Category: UNIXish

Inadvertent theme this week: games.  Yet somehow I didn’t include a roguelike?  Dang.

• Why USB plugs aren’t/weren’t reversible.
• 10 Awesome Ways to Upcycle Old Devices With a Raspberry Pi.  Some nice connecting of analog controls on these projects.  (via)
• A bug so cool that the development team was reluctant to fix it.
• Open Source Game Clones.  I seem to link to this every two years or so.  Still iffy on it.  (via)
• Notes on recent games: nifty little experiments.
• The fate of an archive.  Linked cause I still have a pile of CRO2 bootleg music cassettes that I don’t think exist digitally, anywhere.
• The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent.
• The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.  (via)
• A Gopher server in sh.  (via)
• Textreme.  The Most! Exciting! Text! Editor!  EVER!  (via)
• tokyo60 keyboards.  (via)
• HHKB layouts, related to the last link.
• Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Vol.6.  (via)
• Day of the Tentacle, a history.
• A Very Brief History of Gamebooks (up to 1979).
• Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002).  Also, the 2015 followup.  It may surprise nobody that the average answer is “bunch of terminals and a web browser”.  (via)
• Advent of Computing: Episode 5 Notes – How much has UNIX changed?  (via)

I’m really loading up with links this weekend; make some time to read today.

• The Unitech UNIX posters.  (via)
• Floating point precision as physical control.  I linked to the underlying story before, but I like the idea that compilers should have Winamp-style skins.
• Illustrations of Imaginary Cyberpunk Gadgets.  (via)
• Mythological Monsters.  Try bookfinder.com or isbn.nu if you’re searching for old books; Amazon bought all the others.
• A-EON Talks About The Future of The Amiga Platform.
• Hull: An alternative to shell that I’ll never have time to implement .  I appreciate the honesty in the title.  (via)
• Why You Can’t Trust Network Time.  It’s a self-advertising story, but not invalid.  There’s interesting details in the source link comments.
• The WIRED Guide to Open Source Software.  Unfortunately glosses over BSD.  (via)
• How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape.  (via)
• Cidco MailStation as a Z80 Development Platform.
• Richard Garriott de Cayeux; creates Ultima, becomes a robot.
• The Beginner’s Vim Cheat Sheet.  (via)
• Intermediate Vim.  (via)
• …and in the end there will be the command line.  (via)
• Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019.  (via)
• Real and Strange ICD-10 Codes.  (via)

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)