A bit short this week – I am in the final parts of a large software transition at work.
Comfortably all over the map this week.
- Recreating a Cyberpunk 2077 game prop.
- Backblaze drive stats for 2023Q2. I just found out how cheap b2 storage can be.
- Awesome Inferno. (via)
- “Why would you do that?” The management review of yacc.
- What’s special about this number? (via)
- Dobbstown Mirror, $1. You should subscribe; I’ve enjoyed 3 issues so far.
- I did not know: vim exists via Atari/Amiga vi ports.
- Futurism Restated, an electronic music blog. I mean Substack. The lines blur. (via)
- v8 /etc/motd.
- Tiny life hack: paint your mouse dongles. I wish I had read this years ago.
- Inflation in 1983 must have been horrible. Linked just because 9 year old me thought the Elephant Memory Systems logo was cool.
- STIRred AND SHAKEN. Boring, but quietly important.
- The first color e-ink monitor I’ve seen.
- On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions. A certain amount of open source work is built on the tailings from venture capital, and from corporate waste.
The mini-theme this week is that some of these links go to lists of more links, so I’m sure there’s a rabbit hole in here for you somewhere.
- Paypal security story. (via)
- LETTER BOMB TRANSFER PROTOCOL. (via)
- textual-paint. (via)
- Plain-text journaling. Not necessarily recommending this. (via)
- Why is DNS hard to learn? (via)
- Warren Ellis’s UbuWeb Top Ten.
- The only remaining pre-1950 valve computer.
- Free and open source software projects are in transition.
- tildeverse.org.
- Wrench button to root.
- Forthcoming books. (scroll down for the list of suggestions)
- CRT Rejuvenators. (via previous)
- The Garden of Computational Delights.
This is one of the more eclectic groups of links I’ve published.
- 50 Years of Text Games as downloadable book; it will be available as a print on demand book eventually. I got my high-quality copy from the Kickstarter and it is a weighty tome. I was going to link to some of the posters but those are gone now too, geez. Here’s something not in the book.
- August 15th: TrueNAS presented at SEMIBUG‘s monthly.
- 2023Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
- Tales of Type. Truetype is one of those all-nerds-should-be-passingly-familiar bits of history.
- Space Colony Art from the 1970s. Surely you’ve seen these before?
- Same source, Hokusai’s warriors series. You know the artist from the Great Wave, but probably never saw these.
- Weird 80s audio sampler history. (via)
- HTTP has become the default, universal communication protocol. Though people don’t always pay attention to the result codes.
- Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements. (via)
- Yubikey All the Things. Linked for the OpenBSD section.
- Between ISA and PCI, PCs had EISA and VLB. And it sucked.
- ARM Thinkpad. I might finally upgrade from my x220. (via)
- Installing Research UNIX on a PDP 11/70, emulated.
No theme this week.
- All the Nerds Are Dead. “But maybe the most characteristic feature of nerd culture is its total lack of irony.” (via)
- Hidden BeOS installs.
- A bit of Unix history on ‘su -‘.
- Letters to ed(1) is on sale.
- And the source, the FreeBSD Journal, has a new issue out.
- pkg_*: the road forward. OpenBSD pkg.
- Lessons Learned from Sendmail. (via)
- Using FreeBSD’s daemon(8)? Consider -r.
- How to install Kanboard on OpenBSD.
- Fake Nixie tubes with a bootup screen.
- Wayland on OpenBSD. (via)
Mini-theme: things that haven’t existed for decades, recreated.
- Making a Studio Ghibli Wallpaper Carousel. Linked for the script.
- Resurrecting a Thinkpad 701c and its butterfly keyboard.
- The day my ping took countermeasures. (via)
- HAKMEM, the PDF. (via)
- Z1, a mechanical computer from the 1930s. You can see bits flip. (via)
- Unix support 50 years ago: “your only source of information is a 2-man operation an ocean away” Similar to much open source today. (via)
- B Compiler restored.
- Next NYCBUG: August 9th.
History mini-theme.
- The Secret History of Mac Gaming, a book. Found in a picture of someone’s workspace, linked to by Naive Weekly,
- Andrex x Eno. The base of the joke.
- An Adventure walkthrough.
- Forced email triage. (via)
- Pull in satellite images, right from the satellites. (via)
- “CRT Inspired“.
- The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird. (via)
- AppleII-VGA: VGA card for Apple II+/IIe computer. (via)
- how (not) to write a pipeline. “I don’t see a lot of error handling.” (via)
- OpenBSD pfsync(4) is rewritten and softdeps are out.
- Limited Audience Jokes. (via)
A little short today but still good links.
- The Blit was also the Jerq, thanks to LucasArts, and chunks of it still exist in Plan 9. That sentence may be confusing but follow the links.
- Control, Escape, and Meta Tricks. (via)
- Also, yay, 200 issues of Nixers!
- pkgsrc-2023Q2 is out. The 79th!
- HUDs and GUIs. (via)
- CoBUG (Colorado BSD user group) is starting the mailing list back up.
- Naked Domains. If you like large scale stats, today is your lucky day.
Half a year til Christmas!
- Software written in B. C’s predecessor, revived – follow the whole thread for tools.
- History that I didn’t know: at one point the U.S. Department of Defense had its own Unix, supported by Ford, the car company.
- BSDNow at BSDCan.
