Lazy Reading – Page 30 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/12/152013/12/17

Lazy Reading for 2013/12/15

Halfway to Christmas; time to buy presents if you haven’t already!

DragonFly on Hacker News. I haven’t read through the comments fully.

The Meaning of “Doom”. This article makes a very good point; Doom was one of the first game that encouraged user participation in the creation of the game. Not the creation when it was first made, but the endless recreations as mods. It’s sort of the same mechanism as open source, but as an activity and not a license.

Alphabet of the Obsolete. Also known as “Things my children don’t know and don’t care about.”

Now is a good time to donate to the Internet Archive. (via many places)

The Development of the C Language. Dennis Richie was good at telling stories about some otherwise very dry subjects; his histories are enjoyable. Maybe you have to have a certain kind of temperament or interest to really like them. (via)

The Birth of Standard Error. It was a smelly typesetting machine where it first started. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)

There’s some other interesting articles on that site, including “Programming Languages vs. Fat Fingers” and “The Importance of Being Declarative“.

Better and Better Keyboards. Continuing the keyboard theme from previous weeks. (via)

Building the Commodore C-128. I never used one of these, but I’m sure there’s a few readers that will be gripped with nostalgia. (via)

The Amiga 500 as a Chrome add-in. Nostalgia, again. (via)

Running 4.3BSD Quasijarus with simh VAX. It’s apparently 4.3BSD for Vax hardware. I did not know of this, or at least I don’t remember it.

When a Bash script asks, “Where am I?”.

Have you heard the axiom that every program grows in scope until it reads email? It’s really all programs grow in complexity until they have their own auto-updater. (Also, XScreenSaver is awesome.)

Vim, in Javascript. Or maybe the axiom should be ‘Everything eventually is rewritten in Javascript’. (via)

“Did you see that interstitial? It was dope!” (via I forget, sorry)

Your unrelated animated gif of the week: Happy talking boat.

2013/12/082013/12/04

Lazy Reading for 2013/12/08

Links are a bit rushed this week cause I’ve been on the road, but here you go.

explainshell – help for arbitrary shell commands. It’s a really good idea, implemented in a pretty way. (via)

True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows. I’m also saving this for later, just like the person who found this link.

From the same place: The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection. Recreating the entire Internet, when the Internet could be summed up as a list of 5-6 locations.

How ALL CAPS and punctuation is now used to communicate mood. Communication methods still tied down by ASCII, and then UTF-8.

I miss USENET. (via)

A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility. Watch the video at the end. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: There are more comics and illustrated works out there than there ever have been. A decade ago, I could buy a few art comics and a reprint each month and feel like I was keeping up. Now, it’s like a firehose of minicomic, self-published books, and prestige reprints that completely refreshes every week. The Comics Reporter 2013 Holiday Shopping Guide is huge but barely touches on it all. Read through and order something you aren’t familiar with; I can almost guarantee there’s several items in there you’ve never heard of.

2013/12/012013/11/30

Lazy Reading for 2013/12/01

Now that I’m going into more descriptive detail with these, I’m going to try without the bullet points. It’s less of a Wall Of Text that way.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code. Really, very good advice. (via)

‘vr’ mentioned the Space Cadet and Symbolics Macivory keyboards in comments for last week’s Lazy Reading keyboard links. I didn’t know what they were, so searching around found me this Symbolics keyboard image (the model itself is apparently dearly missed)and the inevitable Wikipedia Space Cadet entry. I also found this study of keyboards that mentions some other ‘special’ modern models I’ve heard of in passing – Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking models.

Also found as part of that search: one man’s quest to get his own Lisp Machine. That appears to be about 10 years old, so my guess is that you’d go for emulation these days.

Sorting information that isn’t quite numeric. This bites everyone sooner or later.

