Lazy Reading – Page 32 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2013/03/242013/03/23

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/24

It’s still snowing in my area, which is unusual. And great!

An IBM Selectric being gutted, in stop motion.
Apple is Losing the War – Of Words. I’m not interested in it for Apple, but rather the casual reference to the huge quantity of astroturfing going on, all the time, from major tech companies.
Following up on my earlier tweetspam post: World’s Best Spam. Remember, recommendations from others is the most effective persuasion method to get people to buy, so there’s a big economic incentive to create positive recommendations. (via)
Related: The Economics of Spam. (via)
se, a modernized, screen-oriented ed. (via)
Where the symbols “+” and “-” came from. (via)
A Partial History of Headphones.
Geometric shapes in Latex. I’m sure someone will find this useful. (via)
“The Kung Fu Killing Machine DragonFly” See the second cover. I have this actual series in paper form; it’s great. (via)
That Afrodisiac comic from the previous link is available from the publisher; there’s a PDF preview.
Continuing – the best blaxplotation homage ever is Black Dynamite.
I never promised I’d stay on topic here.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: French cartoonist Boulet knocks it out of the park again.

2013/03/172013/03/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/17

You know what stinks? I find a really cool thing online somewhere, early in the week, or even in a previous week, like today’s unrelated link. Between me finding it and this always-on-Sunday post, other people encounter it, the link gets reposted everywhere, and it’s old hat by the time you see it here. Yeah, I’m complaining like it’s hipster linking!

Has anyone noticed how there’s been an explosion in nontraditional peripherals lately? Seriously, follow those links. I know there’s more.
A Roguelike Primer. An excellent overview of a lot of different roguelikes. I didn’t know NetHack had an isometric view. (via)
There’s a programming language called Quylthulg. That makes me happy, in a D&D/roguelike kind of way.
Abandoned Apples. I feel bad about the Apple ][ units, and the fatmacs. (via I forget)
yes `yes no`. The comments on the linking page note how the linking description is all wrong (and here’s corrections), but one comment is fun: shell Russian Roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click* (via)
A note about Google Reader’s demise from an interview with one of the creators. It strikes me that there aren’t more people mad that RSS feeds are hard to find. There’s lots of conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and other places, and I can’t see them without getting an account for each, and logging in. The overall effect of this separation is that it’s hard to follow any one source.
The Thing, an art BBS.
Here’s a chart of possible Google Reader replacements, plus my query earlier this week let to a number of comment suggestions. tt-rss looks like a good candidate, because I don’t have to worry about someone deciding not to run it anymore. There’s also newsbeuter, though maybe that’s too minimal.

Your unrelated link of the week: I almost can’t tell this is a parody. Actually, it’s more like a double level of parody. Seen on this inexplicable, wonderful Tumblog; found via arts inscrutable.

Bonus link: Dog Snack Episode 3.

2013/03/102013/03/10

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/10

I managed to come up with a lot of links this week, somehow, despite the start of the class I’m teaching in addition to normal work. And Summer of Code’s coming up! And we’re due for a release relatively soon! I may appear somewhat… stretched over the next few weeks.

Hey, other people are noticing that odd linkspam email I’ve been getting. (via)
The followup: Don’t share that infographic spam. I’m pretty sure I’m the ‘one reader’ mentioned by the author, since I mailed him about the previous story.
I always enjoy stories about troubleshooting strange performance problems.
We need something like this Red Book idea for pkgsrc/DPorts.
Ode to the Semicolon. I love semicolons; I use them more than an em dash. (via)
The Maker Map. You may find this useful for building resources. I’m gaining one near me soon. (via)
The Book-writing Machine. Possibly the first book written with a word processor. (via)
Vim Git Gutter. A brilliant idea: show the git diff as you work in Vim. (via)
Add everything to Vim! Add nothing to Vim! (via a long twisty path of links)
An HTML5 roguelike, THE ROYAL WEDDING; nicely done. (via)
Hey, the Digest is on Google Plus, or at least the RSS feed is.
Smallest analog computer ever made. This is what computers should look like. (via)
List of inventors killed by their own inventions. No good reason to link this other than it’s a longer list than I thought it would be. (via)
This PHP/MySQL assessment made me laugh. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I’m the Computer Man. I always thought the mid-1990s were sort of a Internet/computer teenager phase. Everything had potential but everything was also awkward. (via I forget, sorry!)

