• Networking for System Administrators (2nd Edition) is definitely happening.
• Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web.  (via)
• Replacing Music Streaming Services with a Self-hosted Stack.  (via)
• ELIZA turns 60.  Check the bibliographic links at the end.  (via)
• BSD-USER 4 LINUX or the BSDULATOR.  (via)
• Selling Lemons.
• Abagious Tactics, a sort of sequel to Oblique Strategies.  (via)
• PIRACYKILLS, a clever method to turn pirates into customers.  (via)
• A dumb use of AI.
• A clever use of AI.
• MUNG origin.
• Other tech trees.
• Special admin tools.  (via)
• Simple X11 configuration.  Saved for my own benefit.  (also via)

Current event: Roguelike Celebration 2025 is happening right now if you read this soon enough.  If you missed it, there’s a related Steam sale filled with roguelike games.

• NYCBUG meets 12/4 at the usual time, for lightning talks.
• Maximizing Time For Reading.  (via)
• Half-Life 2 20th anniversary.  Documentaries like this are sort of about the game but also an inside track on software development case studies.  (See also Psychodyssey)
• Asterogue.  (via)
• Procedural text and tabletop roleplaying.  Speaking of roguelikes…
• The missing text focused programming environment.  Makes me think of Smalltalk.
• IMG_0416.  (via)
• MyNoise.  (via)
• CW&T, a design studio.  (via)
• Keep It Simple Tools.  (via)

This week’s music: Thank You, Dream Girl.  (via)

• DragonFly: git: rtld – do not allow both dynamic DTV index and static TLS offset.  Useful if p5-DBD-mysql is failing for you.
• inetd and daemons, a 4 part series.
• Moving my FreeBSD laptop to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6.  Linked cause I just handled a newer X1 recently; might replace my ancient x220.  More links in article.
• You can now play WUMPUS and OREGON TRAIL on the sigma-9 instance at sdf.org.
• Technical Marvels, Part 8: Historical Surveying Instruments.  (via)
• Next NYC*BUG: 2024-11-06 @ 17:45 EST “Life with a FreeBSD Laptop” by Brian Reynolds.  RSVP if you are going, so you can get in the facility.
• What Are The Civilian Applications?
• Building a game with the Real Engine.  A heck of a lot of work but the results will be unique.  (via)
• revealing the fediverse’s gifts.  (via)
• Paper types ranked by likelihood of paper cuts.
• Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old.
• Broughlike.

• Filtered for home robots, fast and slow.  I’d buy many of these if they were commercially available.
• Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea.  Breakdown of a breakdown in trust.
• Roguelike Celebration 2024 full schedule.
• Visual guide to SSH tunneling and port forwarding.  (via)
• Bell Systems Letters and Memos.  (via)
• Bell Systems Technical Journals, 1922-1996.  (via)
• Related: units(1) exists because of a 24-hour AT&T library.
• Why “Run Your Own Mail Server” is not in Amazon’s Kindle store.  Monopsony described.
• Guided By Vices.
• 30 year anniversary of trip hop.  (via)
• When the Mismanagerial Class Destroys Great Companies.  I agree about the zombification bit at the end.  (via)
• Departure Mono.  I can hear the greenbar Tektronix printer running, just looking at this.

• 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)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

• Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC.
• The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists.  Minitel!
• The Internet’s Many Branches.
• Roguelike Celebration is going to happen! (virtually)  Plus there’s a call for papers.
• PRINTING PRESSES ARE GIANT GPUS.  (via)
• New book: “Cash Flow for Creators”.  If you are working anything but a corporate job ever, this will have value for you.
• The Deprecated *nix API.  (via)
• When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.  (via)
• Announcing the Second Edition of Learning Markdown.
• Dungeons & Dragons at a Distance: Early Play-by-Mail D&D.  (via)
• Hagoromo chalks, progress & Vim.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Desperate Pleas for Nothing.  I get at least one of these every week.
• C&C open sourced.  (via)

• 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.

