Category: roguelike

I have a nice weird mix going on today.

• Rotary cellphone, now purchasable.
• HUDs + GUIs.  (via)
• Inform 7 open-source release.
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, updated and a sequel and a ripoff.
• A Web Around the World, Part 8: The Intergalactic Computer Network.
• And Part 9: A Network of Networks.
• Nineteenth century videos. Back to life.  (via)
• The “50 Years” Book is coming…
• Dirt: The Permadeath Drive.
• Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly.  (via)
• Learning Synths.  (also via)
• The InterLisp Restoration Project.  (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Frank & Beans – Hugo [official video].  I’ve linked to other shardcore stuff before, and thought I had previously linked to this video’s predecessor, but I can’t find it. It’s very good though also very Uncanny Valley.  (also via)

Whee!

• Snd: A library of free UX sounds.  A nice interface too.  (via)
• Vim Tada – a simple todo manager for vim.  (via)
• Taskwarrior, a commandline todo app.  (via comments on previous)
• Art Bits from HyperCard, meaning early Susan Kare art.  (via)
• Area Ware, linked because they sell Susan Kare material.
• Patching an Embedded OS from 1996 with Ghidra.  A synth!  (via)
• Anonymous Animal.  (via)
• Comptometer.  What it actually does isn’t important.
• GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery.  (via)
• Roguelike Celebration returns for 2022.
• Lost Women of Science, a podcast.  (via)
• You don’t have to clap.

 

End of year reviews are showing up; probably more next week.

• Core Dump Central.  Versions of rogue, plus online!
• Unboxing the best gift of 1983: the Commodore SX-64.
• Cabinet Magazine finally has an RSS feed.
• Digitizing 14,000 woodblocks, a webinar.  (via)
• And here’s the woodblocks, free to download.
• Fictional videogame stills.  (also via)
• Managing my personal server in 2020.  Not BSD but much, maybe all of it, translates.   (via sorry I lost track)
• Hopefully XScreenSaver can’t crash your car.
• The Complete History Of First-Person Shooters.  Linked cause the author is someone I remember reading 20 years ago.  (via)
• Séamas O’Reilly’s Bumper Comics Of The Year 2020 Extravaganza.  That what used to just be Vertigo has shown up in many comics.(via)
• Systems with JT, “first impression reviews of amateur operating systems”.  (via)
• Life at 50.  Life the game.

Your unrelated video of the week: Throat Notes, from the same person who did Double King.

This week’s links are all fun, but you had better have some time to read.

• The Nethack story of Sery the tourist and Sery on the 7th floor.
• Concentrichron.  (via)
• MAX HEADROOM 10\u0027 4\”  Two levels of ironic there.
• The Making of Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 5.45 is out. New hacks, frustrating stories.
• The Be Book…in lovely HTML.  (via)
• Web Conversations With the Year 2000.  (via)
• Music Video Roundup.  From arguably the golden age of music videos.
• Rick Priestley Uses This.
• What’s the Value of Hackable Hardware, Anyway?  Begs the question, but the details of building a 6-key Braille keyboard are neat.
• Precursor’s Mechanical Design.  “Single-crystal diamond milling”.
• Winners of the 2020 IFComp.  (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Shimmer, Then Disappear.

Some esoteric gems this week.

• Derek Muller’s video on Penrose Tilings.  One of those useful patterns to name, like Markov chains.
• B3 Biennale – Panel on computer game history of the Eastern Bloc.
• Something to think about: the longest-running computer ever built is also the farthest away.
• FTP Fadeout.
• SAILDART, an e-book.  Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab Dump and Restore Tape Program, which gives you an idea of the history it covers.  (via)
• Developing Multitile Creatures in Roguelikes.  That… is a problem that sorta upends some basic assumptions.
• “More Lively Counterfaits”  Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science.
• Psion Series 3 palmtop EReader.
• Oxide Computer Company.  Building their own computer, plus their blog has neat logo entries and podcast talks.  (via)
• System 6 programming, by joshua stein.  I just like seeing a fat mac in use.
• Super Merryo Trolls or An Adventure From The Days Before VRAM.  (via)

Accidental open source ideas or maybe history this week.  That might be too easy a category to fit into.