The death and life of great Internet cities. “Whatever we may ultimately make of our move towards sites like Facebook, it’s almost certainly the case that, for the average netizen, it was a movement away from online literacy.” An excellent article about how communities are no longer built online – at least not through social networks. (via)

Farming hard drives: 2 years and $1m later. Data-driven analysis of hard drive prices, and how they’ve recovered poorly from the Thailand floods. I always like it when a company takes data from doing something on a large scale – something very few people are doing or could do – and releases it. (via)

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. Rob Pike pointing out how the system ecosystem was becoming monocultural. It’s over 10 years old, so some of the problems have changed. The interesting thing is to look at it and see which parts were identification of upcoming trends. (via)

DragonFly 3.6 video review. This person doesn’t realize the shell is tcsh, not bash, and it really, really messes him up. I had to stop watching about 6 minutes in. (via blakkheim on IRC)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Church of the Subgenius is selling 2-for-1 deals on ordainment. It’s really a legal ordainment, too, at least in the U.S. You can perform weddings, funerals… circumcisions? Not sure about the legal restrictions on that, and maybe I don’t want to know. Anyway, you get an entertaining pack of literature which you can take either completely seriously, or not at all.

2013/11/242013/11/23

Lazy Reading for 2013/11/24

There’s some in-depth items to look at this week; pull up a chair and get something warm to drink. You will be rewarded.

James Mickens, who you may remember from The Slow Winter a few weeks back, has written again with The Night Watch. Gonzo tech writing is the best. Note to self: a ;login: subscription might not be a bad idea, as apparently there’s more like that.
Another note to self: watch the USENIX blog. There’s some interesting things on there.
Citation Needed. There’s a plausible claim in this that the reason we have 0-based indexing in most languages is because of yacht-racing. Seriously, read the article, and follow some of the links in it. (via)
Engelbart’s Violin. Because “a computer system should maximally reward learning.” Found in that previous essay; good enough I had to break it out.
Found in the comments from that previous link: SiWriter. One-handed phone typing, simulating a chorded keyboard.
History of T. I was wondering if it was something about tea, but no, it’s a discussion about a Lisp implementation. Lisp all seems to originate from a magical time, when computers were faster, dragons were common, and elves hadn’t retreated across the sea yet, or at least all the stories have that mythical vibe. See the ycominator link for additional discussion about system languages like Rust, of which I have only heard in passing so far.
The video and audio from LISA 2013 has been posted. There’s lots there; I’m sure you’ll find an interesting topic.
I wasn’t kidding about this being a dense week for links, was I?
This should have been in yesterday, but I only read about it this morning: Darwin/BSD on ARM. More ARM work everywhere, please; there’s a tidal wave of these processors washing about. (thanks, J.C. Roberts)
Why I use a 20-year-old Model M keyboard. See the ycombinator discussion for alternatives. They all may seem expensive, but it’s equipment you’re going to smash your fingers against for many years; it should be good.
That discussion link in the previous item led me to this image. An old-style Thinkpad keyboard? Now that would be pleasant to use. Apparently these existed, though the Lenovo keyboards section doesn’t have anything exactly by that name; the keyboards there look generic. There’s some on eBay. Anyone ever used one?
The Homebrew Computer Club reconvenes. A computer club nowadays is “we downloaded some of the same software”, while back then it was “I built a computer.” A bit more hardcore.
chibitronics. It’s ‘circuit stickers’, and a good idea.
mattext, a matrix-style pager. Does it work on DragonFly? Haven’t had a chance to find out. It needs a video demo. (via)
More UNIX script debugging. Still Bash-specific, but still useful.
Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt. A useful comparison for those not familiar with these types of tool. (via)
UNIX Proves Staying Power as Enterprise Computing Platform. Gives a short history of commercial UNIX platforms.
I find stories about closing cloud companies compelling. I’d probably feel different if it was my problems to sort out.

Your unrelated link of the week: Mr. T PSA. It’s a parody of the real thing. I explicitly mention it because you, the reader, might not be just the right age to remember this.

If that’s not confusing enough, watch this.

2013/11/102013/11/08

Lazy Reading for 2013/11/10

I spent this entire week saying things like “Wait, today’s Tuesday?” and “I thought this was Wednesday, not Thursday.”

Welcome to my GUI Gallery, a whole lot of different GUI screenshots. This mention of the “Salto” Alto emulator brought me there, and there’s some material I’ve never seen before. Also, there’s Bob. Not “Bob” the prophet, but Bob, the computer mistake. Speaking of problematic designs, see the Windows 8 page.
5 Cool UNIX Hacks. Sounds linkbaity, but it’s useful. I didn’t realize that CTRL-a is the non-destructive version of CTRL-u. (via)
This seems strange, but I never heard of PLATO, even though it seems to be the precursor to so much. (via)
“Goodbye Google“, in terms of switching to your own platform, seems to be a new trend.
arkOS, a similar idea.
Finding Files Your Way. I can never remember all the arguments to ‘find’.
Google has a Shell Style Guide. Which equates to a Bash Style Guide, but that’s OK. Shell scripts are sometimes considered the most disposable form of programming, so it’s good to see a full guide. (via)

Your unrelated animation of the week: late for meeting. A followup to going to the store, which I think I posted here years ago.

2013/11/032013/11/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/11/03

This was a loooooong week, with me working 24 of the last 48 hours. It didn’t get in the way of the link-gathering, though!

This report on what’s new in Unicode 7 is stranger than you’d expect. (via)
gzip + poetry = awesome. This is a great way to visualize compression. (via)
The Internet Archive now lets you run old software via in-browser emulation. Of course, all the screenshots are of games because everyone wants to revisit childhood. (via)
I tell people a Leatherman is one of the best computer tools you can have. Here’s multitool overkill. I’m mentioning a specific brand for a reason, by the way. (via several places)
Fixing UNIX filenames. It’s a bit older, so you may have seen this. (via)
UNIX: the Art of Being Lazy. Remember, the Three Virtues of a programmer, from Larry Wall: Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.
A Mac Plus running System 7 – in Javascript. One of my first computers; even the control panels seemed to hold promise. (via)
Lets Blather All Over… Quadrilateral Cowboy. A hacking game that actually involves code.
What I do when I’m not on here. Rotary phones dialing through an electromechanical exchange to reach between Asterisk VoIP server. I love watching the gears go. (via)

Your unrelated animated image of the day: (via via)

2013/10/272013/10/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/27

Whee!

Commodore 64 and Spectrum keyboards – USB versions. Not interesting to me, but I bet at least one person reading this just got excited.
The Horrible World of Web Hosting. Unfortunately quite an accurate article, especially in his quote translations. (via)
Getting an Apple 1 to run. Note that the circuit board is mounted in a wall frame.
Interactive Fiction Competition 2013 recommendations. This can eat up a few hours if you have them to spare. (via)
Where shutdowns are not disasters. An exploration of the shutdown command.
Mail backups using newsyslog.conf for rotation. A clever idea.
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for ? That story and the link on Hacker news where I found it have some entertaining floppy disk anecdotes. I originally wrote “old floppy disk” but realized that was redundant. Almost all floppies are old at this point.
Don’t Copy That Floppy! Why haven’t I linked this before?
Don’t Copy That 2. Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a sequel?

Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films. You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around. Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them. (via) There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now. Why do I even know these things?

2013/10/202013/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/20

Whee!

The Shady Characters blog talks about alternate phone dial layouts. I’ve mentioned those here before, but Shady Characters links to this video describing the testing that went on for the keypads. Check at about 2:40 for the story on how AT&T figured out the ‘correct’ length for the phone handset cable.
The Youtube channel for Numberphile, the source of that previous video link, has some pretty entertaining math videos…
The UNIX as a Second Language blog has an article up about using strace.
The Roland SP-808. I didn’t know these had a built-in Zip drive. (via)
The ICT 1301 runs again. This is what big computers are supposed to look like, with large cabinets, and spinning tapes, and oversized operator consoles. (via)
Cryptogeddon, a sort of augmented reality game where I think you sneak your way across real systems. ‘Real’ as in not someone else’s computers, but real systems set up for this game. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence. I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers. The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab. For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since. I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover. It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.

2013/10/132013/10/12

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/13

This week just built up and built up.

