Category: UNIXish

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”.

Overflow that started 2 weeks ago.  Maybe I should go intraweekly for Lazy Reading?

• The Multics history of Unix.  I link it for the Dennis Richie anecdote.  (via)
• Unix: Building a Development Environment from Scratch.  (PDF, via)
• A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification.  Outlook.com is huge and poorly configured – it’s the AOL email of the 2010s!
• Whatever Happened to the Desktop Computer?  (via)
• bhgv/Inferno-OS_Android – an Android port of Inferno OS.  Phones seem a natural location for this.  (via)
• What is Debian all about, really? Or: friction, packaging complex applications. Uses Debian, but applies to any packaging system. I like the “strong guarantee” language.  (via)
• Analysis of SSHFS performance for large builds.
• Keyboard notebook – sized to fit under your keyboard, a good/simple idea.  Kikkerland is like the U.S. version of Atypk.
• The Remarkable Number 1/89.  (via)
• VF-1, a commandline Gopher client.  (also via)
• Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.  A Rolling Stone article from 1972 that ends with code.  (via)

I’m already filling in next week’s Lazy Reading links, there’s so much.

• An Open Letter to the Perl Community.  Getting from Perl 5 to Perl 6.  (via)
• chart.business.  (via)
• Teaching an Almost 40-year Old UNIX about Backspace.  (via)
• khal, a terminal calendar. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
• 10 PRINT, a book about a single-line Commodore 64 program.  (via swildner)
• Wireguard, a possible IPSec/OpenVPN replacement.  (via)
• ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation.  “decentralized social network protocol”, and a first step out of the walled garden.  A very pleasant-to-read specification, too!  (via)
• My favorite games of 2017.  This will eat some hours of your time.
• This week in references: echoes, breakbeats, the new sound of music.  The “Breakbeat Deconstruction” video is pleasant auditory history.
• Drummer From Another Mother, a Moog Music product.  Listen, it’s the sound of analog!  (via)
• USB Killer, now with pyrotechnic payload.
• The Screenless Office.  (via)
• System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware.  (via)
• Meanwhile is now available on Steam! Plus extra DLC comic!  Meanwhile is a physical comic built as a maze, or perhaps nonlinear book, and here it is in software.

Almost all of this was done within 24 hours of the last Lazy Reading.  No idea why there were so many good candidates for reading, but I’m happy about it.

• Digital Minimalism for the Working Hacker.  I like the plan he is working towards, though I’m not sure how to implement it for myself.  (via)
• acme-colors, using font faces instead of colors for syntax highlighting in Vim.  I really like this, more than Solarized.   (via previous link)
• There’s a Solarized theme for puTTY?  Found by accident looking up Solarized for the previous link.
• Make the 486 Great Again!  Not found via previous link, just to break the pattern.  (via)
• Gopher: still active.
• Tetris on a business card.
• Life in Unix V7: an attempt at a simple task.  (via)
• UnifrakturMaguntia: a Unicode Fraktur Font.
• Xerox Alto’s 3 Mb/s Ethernet: Building a gateway with a BeagleBone.
• Analog Hard Disk.  (via)
• Reading disks from 1988 in 2018.  I have a linear foot of disks like this.(via)
• “Facebook is done with quality journalism. Deal with it.”
• The Making of Lemmings.  (via)
• Monster Manual, but not the one you remember.  (via)
• VintageCG on YouTube.  (via)
• Amiga.

Last anything for the year!  I packed in as much reading material as I could.

• “Bits, in this case, are actual physical objects.”  About the newest MAME.
• piu-piu-SH, a horizontally-scrolling shooter for the console.  (via)
• Reviving the Apple 410 Color Plotter.  (via)
• Print Color PDF Apple II Print Shop Christmas Cards.  (via)  The microm8 idea sounds interesting overall.
• Computer latency: 1977-2017.  Maybe I need an Apple][ category?
• winss, a process-supervision init system for Windows based on s6, an init system designed for Unixish systems.  (via)
• Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401’s core memory and power supply.  Nice pictures!  (via)
• The 2018 internet resolution everyone should have: Bring back your browser bar.  (via)
• The Hardest Computer Game of All Time.  (via)
• The text adventures of 1991.
• The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn’t.  (via)
• About the Use of Dot-Slash in Commands.  (also via)
• The Wayland Zombie Apocalypse is Near.  Linked mostly cause I didn’t know Samsung kept an open source blog.  (also via)
• Evil Coding Incantations.  Mentions the wat presentation, which I have linked here before, but if you haven’t seen it…  (also via)

I’m throwing in some end-of-year lists cause now’s the time for it.

• The Best Bandcamp Metal albums of 2017.  #1 on the list, Power Trip, is my new favorite band.
• Polygon’s 50 best videogames of 2017.  Some not-what-you-would-expect games in there.  (via)
• AF_UNIX comes to Windows.  (via multiple sources)
• The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix.  (via)
• Uncle Miod’s Machineroom.  (via a comment in the previous source)
• XScreenSaver 5.38.  Note that the Android release is now a manual download.
• Repairing a 1960s-era IBM keypunch.  (via)
• The Quest for a Desktop email client.  (via multiple)
• ScummVM 2.0 released.  (via)
• Ron Mueck’s Giant Skulls.  I’ve linked to this artist before.
• Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 2: MUD.
• Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 3: The Persistent Multiplayer CRPG.
• Vim: My Shiniest Gems  (via)
• How to Setup a Unix News Server (1999).  Nostalgia, at this point.  (via)
• Squinting at ASCII.
• Oops.  (via)

Lots and lots this week!

• Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe.  (via)
• TIC-80: a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.  (via)
• FPGA-Based Disk Controller for Apple II.  (via)
• 52 weeks of Unix Newsletter.  You too can subscribe.  (via)
• Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987).  (via)
• Pancake – a CLI/Emacs web/gopher/file browser.  Linked really because of the gopher mention.  (via)
• File crash consistency and filesystems are hard.
• Computers suck: episode 17787 of 31279.
• What media/pop culture “easter eggs” are format-specific?  (via
• The Internet Archive.  Neat hardware!
• Debugging an evil Go runtime bug.  (via)
• Use pax.  Already installed!  (also via)
• Stuff the kids know and stuff they don’t.
• Internet protocols are changing.  A good summary of what’s coming/here.  (via)
• An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage.

 

Accidental theme this week: the 1990s.

• Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard.  Matches every place I’ve ever worked.  (via
• The Advent of Void.  I wish someone would do this with BSD packages.  (via)
• wiby, a 90s-only search engine.  (via)
• What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?  (via)
• VPN recommendations.
• Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 1: Strategy and Simulation.  You will surely have heard of some of these games, even if you never encountered them.
• 90s CD-ROM games.
• The man with a DiscMan.  More 90s.

Your unrelated photo of the week: untitled.