Links – The Roohr Way

November 2024 Web Links

udm14.com

Turn Off google’s annoying AI summary by forcing web mode search. How long will it work for? Who knows. But it works this month.

The Corruption of Open Source (techwontsave.us)

More on the WordPress affair and the Open Source AI definition affair. Excellent coverage and a lively guest. I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I upgrade!

iron mountain atomic storage (computer.rip)

In interesting write up on the history of ubiquitous data storage company Iron Mountain.

Jazz Cups (99percentinvisible.org)

Somehow I’m missed this the first time around. Designer of the ubiquitous Jazz print got some recognition. Interesting to know it’s originally a charcoal sketch that was then colored on a computer.

MG Ultra (bandcamp.com)

Machine Girl’s most coherent (but still very punk) offering to date. The crazy breakdowns (like the end of track 12) are much appreciated.

The End Of EDH (commandersherald.com)

When I got back into MTG in college in 2013, one of the exciting new features was the EDH format. It was much more casual, closer to the kitchen table tomfoolery that kept me entertained back in the my first run (~2002-~2005.) We didn’t all run Sol ring.

It’s interesting to see what the format has become since then. The bans seem good, but I suppose the writing was on the wall when Wizards decided to print those cards in the first place.

Designing a few cards for EDH was neat; people were using commander precons. But the coolest thing was how it made you reconsider the types of cards that never saw play in constructed before. Overcosted things that fit into weird archetypes. Jank old legends like from actual _Legends_, amd trying to make them work. I get the sense that commander has become more like other constructed formats, with people making tuned decks using good cards.

I don’t know if I should care, I do not play a whole lot anymore and new cards aren’t really printed with me in mind. But it’s interesting to see the last gasp of a truly community driven hack of Magic as it’s absorbed into Wizards.

Pollyanna’s Corpse (interruptkey.com)

Delicious page design, but a chilling investigation. The idea that we’re all building our own digital tombs only for them to be refurbished as spam instruments is a sobering one. I suppose it’s a consequence of two factors: nothing can resist entropy forever, and on the internet the form entropy takes, the heat death, is turning into spam. Spam and bots are the gray nothing of the dead web.

October ’24 Web Links

Does Open Source AI really Exist? (tante.cc)

This is an important article and everyone who spends time in the open source community should pay attention to its contents. OSI is preparing to adopt a definition of Open Source specific to AI models which doesn’t fit the definition it uses for code. I assume this is to allow some open source AI to exist, but in effect it is allowing Facebook (and Stability if they don’t go under) to pretend that what they’re putting out as far as weights is the same as the faffing Linux kernel.

Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg (news.ycombinator.com)

Litigant commenting on social media. Always something interesting to see. I have no plans to switch off of WordPress, but that’s of course mostly about inertia and avoiding link rot. I’d be happy to switch to a fork not managed by… a litigant posting on social media.

Redditor linked some old internet resources (reddit.com)

I haven’t actually tried these out myself yet, but if you’re an old internet enthusiast you may be interested.

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/

I like sites that document old models and stuff like this. Been meaning to ask if they’ve seen anything like those unidentified Archie McPhee ships; when I tried to google for information about some similar stuff, I got there.

Opensourcing of Winamp goes badly (el reg)

A frequent complaint you’ll hear in the retro tech community is wishing that people would just open source beloved old software. Owners of said source code frequently say that that’s not as easy as people might think. This article is an illustration of why that’s correct; it’s not as easy as just throwing it on github and hitting publish, which the owners of Winamp seem to have done.

This awesome DnB clip made out of car noises (youtube.com)

Listen to it. Wish it was longer.

Why are unironic imperium posters so common? (Reddit.com)

Speaking of reddit, this was, embarrassingly, locked. But I think the following article may help answer it:

Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places (timcolwill.com)

Put much better than I could have, but a line of reasoning I’ve had to have with folks before. GW definitely wants to sell its exciting world but also get out from under the massive problem it’s created with its lore by calling it satire. Nobody can keep a joke going for that long, not even SNL. The jabs at the US armed forces stings of course, and I’m not saying I agree with all his politics here (remember folks, a link is not an endorsement), but he does an excellent job of laying out the tension of GW’s two sided “it’s a satire / please enjoy how cool space marines are” position.

