available these days.  (via)
• Do you like capacitors?
• tectur.io. Startup “inspiration”.  (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: The showreel of Nick Denboer, AKA Smearballs.  (also via)

Historical links are the accidental theme this week.

• RFC Reader.  For those uncomfortable with plaintext?  (via)
• The truth about C & Unix history.  An oldie but goodie.  (via)
• After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly.  There’s something coming together, though.
• Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper.  (via)
• 1980s sci-fi show openings.  No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got.  (via)
• Who named Silicon Valley?  (via)
• Unix people cards.  (via)
• Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club.  (via)
• The Cryptographic Doom Principle.  A clear explanation.  (via)
• TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item.  Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
• Ping stories.  I’ve linked to other versions before.  (via)
• The history of grep.  (via)
• The little book about OS development.  (via)
• Decentralize All the Things!  (via)
• That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun.  Also this truth.
• His site is destroyallsoftware.com.  I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
• Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup.  My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud.  I wish more people did this.
• Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.

My end of year vacation is over tomorrow, darnit.

• My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake.
• The Old New Thing 2014 link clearance.
• This sentence proves it is The Future.
• Another hidden computer/exposure surface.  (via)
• Preserving arcade games.  (via)
• The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island.  (via)
• The Internet version of ‘empty calories‘.  (via)
• Quake on an oscilloscope: A technical report.  (via)
• From Gongkai to open source.  I don’t totally agree, but it’s compelling.
• Virtualizing an operating system to run a text editor.  (via)
• On the curl | sh pattern.  (via)
• geektyper.com.  A modern ‘boss key’.  (via)
• A Microsoft-centric developer switches into open source.  (via)
• Why aren’t we using SSH for everything?  (via)

 

Last of the year!

• Glitches: A kind of history.  (via)
• Speaking of glitches: Breaking Madden is still going.
• First Commits.  (via)
• Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer.  (via)
• The SoftSel Hot List for 1986.
• Steel Mill Hacked.  How long until having operations disconnected from the Internet becomes a sign of quality for a business?  (via)
• Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator.  (via)
• The Infocom virtual machine, made flesh silicon.  (via)
• DOSBox in the browser.  “…watching a miracle with every boot.”  (via)
• Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty (via)
• The Future: A Cat Litter Box and DRM.  “Internet of Things you can’t own”.  (via multiple places)
• When Security Goes Right.  This is how problems should be handled.
• Images of Math, a tumblr.  (via)
• Two eras of the Internet: pull and push.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: UpDog, a revolutionary communications platform.  (via)

 

I am slightly confused about which day it is.

• Dinosaur’s Pen, excellent old technology pictures.  (via)
• Ultima Ratio Regum, a roguelike walking simulator in development.  Currently Windows-only.
• 2014 Cacowards winners.  These will probably run on most any BSD with a Doom port.  (via)
• Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale.  All the management issues were in the browser.  (via)
• The 12 days of Unix.
• “the artifacts of any media format define its aesthetic like a cultural permalink”  (via)
• Origins of the Tablet.  (via)
• Hybrid Water Computer.  (also via)
• Computers are People, Too.  1982 computer graphics and Disney.  (via many places)
• USBdriveby.  Maybe gumming up the data parts of your USB ports isn’t such a bad idea.  (via)
• Intercal: The Worst Programming Language Ever.  A video.  (via)
• Why I don’t like hackathons, by Alex Bayley aged 39 1/2.  What he describes is very different than the BSD hackathons I’ve known of.  (via)
• Useful syadmin tools.  Here’s a gift list…
• Learning Unix.

Today is my birthday, so I have a gift for you: a lot of reading!

