The Large Installation System Administration 2013 conference has been announced for is coming up on November 3-8, in Washington, D.C. There’s training and speakers and all sorts of stuff, and maybe even a working government in that town by that point.
This week just built up and built up.
- UNIXStickers.com. Not really UNIXish. More vaguely free software cause-ish. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hail Mary Cloud and the Lessons Learned. Peter Hansteen’s talk from BSDCan 2013. I linked to some of his earlier comments on this botnet before, but this is the comprehensive summary.
- Dwarf Fortress NYC. A good exploration of how the symbolic representations in Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes in general are not that far from ‘accepted’ artwork and design. (via)
- Killscreen on Salty Bet. Describing Salty Bet out loud sounds like a cyberpunk novel idea from 1998. (via)
- The top 100 inventions of the past 100 years. I’d argue that some of them are not that important, but the photographs are neat. (via)
- Resurrecting APL/360. People go to extremes to recreate not-very-pleasant historical computing environments. (via)
- Facebook and Open Networking Plan. Facebook doesn’t exactly do good, but I do like the idea of separating hardware from software in networking equipment, a la pfSense. (via)
- Polemic: how readers will discover books in future. Sounds awful, and unfortunately a bit feasible. (via, with a great illustration)
- Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance. A lot of the stupid mistakes tech companies make happen because they are uniformly run by inexperienced people. Worse, this is the sort of perspective you only gain with age. (via)
- How was Hangul Invented? I don’t know any Korean, spoken or written, but I find the planned creation of a language interesting. (via)
- History of the Telegraph. I like the physical design of the old models. Also, Western Union was once the largest telecom company in the world.
- A list of free programming books. (via)
- Connecting a payphone to Asterisk. I did a similar thing with a Model 500. Hmm… and this guy has the same initials as me. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nimona.
By the time you read this, I’ll have already been sitting on an island for a few days. There’s so much stuff to post lately I’m scheduling material a week out.
- Have you used the grep replacement ‘ack‘? There’s a Twitter feed of tips for it.
- A horrible programming idea, so bad I can’t tell if it’s trolling. (via multiple places)
- Links at the previous item led me here: Breaking Systems for Fun and Profit.
- A tiny fatmac. It’s adorable.
- Beautiful Code, from Rob Pike, described by Brian Kernighan.
- That previous link was found via this reimplementation of Pike’s grep in Go. The “Practice of Programming” book mentioned is one of my favorites.
- The SCUMM Diary. The SCUMM engine could arguably be as big an influence as the Quake engine on game history. (via)
- This is a very nice keyboard.
- Managing sshd in Ansible, cross-platform. A sequel to last week’s Ansible/Lucas link.
- UNIX pioneers remember the good times. These anecdotes seems to illustrate the personalities of their tellers/perpetrators. Or at least I imagine they do. (via)
- NTP reference clock statistics. (also via) When milliseconds matter. Also, yay graphs!
- WTF Visualizations. A counterpoint to the previous well-illustrated link. I read through a bunch of the nonsensical graphs and started to feel disoriented. (also also via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: The Scout, by Malachi Ward. A self-contained sci-fi story.
So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.
- The FatMac cooler. Cooler as in place to keep drinks cool.
- I always like seeing what people use for home BSD hardware.
- Note the embroidered dragonflies.
- Early mobile and video phones. Decades early. Look at the slideshow.
- Looking for evil in your firewall logs.
- Best Open Source games. Dunno how many work on any BSD. (via)
- The 2-clause BSD license and the ISC license are considered functionally equivalent?
- The GREP test, an excellent standard for code. (via)
- What if your klacky keyboard is too klacky? (also via)
- Soldering is Easy, the comic book.
- People are really starting to pile on Microsoft. (I already started) Unix-like systems are resuming their dominance of the market. Maybe ubiquity is a better word?
Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!
Last week was relatively light, but somehow this week I read a zillion interesting things. It’s been too dang hot to do much else, other than flop in a chair and point a fan at my head.
