• Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now.  Go, if you are near.
• On pressing the space bar for the cabinet.
• The state of Linux music players in 2026.  A subset of that is BSD music players of course.  (via)
• ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering.  (via)
• The Dunking Decree.  (via)
• Bending ePaper To Our Will with Custom LUTs.  E-paper ‘pixels’ are not binary on/off.
• This is magic.  Good comments from Youtube, a rarity.
• The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed) and Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess.  The important thing to me is the note that vi exists as a specification, not just different software variations.
• Sorta related: Design Deconstruction, Vim as video editor.
• Things that are not backup solutions.
• All Your Base, slight remaster.

• Cal Newport on the case for quitting social media – second video.
• Tea Brewing Guides.
• Our Ancestors Murdered Their Mother Tongue, Thankfully.  If you don’t know what Proto-Indo-European is, this will help.
• “you’re not talking to a helpful sci-fi robot – you’re roleplaying a story about a human talking to a helpful sci-fi robot“
• lenticular potato chip.
• YouTube… Over Dial Up.  Multilink PPP, which I have never seen in the wild.
• The 100 MHz 6502.  (via)
• UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A.  (via multiple)
• Roguelike Celebration 2025 event list.  Happening in less than a month.
• [COFF] TECO variants.  I had heard TECO was arcane but I had no idea.

• How are zlib, gzip and zip related?  (via)
• All Internet Roads Lead Back to 2014.  (via)
• Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling.  The forks part is most interesting.
• Jeff Keen’s Amazing Rayday Comic collages.  (via)
• Creating A Productive Terminal Environment.  (via)
• Steeped in chemistry: A nice cup of tea, molecularly.  Prewarm your pot, open your cup, agitate your tea.  (via)
• .emacs bankruptcy.  (via)
• The Computers of Voyager.  Possibly the most extreme reliability engineering.
• Last chance to buy the Edible Games Cookbook.
• Scott Bradner – A History of the Internet.  (via)
• Roguelike Celebration 2024 Call for Presenters Now Open.

• 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)

• 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)

• Ascending NetHack by breaking the RNG. (via)
• “This is an archive of the source code for various versions of the QED editor.” A Git archive with commit dates that predate the creation of Git, cause QED dates to pre-UNIX. (also via)
• aphelia: A light, single-file, minimalist window manager for X11. (via)
• SyncTERM connecting to lobste.rs. (via)
• chezmoi: manage your dotfiles securely across multiple machines. Not necessarily advocating this over plain version control systems. (via)
• Monotonic clocks are not monotonic. Many people get to make this discovery, in many places. (via)
• A NES Emulator written in Emacs. (via)
• A computer built into a mouse. (via)
• Journalbook, a private, completely-offline notes browser app.
• Insects as food, a comprehensive PDF. (via)
• Xenix tales: 8086 and Xenix 386 networking. (via)
• Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode one – crushed legs and eagle guts.
• Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode two – flailing in a pool of dwarf pus.
• Getting an IBM AS/400 Midrange computer on the internet. (via)
• A Bit about Alphabit. A Commodore64 demo.
• When a cabinet and an automaton love each other very much…
• halting problem :: History of GNOME / Episode 2.0: Retrospective.
• kitty – the fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator. Blurs the line between terminal and windowing environment.
• Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email. (via)
• Random Role Playing Game Inspiration. (via)
• SCRIPT-8, the Javascript-based retro computer. (via)
• 30th anniversary of the Macintosh SE/30. I would not argue with Best Mac Ever assessment. (via)
• 2018 Hard Drive Reliability Stats by Manufacturer and Model. The Backblaze report. (via)
• How You’ve Been Making Tea Wrong Your Entire Life – BBC. Some of this seems obvious? (video, via)

Your unrelated audio link of the week: Centuries of Sound. The major sounds of a given year, starting in 1859. Yes, 1859. It’s like time travel for your ears, with liner notes. (via)