• Secure erase.  I have done this yes.
• “Encrypted email is LARP security”
• 4 Columns.  Linked for the interface and how it’s tied to the content.
• Best Ever Spooky House Adventures.
• On The Metal, a technical podcast described as a garbage replacement, though without the BSD content.
• Void: Terminal-based personal organizer.  Looking at the resources listed at the end of the README is also instructive.  (via)
• Is Myst still one of the worst games ever?
• The Best Fountain Pens Under 100 Dollars.  The TWSBI 580 is my favorite.
• 4 Plain Text resource links.
• Teletext: the Boring talk.
• Variables, Pointers, and Indirection in Arduino C.  (via)
• You are a raccoon. Descend into a dungeon, looking for lost books.  (via)
• Removing characters with tr.
• CSS didn’t decouple content from presentation.
• A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NEXTSTEP Workstation.  (via)
• Terminal Vision.  Terminal == Serious Computer.  (via)
• Obscure features of JPEG.  (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Hannibal Rex – The One Hundred & Forty Faces Of?.?.?.  Has the same drive as early Mix Master Mike, to my ear.  (via)

• 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)

• Have You Played… SimCity 2000?  Not really about the game, but the music involuntarily associated with it.  Elektra:Assassin and MARRS is the same for me.
• Prosthetic synthesizer.  (via)
• Cable standards history.  More interesting than I make it sound!
• Kermit, a history.  Not just a summary; the source documents.  (via)
• Old CSS, new CSS.  (via)
• Evoboxx, uneasy retro synth.  Game of Life as dedicated hardware.
• A love letter to the fantasy airship.  (via)
• What is a traditional roguelike?  (also via)
• byNWR, streaming restored fringe films, plus a talk about it.  (also via)
• Stickers for the RSS massive.
• Rooibos.  Technically not tea.
• Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet.  And that’s awesome.  (via)
• Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses.  (via)
• Zip Files: History, Explanation and Implementation.  (via)
• The ‘sextortion’ Scams: The Numbers Show That What We Have Is A Failure Of Education.  I like the deep dive.

Your unrelated music link of the week: KUTMAH – New Appliance.  (via)

• 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)

• 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)

• • 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.

• Neal.fun.  The old weird web.  This will eat some hours.
• “Link In Bio” is a slow knife.  There’s a lot of things I can’t link to because they are hidden away just like this.
• blinry’s Advent Calendar of Curiosities 2019.  (via)
• It’s Time to Get Personal.  (via)
• Tmux and Vim — configurations to be better together.  (via)
• OpenHAB, open source home automation software.  (via)
• 36th Chaos Communications Congress, coming up.
• Real time clock for your ISA slot.
• A Spotify playlist of all songs mentioned in the Time Zone Database documentation.  I love everything about this without even hearing the music.  (via)
• AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights”.
  (via)
• Roguelike Tutorial: Up-to-Date and Literate.  (via)
• Roguelike Tutorial – In Rust, via comments in the last source.  There’s a lot more links in there, too.
• Dungeon Generation in Enter The Gungeon.  (via)
• The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained.  (via)

• Cabinet Magazine is blogging and it’s wonderful in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
• First, do no harm… with this software.  The Hippocratic License.  (via)
• BBC BASIC on Twitter.  (via)
• Conceptronica.  (via)
• Software Rights, the book.  (via)
• Solid State: Minnesota’s High-Tech History.  Public material, so freely streamed.  (via)
• Berlin Tea Festival 2019, later this month.  I’d go if I was near.  (via)
• Pay attention to the difference between round() and floor().  (via)
• (mini-section about owning your information for the next several links)
• Historic Digital Places.
• Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours.  (via)
• Computer files are going extinct.  (via previous)
• Yahoo Groups going away.  Well, technically still there, but not really.
• Own your content on social media using the Indieweb.  (via)
• The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web.  (via)
• (mini-section over)
• The Open Book Project.  Open hardware e-reader – not yet complete, so for hacking, not using.  (via)
• uGlass: an AR module on your glasses.  Low-cost, works on existing glasses – I like the idea.
• Cutest oscilloscope I’ve ever seen.
• Building the Ultimate Roguelike Morgue File, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
• The Hissing of Vintage Tapes.  Not mentioned but related: Cr02 tapes, or comfort noise, which I did not know exists in an RFC.  It’s funny to think of having a standard way to present what is normally a defect.
• An old-school shell hack on a line printer.  (via)
• This Time, There Really Are NO IPv4 Internet Addresses Left.  (via)  My main workplace is sitting on a public /24, which shows how long ago it was obtained.
• Cluster SSH – Manage Multiple Linux Servers Simultaneously.  Those who do not remember expect are doomed to recreate it.  (via)
• Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 4 – Final.  (via)
• Text Editing Hates You Too.  (via)
• The $15 Sous-Vide Cooker.  Save $50, burn the house down, is what this says to me.
• How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries for decades.
• One Page Dungeon Generator.  Fun just to reload and read and reload and read, like a super-short story generator.  (via)

• 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)