And the #Shepherd has a new hut! 👇
https://shepherding.services/news/2025/10/the-shepherd-gets-a-new-hut/

Yup, that’s right! You can now find it at shepherding.services! Because shepherding services is what it does all day long.

Now playing: 95-ravers-megamix.mod

😜

Commodore SX-64 CRT close-up.

We retrieved from an old archive "NoteCards User’s Guide" V2.0 and added it to the source tree. Published in 1991, this manual better matches the NoteCards code that comes with Medley Interlisp but some of the information the document provides is now only of historical value.

https://files.interlisp.org/medley/notecards/docs/user-guide-v2.0

#interlisp #NoteCards #hypertext #retrocomputing

What if computers, but in a good way?

the system will what

Oh hey look, I published a new #blogpost, “Advanced Self-Aware ed(1)”! It’s about what madness can one commit when one decides to not use proper #programming systems and goes all in on accidental/awkward #Turing-completeness. As discussed with @whitequark

https://aartaka.me/advanc-ed.html

https://screwlisp.small-web.org/software-individuals/sandewalls-sat-solver-implementation-example/

Eminently doable #walkthrough of part of Sandewall's 2010 labs 2 and 5 of his #lisp #AI course at the university of Linkoping.

git clone, start lisp, then it solves for locations of a test structure (e.g. some code) satisfying some decision tree constraints.

#logic -al #decisionTree #constraintSatisfaction #satSolver #programming .

See everyone for the live show two hours from now as always on https://anonradio.net/ .

Did you make your first #softwareIndividual ?

The Black Panther Party was founded #OnThisDay in 1966.

From a 2016 article commemorating its 50th anniversary:

"The work of the Black Panthers remains important for several reasons. First, they remind us that the problem of police brutality has long been with us [...]

Second, the BPP offers a good model of grassroots activism and ideology in practice."

https://jacobin.com/2016/10/black-panther-party-fifty-year-anniversary-founding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

#history #BlackHistory #BlackPanthers #BlackPantherParty

a mechanical tesseract 😮

https://juliusvonbismarck.com/bank/index.php/projects/round-about-four-dimensions/

A lot went on in the 2½ years it took to develop #BarrenPlanet. Planning, the creation of a wargame library, the coding itself, and building the content for the supplied campaign were all major phases in that time. I talk about this in a blog post at http://dos.cyningstan.org.uk/post/199/barren-planet-the-process #gamedev #ibmpc #msdos #cga

Ooh, and Intext has a basic terminal program!
#retrocomputing

AWS crash causes $2,000 "Smart" Beds to overheat and get stuck upright
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/aws-crash-causes-2000-smart-beds-to-overheat-and-get-stuck-upright-3272251/

I really appreciate how ASDF, #CommonLisp de-facto build tool/library/manager treats configuration. It has:

- Programmatic configuration with clean functions and custom package registries
- Stateful and dirty variable (asdf:*central-registry*) initializing the whole thing and thus easily overridable
- Environment variable (CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY)
- Filesystem-resident config files with a DSL for library locations

I mean, it’s not unique, but I still appreciate having more than one way to configure the thing. Especially given that CL packaging spectrum goes from “just pull it all off the Internet” (Quicklisp) and “just pull the necessary versions from the Internet” (CLPM and some other thing I can’t recall now) to “aggressively vendor the whole dependency tree with the project” (Qlot and my submodule-driven approach.) In my particular case, environment variable is the perfect way to configure the thing, given that I’m building my software with Make. It would be painful to not have it.

Here’s to configurable software!

Today, October 21, 2025, there is a rally in San Francisco in support of @internetarchive. Tomorrow, the Internet Archive is having a party to celebrate 1 trillion webpages archived. To show my appreciation for their most famous creation, the Wayback Machine, this week's Cybercultural post takes you back 24 years to its launch. Thank-you @brewsterkahle and long live the Internet Archive! https://cybercultural.com/p/wayback-machine-launch-2001/ #InternetHistory

Years ago, I had this idea that what I really wanted out of a computer was an offline terminal with a moderately sized local disc, great battery life, and a blazing fast wired connection to a little sidecar machine.

The sidecar machine would have a real Internet connection and access to my private network, tons of storage, full disk encryption, and a bunch of network applications that would interact with my terminal over a wire, mostly in text mode.

If I want real time comms, I plug in the wire and slap the sidecar on the back of the terminal and I've got it.

If I want offline, I do whatever I want to do local and batch the network stuff for later.