- Chopping up CSV files. Tabular format will never die, and for good reason.
- Reanimated: The story of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. I like this idea that someone can just keep working on a project long after the originating company disappeared, just to improve it for their own benefit – no mention of open source or even a plan for it. See also Oblivion Lost or Complete for some of my personal game fix/improvement modification favorites. (via)
- I don’t think this systemd/Debian news is accurate in its reasoning, and they don’t say what’s going to happen with non-Linux Debian. However, it’s still crappy, any way you slice it. (via)
- The paranoid #! Security Guide. Lots of details that won’t necessarily apply to your BSD system, but the descriptions of various attacks are neat. (via)
- Another reminder of how easy it is to deal with a lot of text data at a Unix-ish command line. (via)
- Those ssh password attempts are still going, and have been for a decade. (via)
- Don’t care about the story, but I like the dragonfly illustration.
- Linus Torvalds swears a lot. The problem is not ‘office politics’ as he sees it, but that if you swear all the time as the leader of a project, it becomes commonplace. Linus really has to really freak out for people to notice something new. There’s other issues, like how other people emulate the behavior, but I’m pointing out the ‘verbal base sweariness’ of a project affects the entire tone.
- Quine Relay, where programming languages write each other. The Ouroboros illustration is appropriate. (via many places)
- History of emacs and vi keys. I like how this shows that the command styles in both editors was shaped by the available hardware. (via)
- Fear and Loathing in Debian^H^H^H^H^H^H/Ubuntu (or: who needs /etc/motd). A wonderful rant about the creeping complication of operating systems. Let’s place bets on when people start complaining about Linux bloat. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Your unrelated link of the week: Bones Don’t Lie. An anthropologist who blogs about various discoveries of human remains. I really enjoy blogs where someone is talking about a subject they care about – not to sell a product, not to be paid (directly), but just because they like the topic and they want to share it with others. Of course I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!
- This short story from 1954 might serve as a reason to avoid single system image computing… (via Sascha Wildner)
- Vim and Ctags tips and tricks. (via)
- Psygnosis game box designs. Nostalgia for some, neat art for anyone else. (via)
- 50 years of ASCII, and here’s the table it comes from. Some other neat links there, too. (via)
- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. If you like stories about Feynman, who was a very interesting person, you may want to read Feynman, the comic book. I met the writer, Jim Ottaviani, years ago, and he was very energetic about both science and comics. Look up his other work if that sounds interesting – which it should. Here’s a sample from the Feynman book. (via)
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Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
- Building a Cray at home. Similar to this previously-linked idea. (via)
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)
Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)
Switching terminals in X with ctrl-alt-Fx requires a not-on-by-default option. This could catch anyone used to the old behavior, so I might be doing you a favor by mentioning it.
This is a text-heavy weekend, given yesterday’s post. Enjoy!
- SELinux’s toxic mistake. If people aren’t using something you built because it frustrates those same people, it’s not their fault. (via)
- Contrary to popular belief, QWERTY was not designed to slow the typist down. (via)
- VMS will finally reach end of life in 2020. VMS was a contemporary operating system to UNIX, and started on nearly the same hardware. (the PDP-11) Aw, I feel bad. Not so bad that I’d actually use it again, but still: Aww. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- “At the point all my hardware undeniably works on BSD, I will probably move there.” This article is in no way scientific, but it makes me a little happy. (via a Google search)
- The Deepest Uncertainty. A surprisingly enjoyable description of set theory and other math bits. (via)
- 8 months in Microsoft, I learned these. None of these are a surprise, really, but point 5, “not giving back to the public domain is the norm” is really sad. The example given isn’t even code – it’s just describing a solution on a web page, publicly. (via)
- Trillian is publishing the specs for their IMPP communication service. A quote from the announcement: “…our commitment to run a business whose primary focus is its communication products, not advertising”
Your unrelated link of the week: ScummVM in a browser. Comes with some LucasArts game demos, too. (via many places)
Last week was a lot of very brief links. I’ll go for verbosity this week…
- Regular expressions and regular grammar. I hope you like detailed explanations. I’ve said it before: you should understand regular expressions. The difference between knowing and not knowing is sometimes the difference between knowing how to finish a project, and being hopelessly swamped. (via)
- A plea for less (XML) configuration files. From the same place. I don’t advocate rejecting XML files out of hand like some people, but I think you need to have a certain existing level of complexity already in your program before you use XML. For example, so complex that nobody will notice some XML sprinkled in there too.
- Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid, a talk about the Internet from roughly the late 90s to the 2000s. Some parts of this get farther into political notes than I usually care to read, but I like the point made with “Many women and men alike are using, not building, the web.” I am frustrated by how the Internet is effectively one-way transmission for so many, like TV. (via I forget, sorry)
- Bringing Unix commands to a Windows world. It’s about Cygwin. I’ve installed Cygwin a number of times, but it’s such a strange hybrid I eventually stop after using it for whatever specific reason caused the first install. These days, it’s almost easier to set up a virtual machine on a Windows system and just switch over as needed.
- The Weird Stuff Warehouse. How much does this look like your basement? I like looking in stores like there cause there’s always some hardware item that seems to be worth resurrecting. (via)
- Open Source Game Clones. I feel iffy about these things. This tends to be viewed as “I want a free game”, not “I want the right to modify a game”. Also, you could argue it takes revenue away from the original artists who work on a product when it copies the original game methodology, reducing the incentive to produce. That could be debated, but I am certain of this: I wish people tried original rather than rehashed ideas in open source, because it has a much lower threshold for success. You don’t need a studio to tell you when you can be published… which is sort of the idea behind “indie gaming“, I suppose. (first link via)
- Remember those old not-a-desktop-not-a-laptop computers? They looked like this image I saw recently. I actually learned to use vi in a mild panic on a Sparcstation Voyager, which would be another device in that land between categories.
- SSH Tricks, found by accident while I was searching for how to do per-host configs in ssh, so that I only had to type a short name and leave off the long suffix (like dragonflybsd.org) when connecting to a server. Someday I might even get remote port forwarding over ssh correct.
- USSR’s old domain name attracts criminals. Somehow I doubt you can identify a criminal site by domain suffix that easily. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Massive Chalice, a Kickstarter for a new strategy and tactics game. It’s by Double Fine, who has made some fantastic stuff, and it has permadeath, turn-based combat, randomly generated maps… it’s a roguelike! It’s cross-platform, apparently, though I don’t know if it will work on any BSDs.
A really packed week, this week.
- Interview with Donald Knuth (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Garry’s Mod on DragonFly. We need that linuxulator working on x86_64. (thanks, tuxillo)
- Exxon used to be in the processor business? (via)
- PDP-11 in your pocket. (via)
- I’ve mentioned before how news aggregators go in cycles: Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News, which might be reaching the peak of its cycle. (via)
- Another review of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.
- And I don’t think I’ve noticed that Unix column before.
- Dennis Ritchie’s earliest known C compiler, now on GitHub. (via)
- Why makefiles indent target lines with a single tab character. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Computer Beach Party, with backstory and interview (via) Not recognizably Unixish.
- A very in-depth exploration of SSH keys. (via)
- The Real Origins of Tumblr. Related: I often link here to Trivium. (via many places)
- UK readers may find this ZX joke funny.
Your unrelated link of the week: Superman’s Ultimate Crotch Kick.
I think spring has arrived; everything’s turning green, and a young man’s thoughts turn to computer hardware upgrades. Time to move to 64-bit! Anyway, lots of links this week. These are getting more and more content-filled over time, but I don’t think anyone minds…
- For the Bitcoin enthusasts: ‘…when my wife refuses to bring him cake on our sofa, he calls it a “denial-of-service attack”’ (via)
- Make It So, coverage of computer interfaces from movies. I always thought that was what Enlightenment was trying to achieve: the Interface From The Future. (via several places)
- Same computer interface topic, but from anime movies. It would be nice if this became something people actively worked on, instead of Bitcoin selling and Facebook monetizing. (via)
- Flat icons/monochromatic icons seem to be another microtrend. This is probably because few people do small dimensional icons well. My favorite was always the BeOS set.