2013/03/032013/03/02

Lazy Reading for 2013/03/03

I am all over the place with links this week – some of them pretty far off the path. There’s a lot, too, so enjoy!

Puctuation obscurantism, punctuation humor; I like it all. (via)
Exporting your git repository. Found while looking for something else.
I want CTRL-D at a terminal to make something like this to happen.
Visual Representation of Regular Expression Character Classes. I like visual ways of classifying complex data.
Speaking of which: Anatomy of Data. Not sure how I found it.
Digital Files and 3D Printing – In the Renaissance? The title sounds a bit linkbaity, but the story of the 14th century map designed to be recreated with a graphing tool is pretty neat.
Postgres: The Bits You Haven’t Found. Advanced/odd Postgres usage. (via)
Breaking your arrow keys is the latest idea in improving Vim usage.
PC-BSD is moving to a ‘rolling release’ format, and also using the new pkg tools that are also in DPorts. Historic details on this new setup are available.
Fred, taking off.
Ten hours with the most inscrutable game of all time. I like the idea of Dwarf Fortress more than I actually like playing it. I’m somewhat afraid of it. It looks like this sounds.
That last comparison wasn’t necessarily fair, but it was fun.
If I’m going to talk about music like that, I should link Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
The Wizard of Pinball. I just want my own standup pinball or arcade cabinet game. Yes, yes, I know, MAME cabinet.
Appropriately this week, “Ball Saved”, page 1 and page 2 of a 2-page comic about pinball.
UnReal World, an Iron-Age roguelike. Apparently pretty brutal, and two decades in development. Runs on several platforms, but not BSD. (via)
You Are Boring. Some of the ‘boring’ items made me laugh. (via)
The first review of Michael W. Lucas’s Absolute OpenBSD, Second Edition is available.

Your unrelated link of the week: I’ve already been offbeat enough in this Lazy Reading; I don’t have anything else.

2013/02/242013/02/24

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/24

A calm week, for once.

Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post. These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated. If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions. Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else. (via)
Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing. (via)
The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter. (via)
The Story of the PING Program. I could have sworn I linked to this before. I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk. (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want. (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic) Look at a sample page if you are curious.

2013/02/172013/02/16

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
“Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)

Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!

2013/02/102013/02/11

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/10

For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.

“Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
“It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.

2013/02/032013/02/03

Lazy Reading for 2013/02/03

No theme evolved this week, but that’s OK.

Here’s a good coincidence: I already had a link to post from Ycombinator about the rather scary Ken Thompson compiler hack. Note that the Ycombinator answers are generally, “Nah, this hack is extremely unlikely to happen.” Except Christian Neukirchen happened to note separately that this really happened as recently as 2009, with Delphi.
This poster doesn’t understand that “removing the license” is not a legitimate use of BSD-licensed code.
That crazy anti-BSD ranter on phoronix is getting a fan club – just what every troll desires, unfortunately.
OpenBSD is actually looking at paring down ports, which makes sense when you read why.
LearnYouAHaskell.com – a free tutorial on the programming language Haskell. It’s entertainingly written. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Javascript is the new Perl. I can see that. (via)
Courier Prime, a new version of the ‘traditional’ Courier monospace font. (via) Reading about Courier Prime to the end leads to a mention of Inconsolata as a good ‘coding’ font. Anyone tried it? Sans-serif monospace fonts are the most subtle way you can make your xterm look modern, I think. Update: Thomas Klausner just added courier-prime to pkgsrc, so you can try it now. Inconsolata is already there.
Who hasn’t thought about doing this with the computers in their house, really?
“Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them.“
A modem from the 1960s, communicating. I’d like this even if it didn’t work; the box is nice. I remember watching text scroll on screen like that with a 1200-baud unit. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Related to that: The sound of the dialup, pictured. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: MeTube: August sings Carmen ‘Habanera’. Might be NSFW, probably will make you mildly confused or uncomfortable. Here’s the ‘making of’ video which is all in German, I think. If that’s too much, try a recent Cyriak-animated video. I never thought I’d recommend a Cyriak video as the less disturbing thing to watch.

2013/01/272013/01/26

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/27

Whee!