And while we’re on this general subject…

September ’24 Web Links

America now has a centenarian ex president. But check out this statue in his home town:

Review: Videodrome (kevinsreviewcatalogue)

I was thinking of writing about how you could totally remake Videodrome now, but someone already wrote a much better review to that effect.

A meme about USB (lemmy.sdf.org)

This really captures what I dislike about USB-C.

sfdictionary.com

I was really hoping that something like this existed, and wouldn’t you know it, it totally does. This site cross references sci-fi jargon across the history or science fiction.

The best sports headline you’re going to see this month (Nola.com)

Best sports headline of the month.

Digital Terrain Models of Mars (uahirise.org)

I was looking for some heightmaps I could use (see the next link) and found these really cool scans of the martian surface.

Ceefax (nathanmediaservices.co.uk)

Replication of Ceefax, for retrocomputing enthusiasts.

August 2024 Web Links

Sorry for the shorter link list this time.

Dubsnatch (DarknetDiaries.com)

Darknet Diaries is often carried by its host’s boundless enthusiasm about cybers ecurity, but this episode features one of the strangest moments: the host insisting that there’s a pattern of featuring dolphin noises in Dubstep music. When the guest doesn’t play ball and politely tries to beg off the conversation, the host keeps pressing-he’s apparently a huge fan of dolphins. If you’re old enough to remember the heyday of Brostep, you might get a kick out of the artists referenced in this episode.

Battletanx Covers (youtube.com)

Had battletanx on the mind (it’s a perennial fascination) and wanted to see if anyone had done any decent covers. Turns out the answer is an emphatic yes!

Reckoning (infrequently.org)

This is a good discussion of the failed promises of JavaScript Single Page Apps (SPAs), complete with real case studies where SPAs have sabotaged public services.

But I do think he’s missed something critical that was always hammered home at my first job when I learned about SPAs, back when we were building them out of jquerey: server conpute costs money. Client side compute is free. To you. This could be an appropriate attitude for a commercial outfit, but not one providing a public service.

The Dying Computer Museum (textfiles.com)

Another article about the LCM’s demise. This is textfiles at his best here, highly recommend giving it a read.

Blogosphere (mikegrindle.com)

Reading this article gave me some sort of warm-fuzzies and the desire to link to it, so here goes.

abortretry.fail

This substack author seems to be gunning for https://www.filfre.net/‘s spot, but for hardware instead of software.

A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (loriemerson.net)

This was pitched as a brief history of barbed wire communication. I of course assumed it would be about the way barbed wire sends a clear message to anyone planning to get to the other side of it, but it turned out to be stranger and more wonderful-a story about using barbed wire feces to carry telephony. A neat find for any fans of guerilla telephony.

July 2024 Web Links

It was a crazy month for news, but this ain’t it.

Hobby pages are finally up (blog.eamonnmr.com)

Took me a while. I spend too much time documenting stuff on discord and not enough in places I can link. So here’s a bit of a remedy: photos of painted miniatures, organized by force.

The painting tutorial I learned the most from (YouTube.com)

This came up during a discussion of how to dealt with shakey hands while painting. I described a trick I learned a long time ago that reduces brush jitter. This is probably the painting tutorial that I’ve learned the most from. Watched it early in my wargaming career. Funny thing is, I’m just getting around to thinking about unloading my STAW ships. Ah well.

Pitchfork skewers a recent album (pitchfork.com)

Absolutely gruesome.

If Perry was willing to cop the built-in bad press of making a song about women’s lib with an alleged abuser, shouldn’t the song at least be a banger? Instead, it’s unfathomably tepid, irritating at best. In the immortal words of Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, uttered moments before she died: “Katy Perry, please stop.”

The Face Of Connecticut (70.91.221.154)

Yep, bare IP address. I won’t spoil my future review of it by explaining this one. It’s a forty year old geology book but it touches my heart in a unique way.

Bionicle’s original story guy set the record straight (alastairswinnerton.com)

Just though this was interesting. This guy’s contributions seem to sometimes eclipsed by Farshtey and Faber.