- On benchmarks. It says what you should already know, but I like the Phoronix/MD5 benchmarking joke. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- This article titled “The Meme Hustler” draws a finer line than I’ve seen before between “open source” and “free software”. The author, Evgeny Morozov, seems to also have a hate-on for Tim O’Reilly. See some reviews of a recent Morozov book for a counterpoint, of sorts.
- Spacewar championship, 1972, in Rolling Stone. Exactly two years before I was born! At this point, finding things older than me makes me a bit happy. There’s a picture of a Dynabook in there, photographed by Annie Liebowitz. It’s entertaining to read this 40-year-old story and see how well it predicts the future. I’m also sort of amazed it exists, in Rolling Stone. More Spacewar links here.
- Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP. “Because HTTP is ultimately the one social contract on the web that, amidst a million other debates over standards, rules, policies, and behavior, we have collectively agreed to trust.” (via)
- Ancient computers in use today. I’ve linked to a story about that IBM 402 before, but the following pages about VAX and Apple ][e systems are new. Well, new to read, certainly not new hardware. (via)
- Yahoo Chat! A Eulogy. The spray of forbidden words is an entertaining acknowledgement message. (via)
- The $12 Gongkai Phone. Bunnie Huang breakdowns are always fun, and he’s describing a strange sort of open source that isn’t through license. (via)
- The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to hit a million dollars donated this year, which seems quite possible given last year’s performance. Donate if you can; their activities help the whole BSD community.
- A Complete History of Breakout. It’s not actually complete, but that’s OK. It includes Steve Jobs being a jerk and Steve Wozniak being very clever, which is their traditional roles. (via)
- Ack 2.0 is out. It’s a very useful utility; I’d like to see more standalone utilities created this way.
- Space Claw, Flickr via BBS. You’ll need telnet. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Shady Characters, a typography/history blog I’ve linked to before, has a book out. If you liked those links, you know what to do next.
We are very close to the next release. As always, it comes down to building third-party software. Lots of material here to read, until then.
- E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions – revisited. It’s interesting to look at a software project that has had 20 years to run, with a very specific problem domain, and see that there’s always something more that could be done. (via)
- You SHOULD CONSIDER RFC6919. (via)
- The largest computer ever built. Why are there no SAGE emulators? (also via)
- The newlisp.org logo is a dragonfly, similar to ours. I don’t know why. Oh, wait: I bet it’s parentheses for the wings, which makes sense for Lisp. (thanks, Charles Rapenne)
- UNIX V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU coreutils implementations of echo.c. Not necessarily a fair comparison, but interesting; there’s some useful links in the comments, such as this similar exercise for cat.c. (via)
- Top 10 reasons I Like Postgres Over SQL Server. SQL Server is not that bad a product, but I do wish Postgres was run more often.
- Our Regressive Web. A story on how we’re losing the tools that let us focus on content on the web. The author doesn’t say, but should, that this is partially because we’re using platforms owned by other companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of talking on our own. (email, blogs) (via)
- The earliest known version of D&D, the “Dalluhn Manuscript“, is on display at a museum right around the corner from me. (via)
- Workflow in Tmux. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: A bunch of monster models, all taken at a convention called Monsterpalooza. A bit grody, but still some very good construction work. (via)
Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.
Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.
You know what stinks? I find a really cool thing online somewhere, early in the week, or even in a previous week, like today’s unrelated link. Between me finding it and this always-on-Sunday post, other people encounter it, the link gets reposted everywhere, and it’s old hat by the time you see it here. Yeah, I’m complaining like it’s hipster linking!