UNIXStickers.com. Not really UNIXish. More vaguely free software cause-ish. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
The Hail Mary Cloud and the Lessons Learned. Peter Hansteen’s talk from BSDCan 2013. I linked to some of his earlier comments on this botnet before, but this is the comprehensive summary.
Dwarf Fortress NYC. A good exploration of how the symbolic representations in Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes in general are not that far from ‘accepted’ artwork and design. (via)
Killscreen on Salty Bet. Describing Salty Bet out loud sounds like a cyberpunk novel idea from 1998. (via)
The top 100 inventions of the past 100 years. I’d argue that some of them are not that important, but the photographs are neat. (via)
Resurrecting APL/360. People go to extremes to recreate not-very-pleasant historical computing environments. (via)
Facebook and Open Networking Plan. Facebook doesn’t exactly do good, but I do like the idea of separating hardware from software in networking equipment, a la pfSense. (via)
Polemic: how readers will discover books in future. Sounds awful, and unfortunately a bit feasible. (via, with a great illustration)
Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance. A lot of the stupid mistakes tech companies make happen because they are uniformly run by inexperienced people. Worse, this is the sort of perspective you only gain with age. (via)
How was Hangul Invented? I don’t know any Korean, spoken or written, but I find the planned creation of a language interesting. (via)
History of the Telegraph. I like the physical design of the old models. Also, Western Union was once the largest telecom company in the world.
A list of free programming books. (via)
Connecting a payphone to Asterisk. I did a similar thing with a Model 500. Hmm… and this guy has the same initials as me. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.

2013/10/062013/10/03

Lazy Reading for 2013/10/06

I’m going for pull quotes and dedicated paragraphs this week, just to mix it up.

The Slow Winter. It’s about the history and trends of chip design, if you can believe it. “Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO.” I love it so much. (via)

Richard Stallman on 30 years of GNU. I don’t agree with everything he says, but the basic point is correct. “If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. ” (via multiple places)

When Pipes Get Names. For some reason, I’ve never had to deal with named pipes – directly. I’ve used them via other programs, of course.

The person who invented Whack-A-Mole also created dedicated email terminals in the 80s/90s called Anti Gravity Freedom Machines. All those smaller ‘Maker‘ projects seem unenthusiastic compared to this guy. Anyway, his warehouse full of robots blew up. I haven’t found pictures yet.

Joblint, a job description checker. This has more value than I thought. I’m curious about statistical results over a large number of jobs. Take a look at those warnings, too – they’re mentioning the possible dark side of a lot of job ‘benefits’. (via)

This XOXO presentation by Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Pinboard, makes some good points about work, going against countervailing wisdom to some extent. “You can work on a lot of projects, but you will only get a couple of opportunities to work on something long-term.” Pinboard is one of those businesses that remains relatively successful without having to get bought by Google to return any profit. That’s a sort of success I find fascinating. (via)

CERN has created an in-browser version of… the first web browser. It accurately displays like a green-screen terminal, including key clicks. Watching the screen draw gives me flashbacks to playing MUDs.

Adding Vi To Your Zsh. Can you add vi-like keybindings to tcsh? (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Art comics links. It’s a link to more links, but it’s all worthwhile stuff. Be prepared for difficult but rewarding reading.

2013/09/292013/09/28

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/29

Moved 20 servers to new hardware this week. Normally my workplace doesn’t get very active until snow hits. Normally. Anyway, going for the long sentences this week.

Why I moved away from Microsoft ASP.NET. I agree with everything in this. I’m overgeneralizing, of course, but there’s a certain diminishing return in how easy you make any programming language.
In which I revisit the pastimes of my misspent youth. The last 2 sentences are a nerd experience I am sure we’re all had.
The Floppy ROM. Software via record. If you ever wanted to be able to see a head crash as it happens on your storage medium, this is the way. (via)
Chart of Electromagnetic Radiation. You’ll need to/want to zoom in. (via)
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring. I’ve linked to a review of the book before.
Paula Deen X Machine. Baked goods and graphs, two of my favorite categories of thing. (via I forgot, sorry)
The new Amazon tablets are nice, but there’s no video out. You have to use their network service. This is what makes me leery of newer tablets and phones; as it becomes easier to use network bandwidth to replace physical connections, you become dependent on a separate company to use your own hardware.
Vim documentation in PDF form. Maybe print it, maybe don’t. (via)
Salesforce Architecture. I like seeing how the really, really huge server setups work, but I doubt I’ll ever have to handle one; how many are there outside of Google/Amazon/a couple other companies? (via)
Obstacles to future proofing home automation. At that level of hardware, you can’t assume everything’s going to talk 802.11 or have an Ethernet port.
Tape rescues big data. I need to set up a larger backup system at work, and it might be tape. I hate tape, but I hate it less than the alternatives.

