Category: UNIXish

No theme this week!

• Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway.
• Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld. (Part 1, if you want making-of.
• The new Kermit Project. (via)
• Transfer your files with Kermit. Maybe should be an ‘In Other BSDs’ item.
• Modern LZ Compression. (via) 
• A small notebook for a system administrator. Individually valuable components without worry for the whole. (via)
• “Blogging is now an elder game“. (via)
• How I Got My Attention Back. (via)
• A little appreciation for Vim’s ‘g’ command.
• HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points. (via)
• Pocket guide to UNIX, still relevant after 35 years.  (via)
• Perl 11. A talk about Perl and RPerl, which I hadn’t heard of.

 

Old computer theme this week.  That may be more of a constant.

• PiDP-11: Recreating the PDP-11/70.  (via)
• Fonts on Unix.  (via)  The source comments mention Go Mono a number of times; new to me.
• Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade! Could it still work??  Of course the answer is eventually yes or why link to it?  (via)
• Standard Notes, an open source alternative to other notes apps.  (via)
• Two Bit History, computer history by decade.  I’ve linked to some of the individual articles before.
• The Story of the Polysynth, video.  (via)
• Colour Without Colour: Apple II Computer Graphics.  (via)
• The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found.  (via)
• STAR, an Arduino Robot Recreation.  Creepy crawler.
• Full Table.  Down the rabbit hole of images.  (via)
• Rules for Online Sanity, a PDF.  (via)
• SGI collectors.
• Bad relay: Fixing the card reader for a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe.
• Inform: Past, Present, Future.  (via)

 

I cleared my tab backlog, but I still have a RSS backlog to work through here.  Please be patient as I post a crapton of links and still don’t make it to the end.

• Close Your Open Tabs.  Linked because I didn’t know about tab pinning, and it’s super handy.
• BINAC: A Brief Look Back. (video)  Mercury delay line memory, which provoked a “how does that even work” reaction in me.  (via)
• “So you want to make a TUI…”  Terminal Text User Interface, if you didn’t realize.  (via)
• Explaining the ‘mystery’ of numbers stations.  (via)
• Wizards, Moomins and pirates: the magic and mystery of literary maps.  (via)
• Exhibiting The Hobbit: A tale of memories and microcomputers.  (via)
• The Hobbit, via a comment on the previous link source.
• De-google-ify Internet: List of Alternatives.  Even if you are not specifically trying to avoid Google, it’s a handy mapping of application to need.   (via)
• A brief history of the numeric keypad.  (via)
• Myst, 25 years old.
• Mailing lists vs Github.  People view Github somewhat benignly, but it’s still a company with diverging interests from the people who use it for free hosting.
• The printer that wouldn’t print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s.
• These Books.  Vintage books and posters, modified.
• Haiku R1/beta1 has been released.  (via)
• Most common ingredients by cuisine.  Graphs!  (via)
• Your Calendrical Fallacy Is…  (via)
• “UNIX is a disaster…”  (via)

Your unrelated listening of the week: The Best Metal on Bandcamp: September 2018.  Witch Ripper and Pig Destroyer are pretty fun, both to listen to and to say.

I’m going heavy on history this week.

• “an imaginary mail order computer games shop in 1985“.
• NeoVim, a refactoring of Vim.
• “The Obscuritory, a blog about lesser-known, odder games and software.” (via)
• Pulling the rug out from under an internet protocol.
• Building the Commodore that should have existed.  (via)
• Via the previous link, the C256 Foenix Project.  A Commodore 128 sequel.
• The Arcade Flyer Archive, advertising material around arcade games.  (via)
• AtlTVHead, a project.  (Video)
• OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community.  (via)
• Webrings.  Was there ever a BSD one?  I don’t know…
• Student events at SC18 this fall – sign up now to participate.  That’s “SC” as in “SuperComputing” – they will have a Cray on display, for instance.  (via)
• “There’s real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al“.  The argument isn’t valid, I think – you’ll get the same problem with new tools; it’s really reinvention, not improvement.  (via)
• Yore Computer, old UK computer magazine pages.  (via)

Treat this week: footage of a college animatronic project I was slightly involved in.  See below.

• Maintaining Notepad is not a full-time job, but it’s not an empty job either.
• Concise Computational Literature is Now Online in Taper.  1KB items only.
• 80s Home Robot History.  The first example is classic open source.
• Alphachat, economic film analysis.  This podcast episode is talking about Tron/Tron Legacy.  (via)
• Ten years of Vim.  (via)
• 30 years later, QBasic is still the best.  I link to this story because years ago, in college, some of my roommates built an entire animatronic gargoyle project around it.  I found the footage, recently.  (via)
• Vim 8.1 released.  (via)
• Hints for writing Unix tools.  (via)
• Reverse NES emulation.  (via)
• We Did Our First Kickstarter! And It Worked!  Linking to it because the games are interesting, but also because it’s a viewpoint where he says “We’re getting older, enough so that the end of our careers is in sight. ”  Not something you normally think of for an indie developer.
• Eudora, BSD-licensed.  (via many places)
• WTFUtil, fun-looking terminal report screen.  (via)
• OnlineASCIITools.com.  Exactly what it sounds like.

Accidental theme this week: games.

• AI Anecdotes, with highlights.  (via)
• The history of documented Unix facilities.  (via)
• Web OS, open sourced.  Originally what ran on Palm handhelds.  I got to try an unreleased Palm phone just before they folded – it was slick.   (via)
• The quest to save Stephen Hawking’s voice.  He can literally speak from beyond the grave, if you think about it.  (via)
• A Look Back at PLATO.  (via)
• Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix.  (via)
• The Handheld History Collection.  (via)
• The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization and Part 2: Playing Civilization and Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress.
• The making of Dark Castle.  That game fascinated me.  (via)
• Edible Dice.  Yep, can buy them.  (via)
• Stop cherry-picking, start merging: Index.
• groups.io.  Way, way better than dealing with Yahoo or Google ‘free’ group products, which is an unavoidable feature of many non-tech groups.  (via)

Your unrelated cookbook link of the week: “Texture – A hydrocolloid recipe collection”.