• Panel Syndicate, online comics.  (via Warren Ellis)
• Mastermind at 50.  And its impact on early computers.  (via)
• Opensource.builders.  Alternate apps.  (via)
• Awesome-Selfhosted: “A list of Free Software web applications which can be hosted locally”.  (via)
• Text-Based VR: Explore the Pioneering World of MUSHes.  (via)
• DOS computer in a keyboard.  (via)
• Dos and Don’ts in Open Source.  (via)
• Remap caps lock key to escape with uncap.  When you don’t have xmodmap.
• The core memory inside a Saturn V rocket’s computer.
• Looking inside a vintage Soviet TTL logic integrated circuit.
• Inside a Titan missile guidance computer.
• The Abiopause.  “ABIopause” may make that more clear.
• The Era of Fragmentation, Part 1: Load Factor.
• Should I use Vim full-time?  (via)
• How to program a text adventure in C.  (via)
• EAX x86 Register: Meaning and History.  (via)
• Who’s ready for more Networking History? – all about APPLETALK.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 5.44 Hacks the Planet.  New hacks!
• A history of roguelike games.  (via)
• There’s a tar mode in emacs?
• Any KVM over IP systems need to be on secure networks.

I had so many tabs open they weren’t all showing, so you get a straight dump.

• Haiku Alpha 1: Rebirth of legend.  (via)
• Install & Configure BeOS R5.1d Using Oracle VirtualBox.  (via)
• Closing Periods on Flickr.  Linked cause I do that here.  (via)
• Emulation on an iPhone/iPad.  Linked just to show how difficult Apple chooses to make this.  (via)
• I believe this to possibly be the worst recipe-generating algorithm in existence.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Build a 6502 computer.  Video series.  (via)
• The eMate 300 Out In Front for “BBS Week V”.
• 7DRL is running now.  (via)
• A Text Renaissance.
• My Linux and Vim Notes.  Disregard the Linux part.
• Digging up IP addresses with the Linux dig command.  Disregard etc.
• A random encounter with a 35 year old file format.
• Fucking laptops.  I agree on the x200 series.
• Rotary Cellphone.
• Payphone_Mk_2.
• Lavender, a console font heavily inspired by Sun Gallant and the XNU console font.  (via)
• Ice Cream Book reviews.  I agree wholeheartedly about Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream.
• My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s.  Your reaction to this will vary based on your age.
• Mark 1 FORTH Computer.  “This computer has no microprocessor.”  (via)
• which led me to the Homebuilt CPU Webring.  A Webring!  Bizarre computers!  Hooray!
• opensource-challenges.  (via)
• Gears gears gears animations.
• ‘a dead simple git cheatsheet’.  (via)
• Simone.computer.  The projects are interesting, the interface itself is interesting.  (via)

Partial overflow this week, which means probably even more next week.  We all benefit!

• OUIGO – Let’s Play.  Pinball in your browser.  Good pinball.  (via)
• shlide—a slide deck presentation tool written in pure bash.  (via)
• Under Armour Dumped Its App, and Consumers Feel the Heartbreak.  As the article mentions, companies will dump cheap services – and your data and invested time – at a moment’s notice.  The article might be paywalled.
• How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86?  Begs the question, but still interesting to ask.  (via)
• Apple 2 connecting via acoustic coupler modem and rotary phone.  (via)
• Hard Drive Stats for 2019.  Backblaze.  (via)
• Blackwing Pencils: A Comprehensive Guide.
• Rotary Cellphone.  (via)
• noclip.website, game floor plans.  (via)
• Genres evolve and so does language.  Roguelike arguments.
• The Burroughs Memoirs.  I briefly worked at a child company of Burroughs.  (via)
• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education.  Open source teaches exactly this; most schools do not.  Guess which makes you a better programmer?  (via)
• A Bit of History Regarding “Tunnels of Armageddon” for the Apple IIgs.
• Building a Note-taking System with Vanilla Vim.  (via)
• Vintage Computer Festival East 2020.  (via)

I literally just smooshed all my open tabs that weren’t baking–related into this post.

