Lazy Reading – Page 28 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/09/212014/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/21

Lots of links this week.

Device names. (via)
xscreensaver 5.30 is out, along with a story of how much work jwz put into the first version of Lament.
One Thing Well mentions toybox, which I think is similar to busybox, but BSD-licensed.
This hard drive still worked. (via)
Unix: Scripting with templates.
Road to Rust 1.0 (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Intel Edison. Processors have become a sort of monoculture in the last 5-10 years; it’s good to see variety coming back at the small scale. (via sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Bézier Clock (via I forget, sorry)
Bézier Method. (via)
wasavi, vi in most any web browser text area.
How to become a GOOD theoretical physicist by Gerard ‘t Hooft. (via)
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile. (via)
HPN-SSH – high performance SSH, as anyone who has scp’d a large file would want. (via)
Lost Lessons from 8-Big BASIC. BASIC programming was very … immediate.(also via)
Booting directly into Vim. (via)
Memory Management Reference. (via)
ENIACinaction.com, about the first modern computer, in the 1940s. (via SIGCIS)
The Ig Nobel prizes for 2014 are announced.
XScreenSaver on YouTube.
World’s longest traceroutes.

2014/09/142014/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/14

I didn’t even notice, because this has been a difficult week for me, but I’ve hit over 6,000 posts on the Digest. I passed the 11-year mark too, a few weeks ago.

Wee Ada Lovelace. From a wee series, though this is the only computer-related one.
Being Productive with Emacs, part 1. (via)
The guy who didn’t invent email but really wants everyone to think so. (via)
Git Pretty. It’s a chart! (via)
How is a binary executable organized? Let’s explore it! Linux binaries, but mostly still applies. (via)
The network nightmare that ate my week. (via)
In a weird coincidence, the person who wrote that last link, Garrett Wollman, used to be a FreeBSD core team member and also knows a former coworker of mine, Scott Fybush. No point, just a strange connection when a faceless web page on the Internet resolves into someone you know indirectly through other channels.
Modernizing “less”. I’d be happier if it improved function, and was sent upstream. (via)
Breaking Madden: Jadeveon Clowney’s quest for 201 sacks in a game. I’ve posted links to prior gamebreaking attempts by this author before. I like how he’s doing his best to subvert the digital world presented by the game.
The Semantics of Software. “There are many parts to a praise-worthy open source project”. Read that section especially. (via)
The math is a bit beyond me, but I’d like to model the wifi signal in my home this way. (via)
“I want a sensible phone, not a smart phone“. This is why I’m still using a 4-year-old HTC Incredible – though it’s showing its age. (via)
Sweat the small stuff. I like the attention to detail, and the animated examples of what he’s doing with his software. (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Tea Making Tips, from England in 1941. This 60-year-old WW2-era film is actually one of the better how-to-deal-with-tea guides I’ve ever seen. (via)

2014/09/072014/09/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/09/07

I finished almost this entire thing just on September 1st. I blame school season restarting. Speaking of which, O’Reilly’s running a 50% off ebooks sale.

VAXen, My Children, Just Don’t Belong In Some Places. (via)
Taking it to Th’emacs. (via)
Running old UNIXes on the Raspberry Pi. (via)
In the Mind of the Fractal King. A reconstructed Benoit Mandelbrot interview. Does each question match the structure of the overall text? (via)
How I Start: Go. (via)
How to Secure SSH with Google Authenticator’s Two-Factor Authentication. Can you do this on BSD? I hope so. (via)
A 4-minute film about IBM culture – mostly before computing as we’d know it, from a longer 2011 film. (via SIGCIS)
Unix: Better network connection insights with mtr.
It’s a trap! Employment documents that require you to violate company policy. I had a similar situation once, handling abuse@ email for a Time Warner affiliate. I have some horrifying stories from that…
The truth about 2 spaces after the end of a sentence. (via)
Classic Papers in Programming Languages and Logic. Set aside some time for this. (via)
Building my own home router, part 1. I can figure out the other hardware – I just need a low-cost 24-port gigabit ethernet card so I can build a home switch. Yeah, yeah, I know. (via)
thx nsa.
The things that will last on the internet are not owned. (via)
Why do you think tech books don’t sell like they used to? (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the final answer on how to say GIF . (video source – watch the outtakes, too.)