My very first Ubuntu bug (bugs.launchpad.net)

I’ve been using Ubuntu off and on since the aughts (I’m pretty sure my first install was Hardy Heron back in ’08) but I don’t believe I’ve ever had occasion to file a bug report before. I was trying to get Sheepshaver running on a fresh OS install, and discovered to my dismay that the padsp binary has disappeared. If anyone knows where it went or where I can find it, leave a comment!

https://predawka.bandcamp.com/album/erynias

erynias (predawka.bandcamp.com)

Excellent melodic Drill’n’Bass record from an artist you probably haven’t heard of before. I sure hadn’t. Reminds me of Fine Primitive Sounds a bit. Great sound design, great melodies, and the timing is impeccable, with no element overstaying its welcome.

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown (onehundredpages.wordpress.com)

Bit mean, but very funny.

Study Reveals location of starfish’s head (news.stanford.edu)

I was wondering recently if we’d made any progress on Starfish development, and was not disappointed.

June 2024 Web Links

Excellent This American Life episode (ThisAmericanLife.org)

If anyone could make AI spew sound good, it’s got to be Werner Herzog.

More info comes to light about the ill fated Titanic implosion sub (ArsTechnica.com)

It’s a Wired article, but Ars ran it too. Clears up a lot of the rumors and confusion around the event, such as “how was Boeing involved?”

Samples used in the C&C Series (Reddit)

The real win here though is the link to Methods Of Mayhem. Some really awesome samples and a ton I recognize from Red Alert and Red Alert 2, including many of the voice clips (including the infamous Brain From Outer Space clips used in the Yuri’s Revenge soundtrack.)

I will ****ing piledrive you if you mention AI again (ludic.mataroa.blog)

The title really says it all, this article made the rounds this month. Though it does slide in some AI X-risk stuff, so a good antidote is:

AI Doomers have warned of the tech apocalypse while doing their best to accelerate it (salon.com)

Someone put these pieces together. Admittedly, though, it’s basically doing the homework for that tweet where Altman said Yudkowsky needed a Nobel.

Penryn Space Agency

This was a great electronic music mix show. There are over fifty episodes to listen to. I don’t know the inside story but it sounds like they had difficulty getting to the studio during the pandemic. Their archives are a treasure trove of electronic music recommendations. Get them while they’re hot (and still hosted.) They do a great job of linking to the music they play so you can find new artists.

The Living Computers Museum Finally Isn’t (Old Vintage Computing Research)

This is unfortunate news for the retro-computing community. I’d always hoped to visit this place if I could ever make it out there.

Finding Deceit in the Chambers of Xenobia

A mystery reminiscent of Sour Grapes. Thanks to https://digipres.club/@ryanfb for posting this one on Mastodon.

I’m making a go of it on BlueSky (bsky.social)

I dunno, is this thing on?

May 2024 Web Links

News Related Wikipedia Drama (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia talk pages are always an interesting place, but this one is a pretty interesting discussion, because it gets at the heart of Wikipedia’s role in our evolving Truth landscape.

AI Is Breaking Google (Better Offline Podcast)

A conversation about the ludicrous ‘AI summary’ feature that google debuted recently. The juiciest bit of gossip is that the SEO community has been playing with the feature for a year prior to release and thought for sure that Google wouldn’t release it in that form because it was so busted… and they just up and did it!

Intro contains a cogent explanation of why Google’s latest move is so bad for the web and web users. If anyone has an alternate search engine they’re planning on launching, best to strike while the iron is hot!

The Batsh*t [sic] Software Aphex Twin Used (YouTube / The Flashbulb)

The Flashbulb (yes, that The Flashbulb, the guy who gave us Please Don’t Remember and The Bridgeport Run) talks about software Aphex Twin used. You probably already knew about Supercollider, Trackers, and Metasynth, but I’d only heard passing reference to CDP, for example. I wish he’d gone into a bit more depth about Supercollider and shown off exactly what sort of things you can do with it.

One thing that I found really interesting was the insight into one of my favorites; RDJ album. Tracker outputting MIDI triggering a hardware sampler, because trackers of the day couldn’t handle samples as nice as you hear on RDJ album. I suppose that suggests that HAB was using samples inside the tracker for drums and outboard synth for the melodies? At the very least it’s always sounded like someone manually playing with the cutoff in the first part of Arched Maid Via RDJ, it sounds great and it’s an effect I’ve often tried to emulate.

