Category: roguelike

I’m sort of proud of how wide a range of topics are covered this week.

• Domain Name Scams Are Alive And Well, Thank You.  I’ve been seeing that scam since… 2007?  Less disruptive than wire transfer spearphishing, which appears more common, recently.
• Frameworks don’t make much sense.
• The 7drl (7-day roguelike) Challenge just completed.  (via)
• Universal Install Script.
• What was system administration like in the 1990s and earlier?
• EigenCoder: Programming Stereotypes.  Beards vs. programming language.  Really!  (via)
• X11fs – X window virtual filesystem.  (via)
• Let’s Read the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual.  Exactly what it sounds like.  Fun and/or nostalgic.  (via)
• Why Compatibility And Support Don’t Justify $1000 Optics.  (via)
• glittering.blue.  The source link has how it was constructed, and its life through reposting.
• Exhibit: The Entropy Archives.  The “public randomness beacon” from NIST.  (via)
• The Deep History of Your Apps.  A good history of the Alto, NeXTSTEP, and so on up to the modern app store.  (via)

I am all over the map this week.

• How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive.  I learned D’Nealian; my mother wrote Spencerian. Technical lettering in college and signing labs as a grad student destroyed my style.  Anyone know a good source of fountain pens that are cheap/usable?  I don’t want to go down the crazy route.  (via)
• Triple redundancy in a Boeing 777.  An Ada program compiled with 3 different compilers and run on 3 different processors.  (PDF, via)
• If you’re curious about gold (the software, not the metal) and how linkers work, given DragonFly’s recent switch, the author of gold, Ian Lance Taylor, wrote a 20-part series about the topic.  (Linked here before some years ago, but it’s worth reading now.)
• “We got around three“.  A lesson in the persistence of Fortran.
• Former Atari Employee Posts Work Email Log from 1982-1992.  The source of the link has many choice comments pulled out.
• Four examples of excellent interface design.  In games, of course.  The only one I’ve tried is Brogue, previously linked here, and its terminal controls don’t feel like terminal controls.
• The Storage Engine: Timeline.  History of data storage, an online exhibit at the Computer History Museum.  There are some delightful pictures and stories.  (via)
• Raspberry Pi Zero: The $5 Computer.  Pretty soon it’s going to be possible to sneeze and accidentally lose several computers because you blew them off the table.  (via, also here)
• Also, a comparison of price between similarly-powered computers: everything circa 1980 and the Pi Zero now.
• C.H.I.P. vs Pi Zero: Which Sub-$10 Computer Is Better?  Topical!  “Which runs BSD better?” is the question you should ask, cause price is almost immaterial.  (via)
• A browser-based optics sandbox.  Funny how this used to require a standalone program.  (via)
• The Software Freedom Conservancy is looking for your support.  They provide infrastructure to software you use.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Sunday Comics Kickstarter.

Your unrelated open source game of the week: 0 A.D.  Works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD and can run on DragonFly if you can fix gloox.  (via)

Somehow I managed to find mostly articles with long headlines this week.

• Getting work done while you’re fishing – with expect.
• Linux workstation security checklist.  Most of this would apply to a BSD system too. (via)
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fsync().  From the POSIX point of view.(via)
• There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: (via I lost the source, sorry!)
• The somewhat surprising history of chroot().  (via multiple)
• Modern *BSDs have a much better init system than I was expecting.
• The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community.  (via)
• The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies.  I found this out the hard way over last winter.  (also via)
• The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy.  Can’t top this.  (via)
• Unix Administration Horror Stories.  (via)
• Roguelike Tutorial in Rust.  (via)

There’s some meaty reading this week, so get settled in and start clicking.

• Haunted Machines An Origin Story.  I love this sort of intersection of ideas.  (via)
• Our Friends, the Bots.  (via previous)
• Futures of Text.  Why wasn’t this ever done at the command line, too?  (via previous)
• Cybernetic Serendipity.
• The Verge’s Web Sucks.  A followup to “The Mobile Web Sucks” that I linked to previously.
• How Does Level Generation Work In Brogue?  The animated gifs work very well here.
• Surfing the Internet from My TRS-80 Model 100.  (via)
• The Itanium processor, parts 2, 3, 3b, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.  Here’s part 1 if you missed it last week.  Windows-centric, but probably still interesting for the hardware.
• Ever wonder why they used “that key”?  (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• Pronunciation guide for UNIX.  (via)
• Forgotten Quests from the golden age of adventure games.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales.  It’s a comics series where different comics artists start a story, then hands the story off to a different writer and artist for each issue after that.  I’ve been getting individual issues as they make them, and I want more people to subscribe, so they can get enough cash to print the last few issues.  (Independent comics is a hard business.)  Order the complete series, for yourself or as a unique present for a smaller person.

Be ready for the latent craziness in some of the links for this Lazy Reading episode.