2014/08/312014/08/30

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/31

A relatively trim list for the holiday weekend.

You have ruined HTML. (via)
Do you want to enjoy this? (via)
Useful Unix commands for exploring data. (via)
The most unintentionally tragic tech advert we’ve ever seen.
Doom 3 in Ada. (via)
The Beauty of Roots. (via)
Shift Happens. Notable for the revenue difference between Apple and IBM.
Distributed big balls of mud. Microservices are not the answer. (via)
Unix/Linux trick: ‘cd’ back to the previous directory. I forget this. (via)
The LISA14 schedule is out.
30 layers of NAT. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Submarine Cable Map 2014. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: “Horse.” One of my favorite single panels of all time.

2014/08/242014/08/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/24

I hope you like your links eclectic!

A Tale of Postmortems. As a work strategy, this strategy can restore trust that would otherwise be lost when people outside IT/Engineering experience problems. (via)
Unix: Viewing your processes through the eyes of /proc.
“Writing Aliens”, or, “Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt” Data patterns as seen by a science fiction author, and how it comes out in history and twitter. Really, a good presentation just for the range it covers. More bits on the author’s blog. (via)
A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. I was just thinking the other day about how much I hated PS/2 connectors, especially because I encountered a KVM switch in a rack that didn’t do USB. (via)
How Flash changes the design of database storage engines. It’s funny that when people say “Flash” nowadays, they mean the disk product, not the software.
Tweetable Mathematical Art. (via)
RGB LEDs that change color if a Server has a problem/is not responding. (via)
Not Rocket Science. An astonishingly good idea. (also via)
Years later, this image still gives me a mild jolt of panic.
Halfassed implementations of SSH are no fun.
Thursday, IRL. I just like the expression he makes.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: John Pound, one of the original Garbage Pail Kids artists, nowadays creates his art by coding it – mostly by writing out Postscript. He doesn’t draw sketchbooks – he generates them. (via)

2014/08/172014/08/15

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/17

For once, a shorter week.

One of the better telemarketer things I’ve ever read… and I realized what he was trying halfway through, cause I maintain the same models. (via)
Password Gropers Take the Spamtrap Bait. Peter Hansteen is the same person who found the Hail Mary Cloud.
Pseudo Automata, Fakes & Robot costumes. (via a Kickstarter email)
Input, a non-monospaced coding font, with a preview. (via)
Unix: Gaining network insights with tcpdump.
Are you near Shenzen? This hacker camp may interest you.
UNIX Wildcards Gone Wild. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Continuous Integration and Delivery Illustrated. Sometimes drawn versions are better than any text. (via)
Ten Years of OpenStreetMap. OSM is one of those things that I’m happy it just exists.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Wrenchies. I like Farel Dalrymple’s style.

Bonus unrelated: New Cyriak video!

2014/08/102014/08/07

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/10

This week’s Lazy Reading started as overflow from last week.

Cron checker. Cron commands to English. (via)
Unboxing the Magnus supercomputer. Aw, Crays don’t look as cool as they used to. (via)
OpenVMS gets a new lease on life. (via) Also, there are public OpenVMS installations like deathrow (via) and pub1 (via).
Unix: Controlling privileged access.
Unix: Top networking commands and what they tell you.
runit instead of systemd, on Void Linux. A ray of hope. (via)
The future of iced coffee. Why can’t someone put the same treatment into tea? (via)
What ORMS have taught me: just learn SQL. (via)
Docker security with SELinux. Containerization, which is all the rage these days, does not enforce the same security wall as with a virtual machine – containers can ‘leak’ to their parent operating system. I’m not sure enough people realize this. (via)
A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font. Check the screenshot of it being used on a 320×200 screen. (via)
lowRISC. Open source System on a Chip.
The Worst API Ever Made. I can’t judge if that’s really so, but it’s always fun to watch trainwrecks. (via)
My history with Forth & stack machines. Forth is a crazy language, in a good way. (via)
Lawless Legends, an Apple][ FRPG – in development. (via)
A Mac IIci

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Quantum & Pixel. Another Boulet comic, this time exploring 2D physics.

