Category: Lazy Reading

Nostalgia / game styling is the inadvertent theme of the week.

• 1-bit pixel art of Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave off Kanagawa”.  The layout of that site is fun.  (via)
• SpaceTraders: an API based game.  (via)
• From comments on the previous source: Text Elite.
• The seven programming ur-languages.  (via)
• The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware.
• The Chonky Pocket computer.
• The Flexowriter which was I think the output from a version of the Whirlwind.  (via)
• Before UNIX daemons, there were gnomes.
• AutoHotKey, which I always thought of as compensation for Windows not having a shell.

Some links: The Next Generation in Graphics Part 1, talking about the colossal shift in gaming that was Doom/Quake, and different kinds of differential, explaining how GPS is corrected.  And here’s something unusual: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band tracks with single instruments separated out by AI.  You can more easily hear how unique John French’s drumming was/is.

VCF East photos.  Some of these machines are complete mysteries to me.

Large language model, via the command line.

Audiobooks Without Audible.  Apple and Google have a financial incentive to make data loading that is on their platforms but outside of their marketplace as crappy as possible.  (via)

Sometimes updates are bad.  (via)

The Age of Average, which applies to operating system / open source development these days too, I think.

I haven’t done this in a while. Your unrelated music link of the week: Drifted Entities Vol. 2 by Healing Force Project.  New electronic, but not modern.

Data Transfer Initiative.  (via)

An oldie but goodie for April 1.  (via)

Infinite Mac, to go with previously linked Moof-A-Day.  (via)

Best description of a temp directory ever.

Docker the company vs Docker the product.

Mathematically summarizing RPG combat.  This is extremely niche but extremely interesting if you fit that niche.

“UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.”  Also why Windows had poor UTF-8 support for so long.

Just seeing the screens gives me a nostalgic feeling: early Mac floppies on the Internet Archive.  Collected by the same guy who did the Apple ][ cracks.  (via)

This printer recommendation matches what I’ve been saying for about 2-3 years now.  (via)

From “Run Your Own Mail Server” chapter 0:

“In 1978 Gary Thuerk, an employee of the Digital Equipment Corporation, emailed several hundred people he didn’t know an invitation to a demonstration of the new DEC packet-switching systems.  (…) Five days after the message went out the chief of the US Air Force’s ARPAnet Management Branch, Major Raymond Czahor, called Thuerk’s boss to tell them to never do it again on pain of disconnection.

This first advertising email sold twelve million dollars of computers.”