Archive for the Off-Topic Category
txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary. Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved. If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing. For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming. (via)
On an entirely personal note, I was having a conversation with my coworkers today about the change in technology within my lifetime; when I was young, there was no world wide web, no digital music, no timeshifting of TV programs, etc. etc. My workplace has an intern young enough to have never encountered these things.
Now, I noticed this musicmaking tutorial on Youtube. In 1985, this would have been done in a room filled with electronics, probably hand-built, with cabling run all over the place. Now, the software that accomplishes that, with a single computer, is expressly designed to simulate those old analog connections. It’s very wierd, and probably meaningless to those under 30.
Also, yay dubstep.
Some random links for browsing that I’ve been holding onto:
- PCMag’s top 10 Greatest Hacks of All Time - Item #3 mentions my alma mater. (via)
- Readers of a certain age will enjoy Atari Modern Classics, plus the Bootleg Demakes (via)
- This GameSetWatch article on managerial rhetoric will be familiar to most anyone working in software.
- FreeBSD phone job in Canada - anyone interested?
I had a conversation with a coworker today about what phone to buy, and I thought about this: iPhones are pretty, but you don’t get to own your software or fully choose what to run. This developer’s blog entry sums up all the things you can’t do with Apple’s App Store, and by doing so manages to describe the opposite of open source. (via, I think) The point I’m making: BSD licensing is more valuable than you think.
One link to describe the pain of creating with software/the web, and one link that will make you want to keep doing it.
(Culled from other blog’s posts - sorry, lost original entries!)
Another week, another @Play column talking about roguelikes. This time, it’s about Izuna, a Japanese ‘JCRPG’.
Also, Sascha Wilder (I think - lost the email, sorry!) pointed out that the ultimate roguelike may actually be Dwarf Fortress, a theory I have heard before. (links to go Rock Paper Shotgun, one of my favorite game sites.)
This Wired article on Android is worth reading. Not because it’s directly related to DragonFly, but because it’s a open source platform. If you’re interested in DragonFly, you must have at least a passing interest in open source software.
We’re all used to being able to install and configure (and break) our BSD systems the way we want, when we want, without having to seek permission or necessarily pay a fee to someone who isn’t the author of the software we want. This is not generally possible with phones, which, after all, are specialized computer systems. Keep an eye on this.
(Via)
The @Play column at GameSetWatch has another article on roguelikes. This covers early roguelike software that has become lost; a strange concept in today’s world where everything is saved somewhere out there on the Internet. For an added bonus, the column has a link to a newspost from Moria’s original author, which includes this interesting quote:
I plan to download it and Angband and play them… Maybe something has been added that will surprise me! That would be nice… I never got to play Moria and be surprised…
Is that perhaps the worst part of game development? You always know how the story ends.
Another linkdump!
- Waxy.org has a complete version of the 5-part series, The Machine That Changed the World. This aired in 1992 and is both an excellent history of computing and also an interesting glimpse of the computing world before the World Wide Web steamrolled into the public eye. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 are available. If you don’t have a Flash-enabled browser to watch them, part 5 has a link to a torrent of H.264 MP4 files that contain the same complete broadcase.
- More old school nerditry: Dungeons & Dragons history, plus a rebuttal, all in far more depth than I thought possible. (Via)
- New school (rejectionist) nerditry: Ten ways to make an iPhone killer.
In my ongoing effort to stray farther off the beaten path than other nerdblogs, I bring you a link to this post at the Nonist: Objectified Circuitry. Think of it this way: the computer you are sitting at right now has probably at least a million of each circuit type pictured in that article.
OpenBSD is, as usual, selling CDs of their 4.3 release. It appears that related-but-not-directly-linked goods like The Book of PF are being sold right along side.
The sight of a thick technical book with an included (and probably out of date) CD has been common for years; however, this reversal strikes me as a good idea. Selling a good book along with the operating system that will use it is worthwhile.
Not necessarily about me, but I read an article about the continuous stress of blogging, in the New York Times. Entertainingly, the article says:
Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.
$10 a post? Given that I’ve been doing this for near-free (the Google Ads buy me a sandwich every now and then) for years, that seems like a lot. Not much to live on, though.
Despite the logarithmic expansion of computers and drop in costs of the years, everyone looks back on their first computer systems with a sense of nostalgia. This is why certain readers will find the Raymond Commodore Amiga store in Minneapolis interesting. You should be able to gues their exclusive inventory from the store name. It’s so old-school, the website is a ~username directory. (via Boing Boing Gadgets)
I had an Apple ][+ when I was younger, and Gamasutra has an article up all about pre-Mac Apples, exploiting my sense of nostalgia. (Via the howling void)
While we're on the subject, there's an online Apple ][gs emulator at virtualapple.org. One of these days I’ll get around to scanning my original Castle Wolfenstein disk just to show how old-school I am…
An experiment in Barcelona, last year, took a number of people with no coding experience but plenty of graphic design experience whatever and got them to modify a version of the old game Breakout. The results were quite interesting. You’ll need Flash to see the video of the abstract results. (Via waxy)
Why do I mention this? Open source systems tend to assume users are either very experienced or totally inexperienced. Looking for people who don’t fit either of those categories is a much more useful goal, as it produces new methods and ways of looking at things.
This has nothing to do with BSD, really, but it’s a live-action film by one of my favorite cartoonists, and it’s excellent.
View at Yooootube - embedding it gets mangled by this blog software.
A off-topic item: Jonas Sundström suggested a PIC32 microcontroller for anyone looking to get into hardware hacking. Robert ‘r3tex’ Luciani followed up with a suggestion for ‘baby steps‘. Or, as Matthew Dillon wrote: start very small.