2014/08/032014/07/31

Lazy Reading for 2014/08/03

There’s a lot to read this week… I’m not sure how that happened.

Schwa, two decades later. I had this, then.
Famous Women of Computer Science. At least some of the names should be familiar to you. (via)
Anil Dash on the shifting meaning of “public”. An outgrowth of the jerktech problem.(via)
The History of Autocorrect. (via a newsletter)
-2000 lines of code. An early Macintosh story. (via)
Bill Atkinson’s name in the previous link made me think of Burger Bill (Rebecca, now) Heineman, which led to this: Mentions of Wolf3D for the Apple ][gs. It’s findable, even.
And that Sheppyware link reminds me of Sweet16, a really nice ][gs emulator for the Mac. Excuse me as I wander down the halls of memory…
Cool-old-term. Requires qt5 and I don’t know if it works on BSD… but it’s neat looking. (via)
Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim. There’s some more good resources in the source for this link.
At the same site: SSH Hacks.
hicat, cat with syntax highlighting. (via)
I’ve mentioned ISO 3103 before, or at least I thought I did, but there are apparently 25 more tea-related standards.
That led me to find George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Douglas Adams all had Opinions on Tea. I must have linked to one of them before, but I can’t find it. Douglas Adams is correct, though: most people in the U.S. have never had a decent cup of tea. (via)
Origins of common UI symbols. (via)
Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve. This interests me because it’s in the town where I live, but there’s something else. The vast, vast quantities of film out there was filmed in the last 100 years or so. Most of that film is still readable, though the older nitrate films are fragile. If all that video was digital, how would we access it? I don’t have a single digital storage item in my house older than 10 years, except maybe a Zip disk or two, and there’s no way I can read them. (via)
How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors. I expected the article to quote itself in the middle or something similar; Internet jokes are warping my expectations. (via)
Software, it’s a thing. Talking about how software exists when it is used, not just as a saved file but rather as a multitude of activities – and how that relates to preserving that history. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Mmmm… diagrams. That describes me. The subject and artist, Scott McCloud, has a book called Understanding Comics that is an excellent discussion of perception and communication. His exploration of visual “closure” is good for anyone who has to think about interfaces.

2014/07/272014/07/23

Lazy Reading for 2014/07/27

I was low on time but I still brought the links!

This is why software sucks. Many people get tech news by skimming headlines, and don’t read details – so prominently writing an opinionated title is more effective sometimes than, say, reasoned argument.
“selective disclosure” is a better term. (same author)
The EFF’s Open Wireless Router project. Can they get a 48-port one built?
UNIX: knowing your memory commands.
The Open Source Identity Crisis. I agree with the article – some people still think open source developers are the coders, and then there’s everyone else… which is emphatically not the case any more. (via)
Used/refurbished server sellers. This is going to be useful to someone.
Programming with Punched Cards. (PDF, via)
Escher: Choiceless programming. Weird. (via)
Apparently I’ll link to anything about Dwarf Fortress; it’s a culturally distinct thing – so much so that it’s being used as an art exhibit. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Summer cakes. The second recipe is from Nicola Humble. I just read her surprisingly interesting history of the cookbook in the UK, hence the link. Plus, I’m hungry.

2014/07/202014/07/19

Lazy Reading for 2014/07/20

I spent this week watching an older Cisco ASA slowly lose its ability to see parts of the Internet. How did I fix it? pfSense.