- writefreesoftware.org. (via)
- Three Challenges to Contribute Back to Open Source. The not-code-but-essential parts. (via)
- Netnews, the origin story. (PDF, via)
- I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec, 2023-06-07 version. “if Skynet ever came into existence for real it would be unreachable”
- Operating Systems, Transit and Cultural Influences.
- 50 Years of Text Games: the games. This is a treat.
- You can still buy hardware upgrades for your Mac Portable.
- A comparison of text-based browsers. (via)
- Related: text-only websites.
- When Zeppelins Ruled the Earth.
Whee
- General Turtle, Inc. and Educational Machines.
- From the previous link, some in-the-know shirts.
- Also from that link, Lessons from METAFONT.
- Also also, The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories. Far better than I expected.
- PNG glitches, one and two. (via)
- Miniatua, tiny classic computer reproductions. (via)
- Operation Razit: Raze Reddit. The long explainer.
- Related: There’s no excuse to add content to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit right now. The actual title is much longer. (via)
- Charlie Bit My Finger should be acquired for the nation.
- Browser game: Fallen London. About the game. (via)
- 20 GOTO 10. (via)
Still working through a lot of open tabs.
- ChiBUG meets on the 20th. I’ll post a reminder.
- What Your Favorite Classic Rock Band Says About You. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). “Jethro Tull: You have a favorite rune.” Odd short story: Ian Anderson called my house looking for someone. (via)
- Sprite drawing sheets for Street Fighter 2. (via)
- infrastructure that looks like sci fi. (also via)
- Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD. (via)
- Running Apple 1 software on a breadboard computer (Wozmon) (via)
- Capacitor reforming.
- Tech debt metaphor maximalism.
- Manual of Fear and Death. Linked for the images.
Your unrelated music of the week: Buck 65, an “uptempo rewind to the Golden Age of hip hop”. (via)
A short list this week. I’m heading into the final month(s) of an ERP replacement projects at one of my jobs, so it ain’t going to get better for a while.
- Where does my computer get the time from? (via)
- Software Modernization Failures. (follow the whole thread)
- Bell Labs vs “East Coast” Management style of AT&T. There’s some tangential BSD history in there.
- System Shock: The oral history of a forward-thinking PC classic. (via)
- cooperative.computer. I am surprised this didn’t exist years ago. (via)
- Ctrl-Zine. I like that you can print and fold your own. (via)
- Macintosh Emulation and Printing using Mini VMac on a PocketCHIP. (via)
- How design is governance. (via)
Events and crazy things are the mini themes this week.
- Mini Moog Model D. (via)
- ChiBUG’s next meeting is May 30th.
- NYCBUG has a double lightning talk on June 16th.
- Also the July NYCBUG monthly meeting will be on the 12th instead of the 5th.
- Internet Histories, Volume 7, Issue 2. “Let’s play something awful: a historical analysis of 14 years of threads” got me as a title. (via)
- Hidden Door, roleplaying games via AI using existing genre writing. I don’t know how I feel about this. (via)
- SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes. (via)
- Niklaus Wirth and Donald Knuth, 1985 interview.
- Just take a crowbar to it, glitches as storytelling techique.
- Doom modding and assuming everything on the internet is probably fake.
- What’s black, white, and red on 20 sides?
- Hieroglyphic monkeys holding stuff.
- BSDCan 2024 Reorganization. Michael W. Lucas is a fan of achievement/pain.
- The Story Of Mel, the actual biography. I never thought this would be explored. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: rekt.network. (via)
Smushing BSD and Lazy Reading links together into one, again. Tell me if that’s good or bad from where you’re standing.
- How To Survive, computing safely while on the road, from CCC 2019. (via)
- Early Computer Art in the 50’s & 60’s. The sorts of images I love. (via)
- degreeless.design. Some excellent, excellent books listed. (via)
- My Top 10 Favorite D&D Monsters, part one and part two, and Magic Items, part one and part two.
- Emulating the Casio Loopy with Phil Bennett. (via)
- Rob Pike on the Origin of Unix Dot File Names. “Oops.” (via)
- Stream your OpenBSD desktop audio to other devices.
- Self-Hosted Bookmarks using DAV and httpd on OpenBSD.
- cron(8) now supports random ranges with steps.
- Exploring the CBSD virtual environment management framework – part 4: Jails (II).
- Michael W Lucas on BSDNow.
- Beepberry.
- Hand 386 Delivers A “True 386 Processor” in a Handheld. (via)
- Christopher Strachey and the Dawn of Interactive Text. Before program storage, even.
Your unrelated music of the week: DRASS – see it, say it, slaughtered. Another band name for Shardcore, which I have linked before. AI generated visuals if you can’t tell.
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.
Back by popular demand.
- 50 Shades of Rust, or emerging Rust GUIs in a WASM world. Everything has its own name and language, and there’s 20 of them! Great! (via)
- Review of Six Text Editors. Fun hot takes on old-school editors. (via)
- Calculators, codes, and hidden messages. (via)
- textart.sh. Copy/paste almost anywhere. (via)
- The Modern WWW.
- WizardKnighting Planescape.
- How an 18th Century Sailing Battleship Works. Ostensibly for an upcoming movie, but I always think of the Aubrey/Maturin books.
- Fun with Kermit and ZMODEM over SSH.
- 130 A History Of The World According To Getty Images. Public domain does not mean public. (via)
- The 13 Levels of Complexity of Turntable Scratching.
- Junk Drawer Phone as a Music Streaming Server. (via)
- Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them.
- Set up your own CalDAV and CardDAV servers on OpenBSD.
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.
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)