• Electric Rogue.  (via)
• Tiny Helpers.  Single-purpose web development tools.  (via)
• Manytools, similar.  (via)
• Bringing the London Bus Network home.  Home-made info screen.  (via)
• Fun With Software.  An AR joke.
• fast_template, your own blog, without having to buy into anyone’s platform.  (via)
• ReMarkdown.css, render HTML as Markdown.  Full-circle!   (sorta via)
• Dark Ages of the Web.  (via)
• The clearest statement of how leap years work is a several-centuries-old papal statement.  (via)
• The Cidco MailStation.
• Vintage Byte Magazine Library.  (thanks, tuxillo)
• Work Is Work.  (via)
• Ping, the game.
• Meanwhile, the game, which originally was a comic I’ve mentioned before.
• Tangent: The Automated Dungeon Master.  Fun/nostalgic images for me.  (via)
• A philosophy of project governance.
• Inside the digital clock from a Soyuz spacecraft.
• Dick Gabriel Uses This.  Computer scientist, poet, exclusive Lisp programmer.
• Adding CGI support to my gopher server.
• real world crypto talks.
• TT2020, a typewriter font that doesn’t obviously look like a font.  (via)
• Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire?  (also via)
• Formlabs Form 3 Teardown.
• Unix bc command and its -l flag.

Your unrelated video of the week: Igorrr – Very Noise.  Reminds me of early  Garry’s Mod videos.   (via)

 

I very nearly scheduled this to January 01, 2019.  And then fixed it for the right year but not the day, so you may have seen an early draft of this.  Oops; it’s here now.

• • The link that will eat the most of your time: href.cool links of the decade: there is a lot to look at in here.  Some highlights: Smash TV (video collage), esp8266.net (ultracheap hardware hacking), Magic Mirror (achievable tech), SPACEPLAN (clicker game), and Line Wobbler (physical roguelike).  If I hadn’t linked to some of these things before, I should have.
  • ASCII graffiti.  Not really ASCII but that’s OK, still fun to see.  (via)
  • The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland.  My current peeve: following a link in a newsletter and getting a popup over the content … to subscribe to the newsletter.  This is not hard to fix.  (via)
  • Public Domain Day 2020.
  • multicians.org.  Pre-UNIX.  (via)
  • Time will end in 2038… for Unix.   (via)
  • Managing my dotfiles as a git repository.  Not a new idea, but has a nice host-specific setup.
  • Inter-networking.
  • Chesterton’s Shell Script.  (via)
  • Black Hack 2nd Edition and Apocalypse World, 2 RPGs recommended.
  • Can We Build Trustable Hardware?  Like any headline posted as a question, the answer is “no”, but this is Bunnie Huang, so there’s a much more complex but real solution.
  • The Joys of UNIX Keyboards.
  • Good times create weak men.  (via)
  • fingers.today, like wandering through someone’s $HOME.  (via)
  • A brief history of liquid computers.  “Billiard-ball computing”.  (via)
  • Rhasspy: a completely offline voice assistant.  That’s what I want.  (via)
  • X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach.  Requires no new technology.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cankor.  (click on preview button)  I saw Cankor pages years ago; it’s disturbing in a good way.

Again, way behind cause of being online only irregularly over the last week.   There’s still plenty to look at – August is made for Lazy Reading.