Unix: How passwords can improve your life.
Curated list of curated lists of awesome lists. I suppose this was inevitable. (via)
Hooray for USB. Really, it’s so successful we don’t even think about it any more.
A Game as Literary Tutorial. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons on writing. I’d describe it as a common nerd experience for people above 35 or so, similar to “your first computer”. (via)
Computer virus catalog. Surprisingly pretty. (via)
Why Outlook gets CTRL+F wrong.
Open (source) for business. Why aren’t open source software interfaces more polished? (via)
Cosmic rays: more likely a problem than you think. (via)
Inside bit.ly’s Distributed Systems. (via)
Huh, bzr appears to be dead, or as dead as any open source project can ever be. (via)
Making sure software stays insecure. I had to remove a preinstalled antivirus program from a Windows laptop yesterday… It did nothing, but you’d think I was lighting the motherboard on fire from the warnings it put on screen. (via)
The SIGCIS 2014 Workshop (on historical computing), happening in November in Michigan, has a call for papers out.
Time Management with Tom Limoncelli. He wrote the definitive book on the subject. (via) There’s plenty more videos at his site; I suggest setting aside some time to watch it. (ha!)

Your unrelated link of the week: Avery Monsen’s Vines. Vines are an excellent way to make a very short comedy sketch. Infinite Waffles and Break the Silence are my favorites so far. (via)

2014/07/132014/07/12

Lazy Reading for 2014/07/13

It’s a manageable list this week.

Markov Chains Explained. It’s useful to at least know what Markov chains are, because there are some silly text tricks that can be done, and it’s a good term to use so that you sound smart. (via)
Rob Pike’s 5 rules of programming. (via)
Similar: Epigrams in programming. (via)
snowdrift.coop, a new funding service for open source projects. It’s not launched yet, but it appears to be using a ‘shares’ approach which could be interesting. (via IRC)
Unix: never go topless.
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science. Good quote where I found it, too.
Don’t tell people to use VIM (because) You’re Using It Wrong. Notes how trendy “use Vim!” articles have become. (via)
The levels of Emacs proficiency. (via)
The genre-defining video games we forgot. A surprisingly in-depth documentary.
Eulerian Video Magnification. Heartbeat reading with common cameras. (via a newsletter)
Sometimes you think of something that should exist, and then you immediately find out it does exist – foot switches for emacs.
Explaining X11 for the rest of us. (via)
Awesome-awesomeness. Curated lists of resources for various languages. Two things struck me: one is that Github is being used more like a document repository than a code repository, sometimes, and the other is that this is such a huge list, it almost overwhelms the original purpose of showing what to use next. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Formicapunk. Boulet’s version of analog technology.

2014/07/062014/07/05

Lazy Reading for 2014/07/06

I was out sick for a few days this week (Norwalk virus ain’t fun), and so there’s a whole lot of links to follow.

The History of the Pocket Knife. I link to it because the pictures are pretty, and because a multitool is one of the more useful physical tools you can have. (via)
“Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler” Scott Hanselman’s keynote at Velocity 2014. I would like the reaction GIF to die out as a presentation tool, but the talk is funny. (via)
Ooh, a new James Mickens video! This is a sort of antidote to the overoptimistic Scott Hanselman video. Computers are a Sadness, I am the Cure. (via)
Book review: The Art of Unix Programming.
Computing Across America.
Again, not DragonFlyBSD.
Some interesting thoughts and actions on copyright. I bought the bumper sticker the author’s talking about, directly from him.
Uh oh.
Multi-process architectures suck. Yet that’s everything we work on these days. (via)
The March Towards Go. I keep meaning to sit down and actually try a project in Go. (via)
UNIX Tricks. Some Linuxisms in there, but oh well. (via)
Vim as Language. Not a bad description. Related by association: I get tired of seeing the little-avatar-plus-name-plus-job-title that gets stuck on so many blog posts. (via)
An interview with Damien Conway. He’s a very smart and direct person, so the interview is worthwhile. (via)
Patching the Newton. Some interesting early history. I remember holding a Newton and saying “This should work like a phone.”
BOOTSTRA.386 – A Bootstrap theme that will entertain you, or maybe give you painful flashbacks. (via multiple places)

Your unrelated link of the week: The 1987 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. Imagine there was no Internet access other than what you can telnet to, and nothing on TV other than this. That’s 1987.