- Has anyone noticed how there’s been an explosion in nontraditional peripherals lately? Seriously, follow those links. I know there’s more.
- A Roguelike Primer. An excellent overview of a lot of different roguelikes. I didn’t know NetHack had an isometric view. (via)
- There’s a programming language called Quylthulg. That makes me happy, in a D&D/roguelike kind of way.
- Abandoned Apples. I feel bad about the Apple ][ units, and the fatmacs. (via I forget)
- yes `yes no`. The comments on the linking page note how the linking description is all wrong (and here’s corrections), but one comment is fun: shell Russian Roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click* (via)
- A note about Google Reader’s demise from an interview with one of the creators. It strikes me that there aren’t more people mad that RSS feeds are hard to find. There’s lots of conversations on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and other places, and I can’t see them without getting an account for each, and logging in. The overall effect of this separation is that it’s hard to follow any one source.
- The Thing, an art BBS.
- Here’s a chart of possible Google Reader replacements, plus my query earlier this week let to a number of comment suggestions. tt-rss looks like a good candidate, because I don’t have to worry about someone deciding not to run it anymore. There’s also newsbeuter, though maybe that’s too minimal.
Your unrelated link of the week: I almost can’t tell this is a parody. Actually, it’s more like a double level of parody. Seen on this inexplicable, wonderful Tumblog; found via arts inscrutable.
Bonus link: Dog Snack Episode 3.
A calm week, for once.
- Via Michael W. Lucas: Absolut OpenBSD.
- Another ‘How I customize Vim’ style post. These things always sound great, but I worry that it’s not something that can be duplicated. If you had to rebuild or duplicate your Vim environment elsewhere, you’d have to write out your own instructions. Not impossible, but I don’t have to do that for anything else. (via)
- Twine, a game creation tool that really requires only writing. (via)
- The Oxford Comma, or how it doesn’t matter. (via)
- The Story of the PING Program. I could have sworn I linked to this before. I remember having someone explain ping to me when I was young and had little experience of IP networking; it seemed like magic where the computers would actually talk. (via vsrinivas on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- ARPANet, 1971, as a tattoo. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. All the early issues, available in electronic form, for pay-what-you-want. (And I advise paying; it’s a fun comic) Look at a sample page if you are curious.
For once, I didn’t accidentally post this too early. I hope you have some spare time; there’s a lot of meaty links this week.
- “Keep the workload off the pinkies.” is a good recommendation for any keyboard layout. (via)
- Dan Langille started doing some price comparisons for various hard drives; see the comments on his article for some specialty sites that do the same.
- “It was open source because we didn’t have any choice.” Spacewar, the first computer game. Or at least the first computer game like we’d expect it to be.
- If you read the details, Ethernet and Microsoft Word came from almost the same place. (via)
- YouCompleteMe, a Fast, As-You-Type, Fuzzy-Search Code Completion Engine for Vim. (via) Haven’t tried it.
- This article about the correct pronounciation of “GIF” is mostly a historical rehash, but I really like the last two sentences.
- This Wired article does a good job of describing what’s special about Flickr compared to all the other big photo services, and also has an excellent metaphor for Facebook buried in there. (via)
- This is perhaps one of the better descriptions of being a “nerd” and how it has changed recently.
- Well, that’s a bizarre translation. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- My favorite part of this excellent Economist article about Voyager 1 and 2 is this note: “Most ingeniously of all, Dr Stone’s team equipped the probes with an advanced bit of hardware called a Reed-Solomon encoder. […] The rub was that in 1977 a way to decrypt Reed-Solomon corrected data had yet to be worked out. Luckily, by the time Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, it had been.“
- An HTML5-based roguelike. I’m sure there’s others. I like that HTML5 is starting to make things Just Work. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Anthony Clark of Nedroid.com is selling his sketchbook; 101 pages as a digital download, for $1. Look at his strip or his Tumblr doodles if you want to know more before, but that’s quite a deal. Nedroid is the source of one of my favorite character names: Beartato. Also makes a good shirt.
Whee!
- This is a good thing.
- This is a (description of) a bad thing. (via)
- Linux is becoming the opposite of UNIX. (via makx on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Found via the previous article: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.“
- Arch/FreeBSD. This mixing is still weird. Don’t take this stuff seriously, yet. (via)
- Gygax Magazine, a reinvention of gaming magazines that no longer exist. It’ll apparently include What’s New with Phil and Dixie, from the original Dragon magazine.
- What does the middle initial “B” stand for in “Benoit B. Mandlebrot”? Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
- So that’s where Markov chains came from.
- The first computer image of a person, and of course it’s porn. (via)
- Hey, that’s my haiku!
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Kyle Baker comics, available as PDFs for free. Go, read.
The last of the year.
- Outgrow.me, a list of successfully funded Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. There’s some neat technology doodads in there. And a zillion hipster iPhone tripods.
- Remember when you could find program source code printed in magazines, for you to type in? Here’s an interesting story about that. (via)
- Some good news: despite the completely hostile (and wrong) story on Slashdot, the FreeBSD Foundation has exceeded their pledge goals for the year by a wide margin.
- A very early pre-Internet story about packets. (via)
- Relational shell programming. (via)
- History of the Microwriter. I remember seeing a version of this called the Twiddler. (also via)
- How to Host a Dungeon. Follow some of the links at the bottom. (also also via)
- Early Apple computer designs. I link not because it’s Apple but because it’s very much 1980s industrial design, which is both wonderful and awful. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Marlo Meekins’ Tumblr. Her lettering is refreshingly expressive. That may sounds strange to single out, but so many people place words as an set block of text rather than as part of a graphic layout.
I started this Lazy Reading early, since I had so many links it overflowed into the next week. Merry almost Christmas!
- Here’s an in-depth review of Guilded Youth, an interactive fiction game that hearkens back to the old days of BBS usage. (Do I need an interactive fiction tag to complement the roguelike one?)
- Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk. I really think part of DragonFly’s success, despite being such a small, esoteric project, has come from being generally tolerant.
- Vmail, a Vim interface to Gmail. This seems pretty slick. Looking further, the author has a number of other Vi/Vim-related projects, like a Vim wiki, Vim newsreader, Vim iTunes controls, and more. Also something really clever: the equivalent of ‘tail -f twitter.com‘ (via)
- How I got four errors into a one-line program. All via git.
- Go for C programmers. (via)
- Mars Code. I like the statistic that the lines-per-hour of code was <10; it points out that not all metrics apply, all the time. (also via)
- I never thought I’d actually see e17 come out.
- XKCD has a good summary of the recent Instagram licensing mess, and perhaps a good summary of social media in general. I’m always surprised when I see a business using Facebook or something similar as their primary customer contact method.
- Why is grep always fast? Here’s a very technical explanation of why. There’s more.
- Bunnie Huang is building a laptop. All the extra headers and analog bits remind me of the dearly departed BeBox. (Bunnie mentioned previously here) (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: I work at a salt mine. One of the highlights of my job is when I’m in the mine and need to get somewhere quickly; I use a 4-wheeler to drive. (I’m licensed to operate it.) There’s no stop signs, no stoplights, and generally a whole lot of straight roads with no obstacles or traffic. It can be a fun drive. However, it’s not as cool as driving on the moon. (via)
I hope you like links, and lots of history. It’s been a bumper crop this week.
- The Radio Shack catalog from 1983. Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk. For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte. A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte. Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002. (via)
- Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download. Found from a link to Unix Text Editing. I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987. (indirectly via)
- The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
- Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters. The ancestor of the TTY. It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter. I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
- The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels. I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style. (via)
- Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports. (via) Warning: they’re all in Postscript. Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
- If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel. I had to read the solution twice to get it.
- Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago. It’s true, and also makes me feel sad. (via)
- Google60, Google via punchcard and printer. It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun. (via)
- If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry. The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general. Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case. It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it. You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.