Category: Someday you will need this

There’s several accidental themes fighting it out this week.

• Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog.  Seriously.
• Blogging Less in the 2020s.  Social media demands your complete attention to “succeed”.
• Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore.  The problem of depending on external services that can be turned off or changed.
• This Page is Designed to Last.  I have this worry about the Digest.  (via)
• Working on our Thoughts, a publish-in-multiple-formats (website, book, etc) method.  (via)
• Back In Time For Xmas.  Linked for the picture of fiber wrapped around a large auger; the stuff of nightmares for anyone responsible for network infrastructure.
• Public Sans, a typeface from the U.S. Government.  (via)
• PinePhone review.
• Plasma Mobile as Daily Driver on PinePhone.  (via)
• Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative.  That is kinda linkbaity but what the heck.  (via)
• Inkplate 6, crowdfunded, via comments on the previous source.
• reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics.  (via)
• 2019 Retrospective.  Interactive Fiction.  (via)
• Miller, a command line tool for tabular data.  (via)
• The tyranny of ideas.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• The Blue Tape List.  When I do this at a new job, I call it the Crazy List.  You have only the first 6 months at a new job before everything that struck you as crazy becomes accepted, and you won’t be able to see the problem any more.  (via)
• In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle.  He created the 6502, which powered it seems like almost every home computer.  (via)
• Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feed.  I use Tiny Tiny RSS and had no idea how nice the Readability plugin is.  (via)
• Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings.  Ugh but convincing argument.
• Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg and Crop a video using ffmpeg. Linked cause you’ll need it sooner or later.
• The man who made Wolfenstein.  One of the few commercially purchased Apple ][ games I ever had – and still have.   (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: Cosey Fanni Tutti ?– Tutti.  Found via Ted Gioia’s Best 100 Albums of 2019, which was discovered via Conversations with Tyler.  There, now you definitely have enough to listen to until 2020.

This week is a nice mix between useful and entertaining.

• Oregon Trail, the cabinet game.  (via)
• Cover story: The curious case of a shared database.  (via)
• The Art of Warez.  (via)
• The humane way to take control of your phone.  (via)
• A terminal user interface for Mastodon.  (via)
• Write Fuzzable Code.
• At least one Vim trick you might not know.
• Reliable after 50 years: The Apollo Guidance Computer’s switching power supplies.
• GPG2 cheatsheet.
• Workarounds for semantic problems and More workarounds for semantic problems.
• Found in previous link: this is working Perl and PostScript at the same time.
• A List of My Twenty Favorite Works of Interactive Fiction.
• One byte used to cost a dollar.
• The “Tonya Harding Solution” to computer benchmarks.
• The History of Tetris Randomizers.  (via)

It’s bizarre links week this week.  Well, more than usual, I mean.

• The Infocom dump, via multiple places.
• Related: What is ZIL anyway?
• Techbros ruin eating, again.
• The Very Mathematical History of a Perfect Color Combination.  I’ve mentioned Solarized before.  (via)
• A fully reversible USB cable.  (via)
• Brix System, life size LEGOs.  (via)
• Useful/curious datasets.  (also via)
• Cut / Fold Templates.  Neat paper, neat interface, neat animations.  (via)
• Quake is for everyone.  (via)
• A look at IBM S/360 core memory: In the 1960s, 128 kilobytes weighed 610 pounds.
• One reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days of V7 Unix.
• The Failure of the Great Tip-Free Restaurant Experiment.  Linked because of the eternal truth of that last paragraph.
• Storage Performance Reference Guide: Interconnect Maximum Effective Data Rates.  BSD site bit not BSD-related.
• Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode eight – All Hail the War Mayor.
• Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode nine – Titanfall.
• Efficiency Machines: The Operating System Recontextualized.  It’s about a game.
• ArchiveBox.  The open source self-hosted web archive.  (via)
• Avoiding the gravity well of webbiness in gopher.  (via)
• Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web.  (via)
• I like the whole “computers-in-wood” asthetic [sic].
• Avalanche Noise Generator Notes.