2014/06/292014/06/28

Lazy Reading for 2014/06/29

I bring the audio and the visual today.

The History of Mana. (via)
Where “Von Neumann architecture” comes from. (via)
Futuristic User Interface 16. (video)
Floppy table. The storage space is clever.
As I’ve said before, every software project grows until it has its own package manager for installing other software. This time, it’s Rust. (via)
Also, sooner or later someone says, “Hey, I could build an operating system in $myfavoritelanguage!” It’s like building a house because you’ve got a favorite hammer rather than a need to live somewhere. (via)
Best of Vim Tips. (via) Some interesting tips in the source link comments, too.
vimawesome.com. Pretty! (via)
The Internet of Newsletters. A reaction (and a good one) to social media. (via)
Charlie Stross’s keynote YAPC speech.
“I no longer see the matrix anymore, all I see is dwarf, sad dwarf, crazy dwarf“
Awww, it’s cute.
Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars. And a counter-argument. (both via)
Modern tech in 1977 Atari style. (via) Did I link this before? I feel like I did, but maybe that’s because of the subject matter.
Sorta related: Betamaxx. (via)
“Undefined behavior can result in time travel“.
Lisp implementation in sed. (via)
Unix: having fun with diff.
Visualizing Algorithms. Presented with explanation and methodology, as it should be, as opposed to a random gallery of pseudo-mathy crap. (via)

You unrelated comics link of the week: The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turing, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Purvis. I have other work by both authors – they are excellent – and Alan Turning should be a name already familiar to you.

2014/06/222014/06/25

Lazy Reading for 2014/06/22

Again, a backlog from last week means this week is fat.

Non-classical processor behavior: How doing something can be faster than not doing it. Confusing but interesting.
Rudd Canaday’s blog. One of the people behind UNIX, though not as well known. His stories have some very interesting glimpses into early computing. (via)
Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine. Lisp machines get talked about as if they were the last remnants of a superior, extinct precursor race. Maybe they are? I’ve never touched one. (via)
Mapping the decentralization movement. I can get behind this idea. (via)
KnightOS, an operating system for z80 calculators. (via)
The SSD Endurance Experiment. (via)
The first Photoshopped image. (via)
Does your capacitive load purr?
The very worst subject lines.
Facebook has built its own switch – and it looks a lot like a server. Not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Open Compute idea, but the source article for the link has some useful references to equipment that you can actually get, unlike the Facebook doodad.
UNIX: $42,000. (this and other links via this thread.) (update: that link was to a FTP server at Bell Labs, which appears to be down… darnit.)
The end of Freshmeat, and a surprise link to the origins. (via)
Aggregate hardware and software use patterns from The Setup. A sort of crowdsourced ‘effective tools’ report. Not necessarily perfect – Aeron chairs are popular, for instance, but I’d pick something else.. In an odd coincidence, a former teacher/coworker of mine is #3 on The Setup right now. (via)
Happy World Productivity Day.
A three-sided die, which I didn’t think was possible.
8088 Domination, part 1 and part 2. Full-motion video on a 4.77 Mhz 8088 chip from 1981.
The Early History of Smalltalk. It’s a long read, but a good one. (via)

Your unrelated links of the week: My side hobby I never mention here is baking. I looked up a word I didn’t know, found out about an ice cream type I’ve never seen, started reading about odd things to do with eggs and pressure cookers, and now I’m confused by the possibilities. No narrative point here; I just need to get in the kitchen.

2014/06/152014/06/13

Lazy Reading for 2014/06/15

I’ve been short on this week (worked 19 hour day Tues/Wed, ug), so the list is short.

All Is Lost, the results of feeding the worst possible player stats into the NBA Y2K game. I don’t watch basketball or play sports games, but the forced scrambling of the game is entertaining. The author did a similar thing to Madden NFL. The animated GIFs are the best. (via)
UNIX Uniforms. (via)
UNIX: Root Cause Analysis. Always makes you sound fancy to say that.
jwz says: stop centralizing things.
The Burroughs B6500 Status Report. That’s some oooooold computing there. (via)
textql: SQL queries on CSV/TSV, which is something I’ve silently wished for before. (via)
Not sure what this is or the source, but it’s neat looking.

