• The RetroTINK.
• Become worthless (to tech companies).  Good steps, not difficult ones.  (via)
• Experiencing a Victorian London street in 3D.  (via)
• “One printed IP/ICMP “ping” packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149″.  (via)
• Bastardica.  (via)
• A note on content restrictions and One possible future for websites is pervasive gatekeepers, two articles that I think are more significant when read together.
• Display mood board.
• A trick to render all 1.1M Unicode characters in your browser.
• The Invention of the MMO.  (via)
• How a combination lock works.  I’ve linked to that site before; something to dive into.  (also via)

Unrelated music links: The best metal, electronic, and jazz on Bandcamp for September.

• Inflight Simulator. Flight sim where you aren’t the pilot.  Seems obvious but I can understand if nobody wants to play.  (via)
• Turning a $40 Surface Go into an always-on camera monitor.  Neat but also you can buy the same result off the shelf.
• Vim’s Ctrl-w.  Vi command muscle memory is built one action at a time.
• Small Web 101.
• Oglaf Book 5, a Kickstarter.  Read the comic or perhaps their Patreon if you aren’t familiar with the humor.
• Design Fiction Mood Board.
• Book Corners, a library finder.  (via)
• tmp.out, which I linked to in 2021, has continued to publish nearly-yearly.  (reminded via)
• Technology work at the Metropolitan Museum.  (via)

• NYCBUG social meeting (i.e. no presentation) on October 7th.
• A ‘clamp’ power strip.  I like the design.   (via)
• GIMP, The Movie.  (not really)
• An in-depth explainer of SSH certificates, which are much nicer than… every other security certificate system I’ve ever used, now that I think about it.  (via)
• Risk in 3D – as in a physical globe.  (via)
• folk.computer.  Computing without keyboard or monitory or touchscreen or whatever.  It looks fun!  Read this nice story from someone seeing it for the first time.  (also via)
• The 1981 Framebuffer Show.  (via)
• What playing games can teach us about simulating the future.  Prussian wargaming to D&D.
• Two Slice, a two pixel high font.  “somewhat readable!”  Use this in your terminal of choice and see what sort of weird aspect ratio you get.  (via)

• That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler.  (via)
• They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.  Neovim vs. Vim.
• Similar: s/Neovim/Helix/g.  I’m not picking on Neovim on purpose, rather this is just the particular rabbit hole I fell into.
• The Jef Raskin “3 Laws” quote in the previous link led me to find his book.
• New Cyriak: Sea Life.
• Rethinking space opera, by Charlie Stross.  The article itself is good, but it also led me to some other interesting links, like the next two:
• The Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Krugman.  Relativistic time vs trade in goods and services.  Sci-fi-adjacent.
• Starship Stormtroopers: Michael Moorcock.  Fun for what he says about science fiction, useful for the new (to me) authors and books mentioned at the end, despite being written in 1977.
• And from the comments: all three seasons of Connections are on the Internet Archive.  If you have not watched, you should.

Your unrelated video/animation of the week: CAPAREZZA – A COMIC BOOK SAVED MY LIFE.  My first encounter with Italian hip-hop.  (via)

• Notes on Software Quality.  (via)
• What’s new with robots, 2026 edition.  Linked for the consumer hardware.
• Tesserae: Self-hosted dashboards for e-ink displays.  (via)
• Vim’s UserGettingBored autocmd.
• The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer.  Linked for describing the Gridfinity standard.
• Public Domain Art Resources.  (via)
• ekkoBSD 2.1 released, 20 years after the last release.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 6.16 is out with 4 new hacks.
• LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects.  (via)
• Hyperuplink, a new bit of forum software that sounds… maintainable?
• A review of the Flipper BUSY Bar.
• hc2html, convert Hypercard stacks to web pages.  (via)
• The RAM shortage takes a dark turn.

Your unrelated music suggestion of the week: SETI by Joker.