This is a good thing.
This is a (description of) a bad thing. (via)
Linux is becoming the opposite of UNIX. (via makx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Found via the previous article: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.“
Arch/FreeBSD. This mixing is still weird. Don’t take this stuff seriously, yet. (via)
Gygax Magazine, a reinvention of gaming magazines that no longer exist. It’ll apparently include What’s New with Phil and Dixie, from the original Dragon magazine.
What does the middle initial “B” stand for in “Benoit B. Mandlebrot”? Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
So that’s where Markov chains came from.
The first computer image of a person, and of course it’s porn. (via)
Hey, that’s my haiku!

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Kyle Baker comics, available as PDFs for free. Go, read.

2013/01/202013/01/20

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/20

Ok, now posting this on the correct day…

If you are familiar with 2d/3d animation, web apps, game design or graphics programming, look at my alma mater. They’re hiring teachers… I’m teaching an open source class there this spring.
Kriegspiel, the board game. Kreigspiel, the computer game. Kreigspiel, the Avalon Hill game on my shelf, which is unfortunately not the same thing. Anyway, in the process of looking up that one game because I remembered the name, I found that one of the other games on my shelf might be available again. Silent Death is one of the the best miniatures games I’ve ever played. There’s still some continuation of those Avalon Hill games too. (Long chain of memories set off via)
A noble goal.
The 19A0s, visually somewhere between the late 1980s and the year 2000, with a Pinterest board to match. (via)
Message in a Binary Bottle, secret messages stuffed into the ROM of console games, years ago. (via)
For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade. I miss these. The closest thing to me that’s like these old arcades is this museum exhibit.
Same source: Inside one of the last pinball factories in the world.
This Thinkpad Chromebook actually gave me a ‘Shut up and take my money!’ gut reaction. My work laptop is a Thinkpad x220 and it’s one of the best laptops I’ve ever used.
30 Years of the Apple Lisa and Apple ][e. (via) Hey that’s neat I remember this oh my god I’m old.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Game, by Boulet. Goes with some of the links.

2013/01/062013/01/06

Lazy Reading for 2013/01/06

I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.

Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via)
2600, from 1985, in free collected form. (via)
Russ Cox’s writing. I’ve linked to some of it before. It’s all fun reading.
IRC is dead, long live IRC. Shows the first IRC server.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Some very good tutorial videos. Don’t worry, it’s just electrostatic discharge, wire safety, fun with capacitors, and how to make a Windows shortcut (via/via)

2012/12/302012/12/30

Lazy reading for 2012/12/30

The last of the year.

Outgrow.me, a list of successfully funded Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. There’s some neat technology doodads in there. And a zillion hipster iPhone tripods.
Remember when you could find program source code printed in magazines, for you to type in? Here’s an interesting story about that. (via)
Some good news: despite the completely hostile (and wrong) story on Slashdot, the FreeBSD Foundation has exceeded their pledge goals for the year by a wide margin.
A very early pre-Internet story about packets. (via)
Relational shell programming. (via)
History of the Microwriter. I remember seeing a version of this called the Twiddler. (also via)
How to Host a Dungeon. Follow some of the links at the bottom. (also also via)
Early Apple computer designs. I link not because it’s Apple but because it’s very much 1980s industrial design, which is both wonderful and awful. (via)

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Marlo Meekins’ Tumblr. Her lettering is refreshingly expressive. That may sounds strange to single out, but so many people place words as an set block of text rather than as part of a graphic layout.

2012/12/232012/12/23

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/23

I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week. Merry almost Christmas!

Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage. (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk. I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail. This seems pretty slick. Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more. Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘ (via)
How I got four errors into a one-line program. All via git.
Go for C programmers. (via)
Mars Code. I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time. (also via)
I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general. I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
Why is grep always fast? Here’s a very technical explanation of why. There’s more.
Bunnie Huang is building a laptop. All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox. (Bunnie mentioned previously here) (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine. One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive. (I’m licensed to operate it.) There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic. It can be a fun drive. However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon. (via)

2012/12/162012/12/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/16

I hope you like links, and lots of history. It’s been a bumper crop this week.

The Radio Shack catalog from 1983. Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk. For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte. A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte. Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002. (via)
Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download. Found from a link to Unix Text Editing. I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987. (indirectly via)
The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters. The ancestor of the TTY. It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter. I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels. I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style. (via)
Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports. (via) Warning: they’re all in Postscript. Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel. I had to read the solution twice to get it.
Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago. It’s true, and also makes me feel sad. (via)
Google60, Google via punchcard and printer. It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun. (via)
If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry. The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general. Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case. It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it. You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.

2012/12/092012/12/08

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/09

This is a mini-theme Lazy Reading, where I find small groups of related things.

Exploratory data analysis with Unix tools. The command line is a far better place to mangle data than you’d expect. Well, maybe not your expectations, given that you’re reading this site.
“The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive” Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in 1982. I found that after reading “Open Source Guilt & Passion“, which is a quite accurate description of working on open source, or perhaps any volunteer work. (via).
While talking about people of that generation: Here’s Rob Pike’s Go slideshow (linked previously) in a single-page text format. (via)
And we can get even older with this article about the Computer History Museum in California. There’s a lot of pictures of hardware ‘firsts’, like a light tracking, self driving robot from the 1940s, or the first mass-produced transistor radio. Look for the hardware that shows where ‘core dumps’ came from. (via)
Found on the previous link: Rebuilding the IBM 1401. I like looking at the old “fill-up-a-room” computers, since they look like supercomputers. I wouldn’t want to actually possess a mainframe; they aren’t powerful, eat electricity, and so on. Well… I can think of one that would be OK.
The Enduring Object. I find it oddly reassuring when hardware doesn’t change because it works so well. It’s sort of like an inherited tool from an older relative; something worn from use but distinctly better than buying new.
The 2012 Good Gift Games Guide. There’s some really neat board games in there.
Along the same lines, Designing Board Games with Perl.
The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection. An in-depth dive with Wireshark and an explanation of RSA. My cup of nerditry runneth over! (via)
It wouldn’t be a Lazy Reading post without some Git thingie. This time, it’s “Git: Twelve Curated Tips And Workflows From The Trenches“. (via)
The DuckDuckGo command line. (via)
Exploring Emacs. Posted mostly in the interests of equal time to vi-ish stuff. (via)
“What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor“. A Jason Scott article about emulating old monitors in software, with videos showing the difference. I’ve seen the hardware difference he’s talking about. I’m distressed just knowing my children probably don’t recognize analog static. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. Also known as ‘old weird crap’, but that’s OK – still interesting.

2012/12/022012/12/01

Lazy Reading for 2012/12/02

It’s been a quiet week, but that’s OK. I have sick kids, sick coworkers, and a certification test this Monday…

Playing at the World is apparently a good book. The author has a blog where he dives into old RPG minutiae. You will either find that not very interesting or super interesting. No halfway point.
Teleglitch, a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. I was happy at the word “roguelike”, of course. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A review of Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition.
“I’m writing my own OS“. I think Dominic Giampolo said once that everyone in computer science goes through a phase where making your own operating system can’t be too hard and why not try it etc etc. (via)
This picture makes me happy.
An entire book of studies based around a single line of C64 BASIC code. It’s available as a free download.
Teach Your Children Groff. It’s sort of the opposite of the do-without-needing-to-understand practice that most people assume Steve Jobs wanted. (via)
Your Objects, The Unix Way. (via)
Getting your computer work done in 1973. Given the hardware, I don’t think this is Unix, but it’s still neat to see it work. Punch cards! (via)
Here’s how arcade cabinets were first planned out. I like seeing the old-school marker rendering.
This notebook seems like a bad idea. (via)
This secure bootloader, on the other hand, could be useful. (via)
A hypnotic data visualization. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
A Star Wars roguelike on GitHub. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: GET LAMP. I thought I had linked to it before, but I’m probably thinking of It Is Pitch Dark. It’s a documentary by Jason Scott of textfiles fame about text adventures.

2012/11/252012/11/24

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/25

It’s ‘old week’!

Your team should work like an open source project. It’s not as complete a possibility as I think this person paints it, but there’s principles outlined in that article that could apply to any office. (via)
An IBM PC Model 5150 – in Javascript. (via)
World’s oldest d20. If you told me it was, say, a few decades old, I’d have believed it. (via)
World’s oldest digital computer turned back on. From 1951. I like the name “Harwell Dekatron”.(via)
Speaking of old, Windows 95 Tips, Ticks, and Tweaks. (via multiple places)
A horrible computing idea from the 1960s. (via)
Old computer art updated to work in Processing. You know what Processing is, right? If not, you may be in for a treat. (via)
xmonad layouts for netbooks. I’ve thought that a tiling window manager is a good solution when low on screen real estate, but I never got this detailed. (via)
Remember the complaints about Linuxisms last week? ITWire followed up on this with Marc Espie of OpenBSD. He makes the good point that computers are complex systems, and when you stop thinking about compatibility, everything – including Linux – gets crappier. (via)
Vi-style shortcuts appear everywhere, including on Tumblr. (slightly related: I have a Tumblr with images from the mine where I work.)

Your unrelated link of the week: Disused Rochester Subway. I used to work about half a mile from one end of this structure, and have been in several of the locations pictured. (via)

2012/11/182012/11/16

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/18

Apparently this is history week for Lazy Reading.

You know what I like about older retail games? Not the playing, but the paraphernalia that came with it – maps, histories, stories on printed paper. This Empire for Apple ][ description even has pictures of a hand-drawn timeline.
Remember when Enlightenment was considered too graphically intensive to run easily? Now E17 is in alpha! (via multiple places including here.)
The regular expression that’s the equivalent of a shrug and a handwave.
“Why BSD is better than Linux” (2002). It’s an old PDF presentation, but a good history overview. I got a kick out of slide 40.
Rob Pike on why object-oriented programming isn’t always awesome. Slightly related: I wish Google+ pages had RSS feeds. (via)
The GPL is usually described as a defense for users against companies. What if it’s being used as a bludgeon by one company against another?
Remember in last week’s Lazy Reading, I pointed at complaints about Linuxisms; changes that assumed Linux was the only Unixlike system. The problem continues even within distributions. There’s a common thread of the people involved.
When In Git, different animated gifs set to different git habits and events. This is the next stage after rage comics.

Your unrelated link of the week: The Useless Web. Random single-purpose sites, and oddly compelling. (via)

2012/11/112012/11/10

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/11

The 3.2 release seems to have gone well. Who has tried the new USB support? I’m curious to see how it’s going.

:syntax Off, about working without syntax highlighting. (via)
The previous link led me to this .vimrc with by-line explanations. I never get tired of looking at these things, though I also never implement anything out of them.
102 FreeBSD Tips. It’s really the contents of the FreeBSD fortune file. Almost all these tips apply to DragonFly, too, and often the other BSDs.
A tcpdump primer. Always a good tool to know. It’s not as easy to use as Wireshark, but it’s certainly possible to end up with access to tcpdump and not Wireshark, right when you really need to see what’s happening on the network. (via)
An HTML5-based terminal in your browser. Displays images, runs vim, etc. All that technological growth since 1972 has come full circle to replicate an 80×25 screen again. (I kid; it’s pretty neat.)
A 6-week cryptography course, free of charge.
Nothing to do with this operating system, but: Robot DragonFly, an Indiegogo project. (via)
When you’re young and getting paid to work on open source, you can be surprisingly naive. (via several people)
I agree with this sentiment about Linuxisms coming from an OpenBSD developer. (via Tomaz Bodzar)
Someone want to work on ssh-ldap-helper for BSD? It sounds like a very good idea.
A bunch of free computer books. Ignore the Linux ones; there’s free books for Ruby/Python/Perl there. (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture. You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.

2012/11/042012/11/03

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/04

I’m glad 3.2 is out the door. I think I spent more time on release notes and watching package builds than any other release.

This in-browser recreation of an Apple ][+ is a trip down nostalgia lane. (via)
HappyEdit, “Vim-based” text editor. It’s actually an IndieGoGo project. (via)
A physics paper with a description of a non-Euclidean universe, which happens to mention Cthulu. (via)
NetBSD now supports these 100-core Tile-GX processors; I didn’t know such hardware existed. (Thanks, Tomas Bodzar)
Active vs. Passive Benchmarking. (Tomas again.)
The Search for the Ultimate Engineer’s Pen. I like looking at some of the pen models mentioned. The best way to find the “ultimate” pen, that nobody mentioned: go into a good art store and ask to sample a few pens. Bring the type of paper you normally use. Pens are usually out loose, and having it in your hand is the best way to tell. If there’s a college near you with a good technical art program, check the campus store. Why, yes, I did base that example on direct experience.
The evolution of the computer keyboard. The descriptions of the various mechanisms are neat to hear about. It of course repeats the Dvorak story. (via)
All the back issues of science fiction magazine Omni, online and free.

Your unrelated link of the day: Sir, You Are Being Hunted. I link to the Kickstarter for this game for no other reason than I think it would be fun to play.