Your unrelated link of the week: Another Cyriak music video, this time for Bonobo. (via)

2014/06/082014/06/06

Lazy Reading for 2014/06/08

Less links than last week, but still lots. Alliteration!

“Google’s autonomous cars, meanwhile, have never even seen snow.” Or ice, or deer? Uh oh.
Bits Sysadmins Should Know. (via)
Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim. The title is misleading; it’s Emacs vs. Vim. (via)
How vi came about – Bill Joy in 1984. Compare to the previous link. (via)
Defensive Bash Programming. Just because it’s Bash doesn’t mean you should be sloppy. (via)
Why you should love nmap.
Dwarf Fortress updated – first update in two years. Too scared to play it.
The Unix Spirit set Free: Plan 9 from Bell Labs. As PDF. (via)
How It Works… The Computer. A Ladybird book, sorta.
Will this frustrate you as much as it does me?
Freedom. Is there an open source/works -on-nonMacOS-BSD version of this idea?
Old UNIX source, at unix.superglobalmegacorp.com. (via Antonio Huete on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Awesome 80s computing kids magazines. I had Enter, I think it was.
ADOM is alive again.

Your unrelated link of the week: Carpets for Airports. Requires Flash, unfortunately.

2014/06/012014/05/31

Lazy Reading for 2014/06/01

I have possibly two weeks worth of Lazy Reading built up here, so sit down and get with the clicking:

The Internet with a Human Face. Maciej Ceglowski’s recent talk. This is the you-should-read-it link of the week. (via)
I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome. Bunnie Huang finds the best place in the world to smash your cell phone.
The Art of UNIX Programming. Prompted by this.
Alert Design. The design of network monitor warnings, not designing alertly. (via)
UNIX History Repository. On GitHub. So much is on GitHub these days… (via)
A Trip Down UNIX Memory Lane. A lot of UNIX links this week; I don’t know why.
“Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketech platishforms?” Funny but sorta realistic.
Presenting Data and Information, taught by Edward Tufte. Might be both interesting and local to some reader. (via)
Python 3 is killing Python. This sort of thing has happened before, called “Perl 6”. (via)
The Design of SQLite 4. The more I use SQLite, the more I like it. (via)
Relics of Technology. How many of these things have you actually used? (via)
tetris-bsd: the most basic version of tetris I’ve ever seen. (via saved Google search)
That previous link led me to taipan, which is a game I loved on my Apple ][. Wait, I can still play it now?
Apple phone and tablet models from the 80s. I remember shaping and painting models out of that sort of foam, years ago, before CAD ate it all.
Notepad: more dangerous than you thought.
Not necessarily the wrong way to look at tech blogs.
2000 or so Unicode characters. What common fonts actually implement everything in Unicode? Cause that would be a heck of a lot of designs. (via a Kickstarter newsletter)
Beyond the stack. This way of setting up systems has taken over computing firms that are producing software for the Internet… but I don’t think people realize that isn’t all companies.
The current Humble Book Bundle includes some Top Shelf comics publications, including semi-fictional-early-hacking-history Wizzywig which I’ve mentioned before, and the colossal not-related-to-computers work From Hell. Hopefully will still be up when you read this…
If I can run an arbitrary program, I can do arbitrary things.
Sun stories. Remember, it used to be BSD, back when Sun did was growing. One thing everyone seems to agree on: the workstations were great. (via)
What’s going on with TrueCrypt. Since DragonFly has a truecrypt-compatible implementation, I’d certainly like to see it continue. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: The End of Garfield. I don’t know if this is the original source for the image.

2014/05/252014/05/25

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/25

Lots to read this week – enjoy!