• Don’t panic and keep forking Debian.  It leads to devuan.org.  For a fork to succeed, they need positive reasons to exist, not just a definition of what it’s not.  (via)
• Advent Planet.  Follow it, find your interest topic, get something to read daily for the next few weeks.
• On file formats, very briefly.  I’ve liked everything of Paul Ford’s that I’ve ever read.  (via)
• Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (via)  6502 chips are so universally hacked on, it seems.
• Bumper Sticker Computer Science.  More “epigrams”.  Some dated, some excellent.  (PDF, via)
• ParkyTowers thin clients.  Turning very cheap, very small hardware into usable systems.
• The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game.  See Softalk link below too.  (via)
• Chart Brut: How the MS-Paint Graphics of Conspiracy Took Over the Web. (via)
• Grand St.  short-run consumer tech for sale, very much like outgrow.me.
• A Plan 9 Newbie’s Guide.  (PDF, via)  Coraid uses/used Plan 9?
• The strange world of computer-generated novels.  (via)
• Why my book can be downloaded for free.
• Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI.  (via)
• The Softalk Apple Project.
• Unix: tricks with history.
• Clip Art is dead. Awww.
• RowHammer.  Ugh.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak’s Adult Swim 2014 compilation.

Short this week because of the amount of time I was at work, but what I have is good.

• System/360, older computing pictures.  (via)
• Everyone wants a ports system.  EVERYONE.
• Salto, the Xerox Alto emulator.  For those who saw the Alto code release last week.  (via)
• Hidden Histories of the Information Age.  (scroll all through for links)
• Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic.  Fun if you are the right kind of nerd.  (via)
• Why You Should Never Use MongoDB.  Not a diatribe against MongoDB as you might expect, but an excellent, extended talk about data structure.  (also via)
• I thought I had linked this already: Internet Arcade; many old games re-implemented in Javascript.
• Beginning to Observe Network Management Practices as a Third Party. (via)

Lots of light topic links this week.

• A 50 Year-old Teletype Powered by a Raspberry Pi.  (via)
• Found via the same link: teletype restoration.
• Also found: the rotary VoIP phone.  I’ve made rotaries work again via ATA, but only for inbound.  This, I would love to do.
• How SimCity came to Unix.  It’s available now as Micropolis.
• Which reminds me: Magnasanti, the biggest SimCity 3000 city ever.  (video)
• The Xerox Alto source code has been released.  There’s a nice history at that page.  (via)
• Google Summer of Code 2015 has been announced.
• The great thing about regular expression languages is that there are so many to choose from!
• Computing is women’s work, in 1967.
• An interview with Tom Limoncelli.  (About LISA)
• Why Hypercard had to die.  I taught a Hypercard class to older students during college; it was surprisingly easy to get people with no computer experience to build things.  I miss the old “computer as tool” approach Apple had back then.
• Shall we fork Debian?  (via)
• Hints for writing Unix tools.  (via)
• Vimswitch.
• curl | sh.  (via)
• PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (via several places)
• An excellent description of the social ‘littlenets‘ concept.  (via)
• Web frameworks from Wal-Mart.  Not a sentence I thought I’d type.

Your unrelated animation of the week: Karateka.  I remember discovering this, and laughing and laughing…

Writing this now, and hoping I’ll get the server apart and back together fast enough nobody notices.

• BlackBerry: The Endgame.  Points out that QNX is/was a problem for the ecosystem.
• Breaking Madden: Edge of Tom-morrow.  I love these despite being indifferent to football.
• Measure your open source community’s age to keep it healthy.
• The Bot of Mormon.
• Trouble at the Koolaid point.  Rethink the “ignore it and move on” response.  (via)
• How tilde.club came together. There’s a potential tilde.club on every BSD machine.
• Live coding in VR with the Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, JavaScript and Three.js.  That’s pretty much what I always envisioned the future to look like.  (Youtube, via I forget)
• Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals.  (via)
• The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution.  (via)
• slfsrv, a GUI wrapper for command line programs.  (via)
• NTK, the archive.
• The Shen of Programming.  (via, via)
• TinyScreen, another Kickstarter project, with hardware so small it’s adorable.  (via)
• My Philosophy on Alerting.  (via)  Linking for myself at some point.

Whee!

A talking car dashboard from the 1980s.

Argos Catalogs.  Count how many of the pictured items have been absorbed by cell phones.  (via)

Features are Faults.

King of click.  More Model M stories.