• Unix Meets Prime Numbers.
• The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up.
• Google INTERCAL Style Guide.  (via)
• Before Spelunky and FTL, There Was Only ASCII.  “Procedural Death Labyrinths” sounds fun.  (via)
• How Pinterest simplified, compartmentalised and scattered the web.
• “actually a hat“.
• GMO biology transformed by “Inventor of Email”.  There’s a reason that last part is in quotes.
• What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It: Interview With Internet Pioneer John Day.  A 6-month interview.  (via)
• Running TSS/8 on the DEC PiDP-8/i and SIMH.  It’s not just a software simulation; it’s a Raspberry Pi inside a PDP-8 shell.  The front panel actually works.  (thanks, Remy van Elst!)

Your off-topic movie link of the week: The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.  (via an internet cult.)  Originally titled Invention For Destruction and released by a Czech director, then subtitled to English.  Looks like a strange mix of steampunk content and Monty Python-style animation.  That may seem only mildly interesting until you notice it was filmed in 1958.

I don’t know why I’ve been finding so many roguelike links lately, but it’s to our benefit.

• The Open Container Project.  No mention of a BSD.  I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad.
• Random Numbers in the original Doom.  Is that true?  That seems a bit crazy.  (via)
• The NANOG65 call for presentations is out.
• More falsehoods programmers believe about time.  A followup to a previous link.
• @Play 82: The Talks of the International Roguelike Developers Conference US, 2015.  Some fascinating links/talks on video there.
• Stick to 64-bit counters.
• LIFE IS TERRIBLE: LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WEB – James Mickens.  I don’t think I saw/linked to this one before.  Why is a Microsoft researcher one of the funniest nerd people online?  (via)
• The first port of UNIX.  (PDF, via)
• Vim Colors (via)
• Releasing a Commercial ASCII Roguelike, a Post-Mortem.  (via)
• Cold brew tea.
• From TextMate to Vim.  (via)
• Shortest network cable evar.  I once had a coworker confuse inches (“) and feet (‘) when ordering, so we ended up with a box of 200 6-inch Ethernet cables.  (via)

I came up with a whole bunch of links at the last minute despite traveling and being sick.  I’m dedicated to your idle reading!

• In defence of curl | sudo bash –.  Not really in defense because nobody’s that crazy.  (via)
• Leap “smearing”.
• HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike.  (via)
• Hack RUN.  A… greenscreenlike?
• 30 years of Amiga.  Coming up in about a month.  (via)
• “Why Agile, Lean and Six Sigma must die …”  (via)
• You probably already saw “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks“, but there’s already a t-shirt.  (via)
• Finding the needles.
• If We’ve Won, Why Are We Still Explaining Open Source?  (via)
• hhighlighter, syntax coloring for the output of other programs.
• UNIX Recovery Legend.  (via)  There’s more documents of similar vintage to look at.
• “The Hacker’s Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”.  While I hadn’t read this before now, I’ve been doing a similar pattern for some months now, and I’ve lost 30 lbs/13.5 kg.
• The Curta Calculator.  A neat bit of machinery that I’ve never seen.
• Retro Thinkpad idea.  I would buy this, for the keyboard alone.

Your off-topic link of the week: you have about a week to pay $35 to not die when the Earth is destroyed on July 5th.  It’s the 18th time the world has almost ended, so it has to work out one of these times.

I had to do this early, too, so the link count is a bit low this week.  Sorry!

• From the abacus to smartphone: The evolution of mobile and portable computers, a book by Evan Koblentz.  (via)
• A/UX – The Long View.  OS X in 1998.  I wish I had been able to try this.  (via)
• Monsters and Manuals, another RPG thinkblog.
• The NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament.  (via)
• Linux is not gnu/linux.  Linking because it’s a bit off the deep end.  (via)
• Why I dislike systemd.  (via)
• OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135 [Command 135 initiated]  Numbers stations are one of those deep-dive things.  (via)
• Meet Processing, the Lingua Franca of Creative Coding.  (via)
• mdast-man: Compile markdown to man pages (roff)  So often, the open source solution to something is not to produce more or better quality output, but to instead rearrange the tools for doing so.  (via)

I guess the accidental theme this week is Unix.

• The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid.  From 1981, which says something.  (via)
• Terminal: Beyond Ctrl + A and Ctrl + E.  Linked because I needed to know what the nondestructive version of Ctrl-U was.  (Ctrl-A)
• Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem.  I’ve been considering a static generator for this site, for similar reasons.  (via)
• How to name things: the hardest problem in programming.  A dry topic talked about in a very human way.  (via)
• Floppy Drive Organ.
• Cold Weather, Gogol And The Rise Of The Russian Samovar.  I don’t need one, but I’ve always thought samovars are interesting.
• Unix Shells: Bash, Fish, Ksh, Tcsh, Zsh.  (via)
• When Poll is Better than Interrupt.  (PDF, via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution  (via)
• Backblaze hard drive stats for 2015Q1.  (via)
• Crystals and computer viruses.  (via)
• Inadvertent collection.
• Bash history format.
• Vim Tips For Intermediate Users.  (via)
• Why isn’t our fax working?  (Hint: a power issue.)  (via)
• The Problem with the Roguelike Metagame.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week: svblm.  Found via a link to Infinideer and Forest Ambassador.