Stories from net.rumors. War stories about old, big hardware – the file is from USENET in 1989, so many of the stories are about UNIX or pre-UNIX. It’s a long read, but worth it. (via)
Via the previous link: olduse.net. “Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago.” Also available via NNTP. The web page simulates a terminal news reader, down to the key commands. I’ve mentioned it before.
SSH Tunnel – Local and Remote Port Forwarding Explained With Examples. Partially for my own benefit, since I’ve always intended to set up forwarding but never had enough of a dire need to do so. (via)
Windows in video games. A neat description of how video games simulate building interiors, and a near-perfect usage case for animated GIFs. (via)
Go for sysadmins. Go seems to approach problems in a different way than Python/Ruby, but I don’t have enough experience to quantify that yet. Also, we need to document PFI better to show how you can already do exactly what the presenter does, with DragonFly. (via a mailinglist)
The 12-Factor App, noticed in the video in the previous link.
Building a homebrew USB device. (via) related: I wish lobste.rs would let you link directly to a story even if there weren’t comments yet.
UNIX: Database connection testing.
The future that everyone forgot. I always liked what Danger did. (via)
Arcade Story. I used to be that good with Black Tiger, though it wasn’t as flashy a game. (via)
RFC7258. “Pervasive monitoring is an attack”. (via many places)
Problem of the Week at the Harvard Physics Department. (via)
Notation, notation, notation: a brief history of mathematical symbols. (via)
An Open Letter on Feminism In Tech. Related: I am still trying to hire a system admin at my workplace. (via several places)
Microservices and the migrating Unix philosophy. As the first comment in the source link says, “They’ve not read Brooks enough.”
A curated list of open source sysadmin resources. Interesting set of links, though it seems silly to have this list as a Github project. (via)
Everything is Broken. (via many places)

Your unrelated link of the week: Well, not really unrelated, but this thought occurred to me.

2014/05/182014/05/18

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/18

Another week, another linkpile. I’d probably have more links if it wasn’t for Lost Alpha coming out.

Novena in the X-Ray. I like being able to see the ferrite cores inside the Ethernet ports.
Hardening Android. It’s a good idea. (via)
How to run the previous command with sudo quickly. Linked more because I never remember CTRL-a as the nondestructive alternative to CTRL-u.
UNIX on the Game Boy Advance. 5th Edition UNIX, too. There’s some good history included. (via)
Have you changed your password lately?
What happened to/with BIND 10? Some good points in that presentation. (via)
One of the better casemods I’ve ever seen.
Wearable NFC. Slightly less invasive version of RFID or magnet implantation. (via)
SIGGRAPH 2014 Technical Papers Preview Trailer. The trailer has some neat stuff in it, and here’s the actual papers. (via)
LibreSSL status report. Notable: a commercial company supports OpenSSL, but the code quality was horrible. Commercial sponsors don’t necessarily make everything better. Michael Lucas has notes too, and there’s video. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Dragonfly (the bug) closeups.

2014/05/112014/05/10

Lazy Reading for 2014/05/11

I’ve linked to Wizzywig (free complete book PDF at that link before, as a sort of early semi-fictional history of personal computing. I met the author at TCAF this weekend; his Brain Rot comics about the start of hip-hop are enjoyable too. There’s about a zillion more books I wanted to buy at TCAF, too…

Arabic programming language artwork. “At every single step of the way, every software tool you would use to build a language breaks horribly when encountering non-Latin text.” (via)
How babies are like Unix.
Bringing up V6 Unix on the Ersatz-11 PDP-11 Emulator. (via)
How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch. From the man himself. (via)
The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop. Diving into language use and data analysis. (via)
The Quest for Randomness. (via)
Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. An AD&D module and map, illustrated and turned into a complete narrative. (via)
Recreational Mathematics Magazine. Someone will find this deeply satisfying. (via)
Practical Alternatives to systemd?
The operating system: should there be one? (PDF) Smalltalk, lurking. (via)
Found via that previous link: The Interlisp Programming Environment. (PDF) Notice it says ‘environment’, not ‘language’. Lisp implementations seem to be considered both the operating system and the programming language.
Again found via: Go is more UNIX than UNIX.

Your unrelated link of the week: Memorex. As a friend from years ago said, “Eiiiiiiiiighteeeeeees”. (via)