Your unrelated link of the week: Proper Opossum Massage. Yes, it’s a serious video, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

2013/09/222013/09/21

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/22

This week, the sewer drain for my house clogged. Fixing that is not fun. What is fun is reading random semi-technical articles around the Internet. So get clicking!

Avoiding Repetitious Work with Sed. I know I’ve never used awk and sed to their full potential, but… it’s kinda not fun.
Bunnie Huang goes to Burning Man 2013, and remote-controlled flamethrowers result.
The shocking truth behind Tetris. (via)
The USE Method: Linux performance checklist. This would be interesting to migrate to BSD – and then try it as a comparison method between the various BSDs. (via)
A Brief History of Lisp Machines. I find these machines built around a language interesting, especially since they are extinct. (via)
The Walkman Archive. (via)
Vim as a presentation tool. (via)
The First Critical Hits. Role-playing game history. (via)
Kickstarter for open source. (via)
Tracking disk space usage. Of course, doesn’t work the same way on Hammer.
Atari box art.
Atari box art parody.

2013/09/152013/09/14

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/15

I think I’m finally catching up on the backlog.

Unix: Flexibly moving files with lftp. I usually copy and paste a shell script together.
BANCStar source code. In that sort of environment, there’s no good or bad code. It has moved beyond such considerations. (via)
The Lenna Story. About the 1972 Playboy centerfold image used to test image compression. I mentioned it once before in passing. (via)
If you find regular expressions difficult, putting another layer of expression on top doesn’t help. (via)
How not to check the validity of an email address. I had a similar experience at an old job in 1999, where a coworker set a site’s main page to get all news stories and then showed the 10 most recent. This started to really slow things down when we reached over 5,000 stories… (via)
Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services. A PDF of slides. (via)
It’s described as “the best programming fonts“, but it’s really the most popular monospaced typefaces. Who cares about correct language – it has visual examples. (via)
Phone keypads could have been very different. (via)
Sudo Mastery’s first draft is complete. You can buy it now and get updates as it gets polished.
Have yourself a keysigning party. GPG is complicated. I know there’s reasons, but still, this is the sort of thing that would be better with as little barrier to entry as possible.
The Internet, via Commodore64 and Neuromancer.

Your unrelated link of the week: The Alan Lomax recordings.

2013/09/082013/09/04

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/08

By the time you read this, I’ll have already been sitting on an island for a few days. There’s so much stuff to post lately I’m scheduling material a week out.

Have you used the grep replacement ‘ack‘? There’s a Twitter feed of tips for it.
A horrible programming idea, so bad I can’t tell if it’s trolling. (via multiple places)
Links at the previous item led me here: Breaking Systems for Fun and Profit.
A tiny fatmac. It’s adorable.
Beautiful Code, from Rob Pike, described by Brian Kernighan.
That previous link was found via this reimplementation of Pike’s grep in Go. The “Practice of Programming” book mentioned is one of my favorites.
The SCUMM Diary. The SCUMM engine could arguably be as big an influence as the Quake engine on game history. (via)
This is a very nice keyboard.
Managing sshd in Ansible, cross-platform. A sequel to last week’s Ansible/Lucas link.
UNIX pioneers remember the good times. These anecdotes seems to illustrate the personalities of their tellers/perpetrators. Or at least I imagine they do. (via)
NTP reference clock statistics. (also via) When milliseconds matter. Also, yay graphs!
WTF Visualizations. A counterpoint to the previous well-illustrated link. I read through a bunch of the nonsensical graphs and started to feel disoriented. (also also via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Scout, by Malachi Ward. A self-contained sci-fi story.