I’m surprised The Flashbulb considers Bucephalus Bouncing Ball the all time best. I mean it’s a great track and I love how the sweet melody sneaks in after the harsh metallic noises of the intro, then are just as quickly washed out by more crazy noodling. But the best Aphex Twin track at any given time tends to either be from his latest album or second to latest album. I’d put Rushup | Bank 12, Xmas, or Collapse up against anything from what he called RDJ’s ‘peak era’ (Windowlicker, RDJ, etc.) If anything, what the SoundCloud release shows is that the reason the Analord era sounds so different is that RDJ now feels happy (or financially motivated) to actually release (or at least DJ) more of what he makes rather than holding a ton of it back as he did during earlier eras.

A pretty good thread on The Orange Site about GraphQL

Sums up my feelings about how our attempt to implement GraphQL went back when we tried it out at SmarterTravel.

I thought we had passed the era of Peak Zoom Calls (YouTube / Detroit Free Press)

But here we are.

April/May Web Links

Might not stick with that title, but I do want to stick to the format. We’re in a period where “algorithmic” content feeds and search are becoming less than ideal, and there’s been a trend towards a smaller, more human web. I’ve long maintained a links page both as a more durable bookmark list and as a curated set of links to share. But not everything is evergreen; some things are timely, and I think a regular feature would be a more appropriate place for that. Plus it would motivate me to write a bit more, so here goes.

EV Nova Aftermath – (EV Nova Fandom Wiki)

EV Nova Aftermath was one of the most anticipated EV Nova TCs. Previously, all we had was the (defunct) Aftermath website, landing pictures, and other scattered remnants.

That all changed thanks to a friendly leak a year ago that didn’t really garner much attention. However thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable SharkyNebula, we now have pretty much everything on the wiki. I plan to write more about this and back up the resources on IA, but until then just marvel at these immaculate ship sprites. This was some of the best CGI that the EVN community had to offer, back in the day. They still look great now!

Data General Nova and Eclipse emulators (Wild Hare Computer Systems)

Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine is one of the great pieces of literature written about the computing field, and it centers on the team (lead by Tom West) upgrading the Nova into the Eclipse. Data General is a fairly obscure minicomputer company; the only one people still know by name is their more popular competitor, Digital Equipment Corporation, of PDP and VAX fame. So actually playing around with one of these wasn’t possible back in the day. But now there’s an emulator! You can even run it on a Raspberry Pi, which is exactly what I plan to do. If I get it running, I’ll write up a how-to.

https://fantastic-plastic.com/

For hobby modeling fans, this is a nice database of old model kits including images and enough information about them to find them via google with only a vague description. I stumbled across it while trying to figure out the provenance of a strange but very cool model kit, which turned out to be a Perry Rodan spacecraft. The model kit was purchased either at Neckers Toyland (still in operation!) or War And Pieces in Hartford (long defunct.) Seven years after War and Pieces closed, a Games Workshop store opened in the same location.

Dell HTPC thing from the aughts (youtube)

I found this video on Lemmy, interesting teardown.

World’s Fiasco of 2007 (yoyo fandom wiki)

In 2007 there was apparently some drama in the YoYo community. This would make an excellent Netflix special along the lines of The Pez Outlaw. I have no idea what the veracity of the story is and it contains some fantastical elements, but it’s also exactly the kind of foot-in-mouth emergent screwup that happens when you put enough people in a room and ask them to make decisions about how they should interact with their customers. I’d love to hear the other side of the story.

https://melonking.net/melon?z=/email/mailclient

If they still gave awards for “web site design” that included little site badges for the winner, this site would deserve them all. I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface with it. Be warned – I have no idea what’s lurking under the surface here.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google

Ed Zitron has been on a tear lately with a lot to say about the tech industry. The basic observation that we’ve been frogboiled into a truly lackluster Google search experience is a correct one.

The Sky was full of ships (project Gutenberg)

A short story by Theodore Sturgeon, in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947. I have a very vivid memory of this story as one of the first proper scifi short stories I ever really clicked with. Reading Del Ray’s history of early scifi made me think of it again, so I figured I should save the link for next time.

https://www.thelcars.com/

A CSS framework for making Star Trek style Okudagram websites.