• Never fast enough.  (Scroll way down)  There’s a nonlinear payoff for software speed … for tools.
• Related: Fast Software, the Best Software.
• Also related: Performance Matters.
• On the flip side of that, limiting and slowing social software is a good idea.  (via)
• freemium.cc, free tools for makers.
• https://thehistoryofweb.design/.  The URL is perfectly descriptive.  (via)
• Typography Terms.  Gadzook!  (via)
• Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1.  (via)
• Why Checklists Fail.  Linked cause checklists are usually super-effective.  (via)
• The Roguelike Toolkit (RLTK), implemented for Rust.  The comments in the source page have some interesting further links.
• Dwarf Fortress Diary: The Basement Of Curiosity – Episode 22: Goatbusters.
• The Last Working Olivetti Mainframe Sits In a Tuscan High School.  Comments led me to this neat-looking Olivetti calculator from the year before I was born. (via)
• There are even bots crawling gopherspace.
• We all spend half our day using a keyboard. Do you use any specific keyboard? Which one? Why?  Far more suggestions than you need.
• USB-C Easy Bake Oven.  Interesting for how power is handled.  And cookies.  (via)
• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019.  (via)
• I chanced upon an ancient cache of code…  (also via)

I have some neat history items mixed in this week.

• ASCII table and history (or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?)   (via)
• As Flash dies a little more.
• Beginner Problems With TCP & The socket Module in Python.  Linked cause it shows why MTU size matters.  (via)
• My Top 20 Interactive Fiction, 2019 Edition.   With links to play.
• Monsters and Manuals’ 1500th Anniversary: Half Time After the Time?  Linked for the best-of links in the article; that’ll give you some reading.
• ‘A Humument’ is a completely novel project.  A meaningless book, extrapolated into 300+ works of art.  (via)
• Scanimate News.  This was TV/computer graphics in the early 80s.  (via)
• Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research.  Linking to the summary; continue on if the thread is interesting.
• The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online.  One of the reasons I don’t use Cloudflare.
• Level Design Patterns in 2D Games.
• disquiet.com.  Lots and lots to listen to.  (via)
• Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses.
• ASCII art RPG Stone Story launches into early access.  I’m stretching it with the ‘roguelike’ tag here.
• Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware.  (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Blarf: Cease and Desist.  (via)

This week’s material filled up fast.  It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, so let’s see what next week brings…

• “Anyway my point here is that all of crypto should be run entirely by tweens.”  Look for the Utility Token section, though it’s all fun.
• How to calculate leap second variation for the year 3000.  (via)
• Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.  (via)
• Text size control in st.
• DLX400 typewriter as a Keyboard.  Neat but it must be annoying; those aren’t great keyboards.
• Fast Software, the Best Software.
• “Don’t put it on GitHub“, something we all should know.  (scroll down to last third)
• Creepy pumpkin.  It doesn’t have to be a pumpkin; this could apply to all sorts of things!
• Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural?  You’ve played both, I’m sure.
• An xargs lesson.  (via)
• The Legacy of the Unix Wars is still around us.  (also via)
• What I want out of my window manager.
• Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors.  (via)
• Slacking on security.  I don’t think Slack is a healthy product to use.
• Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I’m sure that won’t backfire.
• Astronauts Falling on the Moon.  No achievement so amazing you can’t trip and fall in the middle of it.  (via)
• LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance.  I think the computer in The Story of Mel, mentioned here before.  (via)

I get indirectly cranky, this week.

• Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1.  Roguelike!  (via)
• Pressing Forward.  “The grassroots mechanical keyboard scene”.  I did not know about the Hall Effect, or the X1 keyboard, both of which are interesting.
• sc-im, a terminal spreadsheet.  Like Visicalc all over again!
• Design tools are holding us back.  I like the note on how toolschains are becoming too ultra-specific.  (via)
• The Internet and My 53 Years Online.
• Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
• Secretly Public Domain.  This means there’s now a huge amount of books, free to read, that couldn’t be reliably identified before.
• The Builder’s Remorse.  “once it was handed over to the corporation, everyone lost control”.  Collectively no-one’s fault.
• Size and the Inert Sandbox.  About Frontier: Elite.
• Tabletop Whale.  “An original science illustration blog”.  (via)
• The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction and Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat.  Video games, in an experience I bet we all share.