2013/09/012013/09/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/09/01

Another week of links completed early. And there’s a lot, so get clicking!

1BSD, the installation. Interesting to see the procedure and the tools used.
Over the Rainbow, polychromatic type from Microsoft. I don’t know if this is as exciting as they seem to think it is.
Do your own backups. Yeesh, what an unfortunate event. I’m fixing up my backups now, after my own troubles.
Operating System Development series. Dry but interesting. (via)
Windowing operating systems are too messy, too restrictive. From 1984. (via)
Home Automation via the Internet. For those who don’t want to deal with x10.
Chess implemented in Sed. No en passant? Sheesh, I was on board until that point. (I’m making a joke) (via)
Managing sshd in Ansible. Ansible’s getting more popular, it seems.
Remember that PDF compression/scanning error I mentioned a few weeks ago? Xerox has fixed it for their devices, and the patch is available. One of the ways to apply the patch is to print the file to a copier, via LPR/raw. Firmware updates via printing – that seems like a good and bad idea all at the same time.
JAVASCRIPT MESS. 45 different computers all emulated in Javascript. A Javascript Mac SE, for instance.
An XKCD cartoon slightly related to the previous link.
Learn to code. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The remix of this 1997 Kid’s Guide to the Internet – somewhat NSFW, and has all the best moments. More from EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.

2013/08/252013/08/22

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/25

This week, I’m opinionated on every link.

An 80s computer ad that got almost everything correct. It used to be sci-fi environments were super-clean – now they’re dirty, with ubiquitous electronics. That’s something that could be picture-blogged to prove, but I ain’t doing it.
Bunnie Huang does “exit interviews” when he stops using equipment. Given his electronics knowledge, he goes into a lot of detail, including pictures through a microscope. Speaking of this, how has my ancient HTC Incredible survived 3 years of trips into a salt mine? I don’t know.
InterTwinkles, open source group decision making software. Don’t know how well it works, but it certainly seems like the right idea. (via)
Turning the Apple //e into a Lisp machine, part 1. They don’t actually get to the Lisp machine part, but it talks about how Apple computers could load data through the audio jack. I remember doing that with a tape player, too. It sucked. (via)
kOS. It’s so minimal that I am not sure what it can do or how to use it, but it’s also so minimal that I’m sure there must be something to it. (via)
Building a Chording Keyboard. I’ve mentioned the Microwriter and Twiddler before, but this article goes into a lot of detail about the actual construction of a home-made unit. (also via)
Book review: The Healthy Programmer. It may or may not make you exercise, but it will make you feel a little guilty about sitting and reading the web like you are doing right now.
Hyphen, en dash, em dash, minus. So few people know there’s a difference. (via)
ASCII Art. History of, examples, and so on. (via, with video)
Five Useful Git Tips. Git tips come up all the time, but this one is interesting because it’s using “showterm“, which lets you make text-based animations? movies? to show a work process in a terminal. I think I may have linked to something similar before, but this is good.
How to Avoid the Emacs Pinky Problem. A neat idea, but some of the suggestions are actually going to make it worse. (via)
Vim: revisited. Decent ideas, and the links at the end are good further reading. There, I’ve posted on both sides of the editor issue. (via)
The problem with Vim. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: the Scary Godmother Doll. One of my favorite illustrators, building a doll. I met the creator years ago in Pittsburgh; she is an astonishingly energetic person.