• mdbase, a specification for Markdown files.  Linked because it’s a good idea, and because the swarm animation is neat.  (found via)
• Open Source Ecology.  (via)
• Hosting a Bulletin Board Service on My Casio VX-4.  (via)
• Hearing Things, a new music blog.  (via)
• Those who don’t know pipes are doomed to reinvent them.
• A Tale of Two Greps, related.  (via)
• Afterglow, original After Dark screensavers using a built-in 68K emulator.
• Roguelike Celebration 2026: Preview Event Speakers!
• Carla Speed McNeil comics for sale.  There’s sample pages.  One of my favorite creators.
• UNIX Reference Cards.  I wish I had one of these early on.  (via)
• How to turn anything into a router.  Of course it’s easier with BSD.  (via)

Also: the Roguelike Celebration Preview Event is happening right after I post this, so it may be happening as you read this.  Tickets are free and it’s online.  Of the three talks, “Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games” sounds most interesting to me but of course it would.  I’ll be working but don’t let that stop you.

• OpenAI’s Rogue Agents Are a Normal Accident.  Linked for the Morris Worm history.
• The Kleptones are on Bandcamp.
• The first machine to run rogue(6).
• UNIX News / ;login:, the earliest issues.  (via)
• Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?
• ESPectre Human Detector for Feather.
• bsd.cafe.  (via)
• “WARP, then ZOOM, FLY, RUN, WALK, TENEX, and the slowest being MULTIX“.
• UNIX was originally UNICS.
• How to dig for music without Spotify.  (via)
• Writerdeck resources.  (via)

• City Builders.  The SimCity genre has kept going.
• “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”  I remember playing this at least once.
• BeepAlive – keeping my soundbar from going to sleep.
• How I use Home Assistant to help with my cats.  Far more ambitious than I expected.
• Found via the recent DinoCon: multiple high–quality small–company dinosaur reproductions.
• Tim Hunkin’s History Of Arcade Machines.
• Introducing Avogadro: A parametric waffle recipe generator.
• I love reading lists of people’s favorite books, especially when I’ve never seen any of them.
• WebZFS.  (via)
• Michaelsoft Binbows.  This is fun but the link has only worked intermittently for me.  (via)
• Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same.  (via)

• “Gravity is worth asking about.”  Linked for describing the “zero-one-infinity” rule, but applied to things you don’t want.
• reTerminal Sticky, a new reader in the now-popular ‘Xteink’ form factor.
• A Network Filesystem for 2.11BSD.  (via)
• Visiting the History of Computing and Play.  Look for “abbreviated history of floppy disks in a single photo”.
• Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C.  1963 ASCII didn’t have } or {, and neither did the hardware.  (via)
• “non-Unix stories about important Unix people“.
• BoxyBSD, virtual BSD systems for people to try out different flavors of BSD.  The base machine is free.  (via)
• UNIX in a Hostile Environment, or Mouse Watching by a Cat – go to page 13.  (via)
• Where UNIX Runs Today.  An interesting article, and a built-in shooter game at the same time?  (via)
• Telehamster.  (via)

• The Bad Apple video, ASCII version, playing without CSS or JS.  (via)
• Sounds of the 60s: The IBM 1401.  I’ve heard this before as sound effects and never realized it.  (via)
• The Map of Metal.  Similar to longtime favorite Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.  (also via)
• The BBC Tetris Companion.  Hardware I’ve never seen before.
• ICEBP Finally Documented.  The article is 8 years old, but it took 30 years to be documented.  (via Nick)
• “Kinky Latex Giraffe“, among others.
• This plant will die if I’m on my phone too much.  (video, via)
• PGSimCity.  Exactly what it sounds like.  (via)
• Syl’s Indie [game] Recs, vol. 4.
• endoflife.date.  (via)

• How you wind up with switches above your office’s false ceiling.  Every office job I ever had, now that I think about it.
• How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks.  Calibre is an astonishingly useful program.
• Entering accented characters in Linux.  Which should be “in X11”, so it should apply to BSD.
• “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”.  Esoteric languages alert.
• The KEXP breakdown of Paul’s Boutique.
• BSD Make extravaganza.  Mandelbrot in bmake.  (via)
• Most Googlebots are fake.  It used to just be “Mozilla” was fake.
• “That was then, this is now“.