• LiteCLI: A user-friendly command line client for SQLite. (via)
• A holiday gift woodworking project using Clojure. (via)
• 2019 IGF nominees: something notable.
• 2019 IGF nominees: mixed reactions.
• 2019 IGF nominees: my favorites.
• Privacy Engineer job at Wikimedia.
• Rand Intelligent Terminal Agent (RITA): Design Philosophy. (PDF, via)
• Book review: Retro debugging. (via)
• The ‘Say Thanks’ Project. Can’t help thinking of T.Hanks. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• The Rise and Demise of RSS. Not as common nowadays, but invaluable for these weekend Digest articles.  (via)
• Nethack beaten in 7 minutes, 15 seconds realtime. One comment notes that you can, within game rules, die before you start playing. (via)
• Text Games to Watch for in 2019. 
• In honor of Donald Knuth’s 81 birthday Stanford uploaded 111 lectures on Youtube. (via)
• Facebook is the new crapware. (via)
• 404 Page Not Found: The internet feeds on its own dying dreams. (via)
• Computers in Kids’ Bedrooms. (via)
• Snowflake Archeology: Early computer animation (1960s) for the DEC PDP-1. (via)
• Online Text Tools. For when you don’t have a shell handy.
• Sinographs for “tea”.
• Misadventures in process containment. Interesting for the history.
• Dawn of the Second Epoch. Coming sooner than Y2038, possibly.
• UNIX in pictures. (via)
• Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time. In-depth article, not just a polemic, getting into how Solid works. (via)
  
  

• drill if you can, dig if you have to, nslookup if you must.  (also via)
• Free-Net history.  I grew up with Buffalo Free Net.
• Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system.  (via)
• An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM mainframe examined: it’s a key debouncer.  (via)
• Open source modular synth software lets you create 70s & 80s electronic music.  (via)
• The year we wanted the internet to be smaller.  (via)
• A Brief History of sed.  (via)
• Legends of the Ancient Web.  (via)
• 100 Outstanding Pieces of Audio for 2017.  (via)
• Here at the End of All Things, fantasy maps.  (via, via)
• Survival Research Laboratories: Inconsiderate fantasies of negative acceleration.  For SRL, whatever their machinery looks like it could do, it does.  Those aren’t movie props.  (via)
• RISC-V, getting more attention lately.  Not vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre and open.  Here’s hardware.  Don’t know if any BSDs run on any of them – but I haven’t looked.  (via a number of places)
• THE tinySAURUS GENERATOR.  (via)
• Tea if by sea, cha if by land.  (via)

• Save 418.  (Thanks, Tim Darby)
• this code very fast.  (via)
• An early (earliest?) Choose Your Own Adventure book.  (via)
• books chapter eleven
• The Zork CPU.  The software engine turned into silicon.  Can that be done for SCUMM?  Does that even make sense?  (via)
• An Introduction to Managing Secrets Safely with Version Control Systems.  (also via)
• Every Programmer Should Know.  (via)
• Rochester vs. Cupertino.  I live in Rochester, and the portrait it paints is accurate.  Kodak made a lot of lives better in ways we don’t expect of tech companies today.  (also via)

• Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures.  (via)
• 9 great mechanical keyboards for coders.  Never thought I’d see a HP Enterprise site referencing Axe Cop…  (via)
• A Sublime-like minimap for console vim.  (via)
• “Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate”: A Cultural History of the Punch Card (1992)  (via)
• The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.  (via)
• Humanscale, reissued.  For my money, Niels Diffrient was the best task chair designer.  (His Freedom chair was much better than the Aeron chair so beloved of startups about to run out of cash.)
• Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea & Human Health.  A national Canadian tea site?  Unexpected.
• Malicious crossenv package on npm.  (via)
• Related, sorta: Random Stack Overflow code importer.  (via)
• Apollo Team Announces the (Amiga) Vampire V4.  (via)
• Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark.  (via)
• Why I’m Learning Perl 6.

• Tmux and Vim – better together.  (via)
• Free Fonts Are Getting Better, But What Does That Mean?   Destruction of value!
• vuln disclosure and risk equilibrium.
• How Google eats a business whole.  Google’s Featured Snippets are often not wrong but also not right.
• Build a Better Monster.  (via)
• Binary Keyboard.
• That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator.
• Ireland and England’s ‘best’ teas, reviewed by an American.
• “There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically.”  (via)
• Operating In Obscurity.  QNX, OS/2, and others.

Your sorta-a-comics-link of the week: Liartown USA, the book.

• Why Nothing Works Anymore.  Occam’s Razor applies; most people undervalue design vs. cost.  (via)
• I miss Delphi
• There’s more than one way to kill a Unix process
• Sniffing out Unix processes using pgrep
• cloudbleed hero graphics.  You know what Cloudbleed is, correct?  It’s hard to illustrate, is what it is.
• 1000 links later.  The Digest is generally a links site, and my experience matches what he’s saying.
• The PDP-10 group on GitHub.  (via, via)
• Doing Presentations.  I have an employee who can’t stop reading text verbatim off his slides, facing the screen… which means I can’t stop falling asleep at about slide 20 or so.  (via)
• An annotated digest of the top “Hacker” “News” posts.  Accurate.  (via)
• ./code –poetry.  (via)
• Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces.  (via)
• comment free codex.  Comment quantity is starting to matter even more than quality.
• There’s no IPv4 ranges left to allocate, but there’s some ranges that aren’t being used by their owners, and are given back.  Here’s where the remaining scraps of recovered IPv4 space are tracked.  It at least delays the inevitable.  (via)
• Eli5: What is POSIX?
• A time-proven zsh prompt.
• About the Newton MessagePad 2xxx ROM card.  (via)

Your unrelated tea link of the week: In Sri Lanka’s Tea Paradise, A Social Enterprise Is Brewing.  I actually heard about the quality of the tea (very good) before I heard about the way the company was formed.  Consider where your next tea purchase comes from, in light of this.

• The Magic Arrow: A talk about the SIP2 protocol and the purpose of REST.
• Testing LLVM
• git apply --palimpsest=3 --rewind-sprocket
• 25 useful web developer tools.  Not clickbait as you’d expect.
• FAP80, A retro computer without the retro baggage.  (via)
• Modern propaganda is distraction, not argument.  (PDF, via)
• Ransomware takes a nasty turn
• Lock-Free Bugs
• Related: The compendium of database ransomware. A scientific approach to measuring a disaster.
• “…the open source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in…”  RethinkDB post-mortem.  (via)
• Maintainers Don’t Scale.  Applies to far more than the Linux kernel.  (via)
• Introduction to Precision Farming.  I have seen this up close, so to speak, as there’s a company that does this around the corner from my workplace.

Your tea link of the week: Scary photo of an Indian tea plantation

• SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim.  A Vim … distribution?  (via)
• Mid-century modern electronics.  (via)
• Open Source Won. So, Now What?  (via)
• A Historical Geography of RPG Playing
• 2016 year-end link clearance.  Going down the rabbit hole of links to links.
• Data formats of Rogue One  (via)
• Architects on Death Star design.  A bit clickbaity, I know.  (also via)
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, looking just at user interfaces.  (via)
• Great Talks and Presentations at 33C3  (I think via)
• Truffle Hog, a clever search-for-accidentally-committed-keys script.  (via)
• Hacker News, like any news aggregate, has now reached the astroturfing / advertising point.  (related)
• Goodbye to GNU Libreboot  (via)
• Irssi 1.0.0 Released  And here’s the XKCD cartoon to match.  (via)
• fortran.io, a FORTRAN web framework.  (via)
• A Tourist’s Guide to the LLVM Source Code
• Story behind malloc(0) standardization  (via)
• python 3k17.  Perl’s is the only scripting language I know that successfully navigated major version changes – for compatibility, at least.
• zz: a smart and efficient directory changer
• Internet of Shit and CES.  Of note: 42tea, where you need a smartphone to do what only maybe needs a timer and thermometer.
• chmod 777.  Not sure if real.
• The many lives of Packard Bell.  I hated these.