2013/08/192013/08/14

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/18

Had this one done before the last Lazy Reading. There are so many things to see and think and do in a day, and they’re not even all on the Internet. You get only the Internet ones here, though.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda on why there won’t be another Hacker News. Found on Hacker News, of course, and I suspect the title was designed to get clicks from there. Some interesting thoughts on how people read.
Facebook is like a television that monitors to see how much you are laughing and changes the channel if it decides you aren’t laughing hard enough.
Unix routing. It’s actually Linux routing, but if you avoid the Linux-specific parts, it’s a useful introduction.
ASCII cheat sheet.
How to build a user-level CPU profiler. Followed by Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles.
Mediagoblin. I haven’t tried it, but the idea is a good one. As long as we don’t have to call it GNU/Mediagoblin.
I was going to make a joke about not using software I can’t name out loud without sounding incomprehensible, but then again, I’m using BSD. Too late for that joke.
The Future of Programming. Take the time to watch this. The list of resource links is enough to fill several afternoons with reading. Also, it’s not yet another TED talk where someone is trying to communicate excitement rather then information. (via)
If I’m going to link to Reggie Watts, why not look at one of his music videos? Normally that would be an Unrelated Link, but I just made it related from the previous item, yay! (link contains naughty language.)
Go for system administrators. (via)
Git + webcam = lulz. This could be fun or scary or both. (via)
Retro video games, delivered. (via) I still hope to build a MAME box someday.
0.9999999999 repeating = 1.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Boulet’s Long Journey. Get ready for a lot of scrolling. I know there’s a lot of really good French comics that I don’t see just because I don’t speak the language. (This one’s in English, but the cartoonist is French.)

2013/08/112013/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/11

Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”

Perl, the Detroit of scripting languages. The slides are entertaining, but it’s also interesting for the discussion of how to handle a very old code base and a community. (which are BSD issues too) (via)
Ruins of Forgotten Empires: APL languages. “APL uses one thread per CPU, which is how sane people do things.” (via)
Remember when we used mega- prefixes to measure disk and memory, and not bandwidth?
Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part series on ELF linkers and linking. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
PDF compression formats. Incidentally, here’s an answer on the Xerox number alternation issue, where compression means one number gets misidentified and substituted for another. The Economist has a not-crazy take on it. It’s not a Xerox problem but rather a JBIG2 compression issue. I have a number of Xerox models at work and have not seen this issue, but also haven’t checked for it.
OSI, the Internet That Wasn’t. People only ever care about levels 1, 2, 3, and 7 in the OSI model. And this joke. (via)
The Toshiba Libretto. You can get more powerful, smaller computers now, but they’re cheap netbooks and totally uncool.
A crash course in tmux. (via)
Whatever room you keep your primary computer in – clean it, please.
Robots for destroying buildings. This is not some speculative article; these are robots you can buy right now. Screw the flying cars joke everyone makes; the future is now. (via)
How to shutdown computer under Linux? A rough summary of how Linux can be a moving target for actual usage.
Vim 7.4 out, mostly so there isn’t so many patches to apply.
Goto is making a comeback. (via Eric Radman)

Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.

Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.

2013/08/042013/07/31

Lazy Reading for 2013/08/04

These have been very easy to create over the last few weeks; there’s been a torrent of reading. Can I say torrent without making it sound like this is all downloaded large files? The word is overloaded. Anyway:

How emacs changed my life, from I think the creator of Ruby. (via)
Autodesk uses Creative Commons right.
British kids in the early 80’s, using computers. Might induce nostalgia for some.
Forth – The Early Years. (via)
The Collapse of the Animal Crossing Economy. I am entertained by the intersection of games and economics. (via)
Tagsistant, a tag-based filesystem. Works via command line, which is unexpected. (via Tim Darby on users@)
Git and GitHub Secrets. (via)
IE vs. murder rate. Correlation, rather than causation, but still funny. (via)
toybox, a BSD-licensed command line environment for Android. I mentally said “so what?” until I saw the “Why is Toybox?” presentation. It’s an excellent talk that makes a sequence of good points about many topics on licensing and utility, and I recommend making time for watching it. (first link via)
The Confused Deputy, an explanation of capabilities. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)

Your unrelated link of the week: What goes on when you are not there!

2013/07/282013/07/25

Lazy Reading for 2013/07/28

So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.

The FatMac cooler. Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
Note the embroidered dragonflies.
Early mobile and video phones. Decades early. Look at the slideshow.
Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
Best Open Source games. Dunno how many work on any BSD. (via)
The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
The GREP test, an excellent standard for code. (via)
What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky? (also via)
Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
People are really starting to pile on Microsoft. (I already started) Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market. Maybe ubiquity is a better word?

Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!