• Decker, a modern tool enough like Hypercard to make me notice.  (via)
• Dinos That Drive, a new book illustrated by the guy who brought you Behold!  The Dinosaurs!
• Be More Party Cannon.
• Hardcore IndieWeb.  (via)
• Describing the early Internet was surprisingly easy.
• The Cybernetics Digital Library.  (via)
• I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to draw (with 9front).  Sometimes the tutorial is the point, not the skill being taught.  (via)
• email encryption.  I have worked at least a little with every protocol mentioned and it was always, always painful.

• A Minimal Syntax For Quantum Text, the methods used to generate the different-every-printing novel Subcutanean.  The book itself has been linked here before.  (via)
• Li’l Factory AB, a tiny fiction publisher.  (via)
• Asterism Books, another oddities publisher.  (via)
• The Virtual OS Museum, emulated computer setups, pre-prepared as Linux VM images.  (via)
• Declassified Space Invaders.  (via)
• The Book Handling Agency.
• Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader.  I am finding all these Xteink links through Bubbles.
• Sneakerweb.  (via)
• Don’t Panic Cyberdeck.  A full BOM is included.  (via)
• LisaFPGA: the Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA.  (via)
• VapourDeck, DOS games in a handheld.

Your music links of the week: Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch which led me to this 1950 film showing some of Partch’s huge instruments, and here they still are.  Related: The Warped, Wondrous World of Microtonal Jazz on Bandcamp.

• Next NYCBUG meeting: it’s a social meeting (no guest speaker), August 5th.
• The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything.  Everyone’s played at least one Sim game in their lifetime, correct?
• Weird Side Projects.  (via)
• Diane Lindo, stop motion animations.  (also via)
• A terminal version of Obsidian.  Different from the official CLI.
• MNT June 2026 Update.  Notes that OpenBSD runs on the Pocket Reform.
• Fish Shell.
• A pocket computer history museum.
• Ditch your Alexa.
• Cutting the cord to the cloud.
• LibriVox, free public domain audiobooks.
• “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?”  Linked for the animation showing an IBM 1401 console in action.

• Why I Like Small Keyboards.  Linked for the keyboard picture; smallest split I’ve ever seen.
• Erwin Wurm: One Minute Artworks.  Found via this post – read to the end for the connection, and watch the video while you are at it.
• Difficult, Important, Succeeding?
• OpenRA.  I thought I had linked to this before, and I had, but it was 8 years ago.  (reminded it exists via)
• Bringing Swift To The Apple II.
• Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD.
• Garbage for humans.  This is one of the incentives for gopher if you think about it.  (via)
• IIgs The Future.  Linked cause it reminded me about the old Apple game The Bilestoad.
• It Always Amazes Us.  Animation Obsessive’s current list of things they like.

• Cyberdeck Meetup Notes.  (via)  I wish Iffy Books was closer; those are some fun events on the calendar.
• Painting with Light.
• The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows.  I was finding wholesale copies of this Digest back in I think 2008 or so.
• Using Claude Code to Personalise the Xteink X4.  Adding to some previous links about this device.  (via)
• And also this: The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader.
• Also probably related: I don’t need it (and neither do you).
• Gmail Thinks I’m Stupid, So I Left.  (also via)
• Please, Just Stop Ruining “10 PRINT”. Seriously.
• Connect FreeBSD to OpenBSD using WireGuard.
• The Starlog 50.

• NYCBUG’s having a social meetup on July 1st; stories about BSDCan will be told, I’m sure.
• When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars.  This seems like a named aesthetic.  (via)
• Building a serial and VGA “everything console”.  Linked cause the author is using one of the IBM keyboards I always wanted.
• Key, In Sight.  The keyboard in the center of this also looks like one of those same keyboards.  Marcin says it’s a Shinobi, which I’ve wanted to get before.
• ‘Vim’ has many faces.
• Aeonic Nebular Character Generator, for a game jam for games that do not exist.
• Powering up a module from the IBM 604.  Linked for the computer styling that says “forties”.
• That new Commodore phone is running Sailfish.
• pkgsrc-2026Q2 is out.
• The freebsd-update(8) Screensaver.
• FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop.  Linked for the Thinkpad-specific parts.
• The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy.