Category: UNIXish

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”.

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.