I need to talk to you about computers, stevenf on the iPad and New World computing. Read this. Soon you can tell just about everyone “Here’s a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer”… if there still are any real computers around, that is.

Mark Pilgrim’s Setup, “I’ve had my current desktop for a little over two years. I want to continue using it for another 20. I mean that literally: this computer, this keyboard, this mouse, these three monitors. 20 years.”

CREOL: A formal framework for reflective component modelling the language is based on concurrent objects communicating by means of asynchronous method calls, and is formally defined with an operational semantics expressed in rewriting logic.

awf, the Amazingly Workable Formatter—a “nroff -man” or (subset) “nroff -ms” clone written entirely in (old) awk.

In praise of git’s index, a great feature once you’ve grokked it.

Digerati colorscheme for vim and terminal. Wonderful.

emacs-nav, a small file browser pane for Emacs, even more lightweight than speedbar.

Miso font, light, clean, and suitable for @font-face.

Generating Good Syntax Errors

Why Vector Clocks are Easy

Magnetic keychain

Tetris Friends, a really good suite of Flash Tetris games, multi- and single-player. It’s got just the right feel; you won’t find a better in-browser experience on the net. Recommended!

Letters.app will be a lean and programmable OS X IMAP email client, with plugin and automation APIs, designed for developers and power users. A great effort.

Wie Werner Gruber einen Körperscanner austrickst, und er hat Thermit dabei!

Pack a Gun to Protect Valuables from Airline Theft or Loss, WJW.

Tour of the Incompatible Timesharing System (YouTube). The tour includes DDT’s help commands, Emacs, transparent file I/O, Maclisp and :peek.

Plan9 Acme Intro Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 on YouTube. A nice way to learn the Acme editor.

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font, whee.

A vi-centric family tree of editors, featuring Emacs, too.

Richard Stallman’s setup (wow, there have been lots of interviews added!)

Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, a black box that places itself for sale on eBay.

LackRack, Ikea’s LACK sidetables nicely fit 19” racks. Genius.

Truck Bearing Kibble, a webcomic. A bit PBF-style.

300 & 65 Ampersands, an ampersand everyday!

A new approach to China, Google: “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.” WJW.

Erik Naggum comp.lang.lisp archive, “This site contains 5,121 articles that the late Erik Naggum posted to the Usenet group comp.lang.lisp.” By Zach Beane.

Simplicial Databases, by David I. Spivak. “In this paper, we define a category DB, called the category of simplicial databases, whose objects are databases and whose morphisms are data-preserving maps. Along the way we give a precise formulation of the category of relational databases, and prove that it is a full subcategory of DB.”

We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA768

NIST has selected the Second Round Candidates of the SHA-3 Competition, CubeHash is in.

xs is a cleanly-designed shell with functional programming, forked from es.

Beautiful fixed-width fonts for OSX, yay! 9x15 sucks but 6x13 is the best monospaced font ever. (And then there is Terminus, which is a bit larger and very nice too.)

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, “What if William Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski?”

Succeedblog, a collection of the world’s most epic, awesome, mind blowing Succeeds.

kottke.org’s best links of 2009

The death of the URL

First-Person Tetris

Lhasa de Sela passed away in her Montreal home on the night of January 1st 2010. She succumbed to breast cancer after a twenty-one month long struggle, which she faced with courage and determination.

Edgeplay With God, by Brad Warner. “Zazen is edgeplay with your immortal soul. Zazen is edgeplay with God.”

AAAARG is a conversation platform – at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.

Monads are Trees with Grafting, by Dan Piponi. “No category theory mentioned anywhere but in this sentence.”

Private Methods are a Code Smell, Kent Spillner says.

A lambda calculus for quantum computation

bup 0.01: It backs things up, a promising new backup tool.

isolate, a utility for isolating Unix processes, minimizing their privilege.

Quake Flash*, Quake2Live, Quake Live. For all your in-browser FPS needs.

America, by Allen Ginsberg.

Syd Barrett’s “Bob Dylan Blues”

Suicide Food is any depiction of animals that act as though they wish

Antique Bold, lovely.

International Klein Blue

Is aviation security mostly for show?, Bruce Schneier wonders. “The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.”

Dependency Injection vs. Virtual Classes, Adrian Kuhn explains nicely why class names should be looked up at runtime.

1-800-WHAT-THE-FUCK? (and read the rest of this wonderful site as well, e.g. Happy Birthday, you Sadist).

4ti2, a software package for algebraic, geometric and combinatorial problems on linear spaces.

Vimprobable is a minimalist WebKit-based browser that behaves like Vimperator.

2009 music wrap-up, by 2009 Jamie Zawinski. Essential.

100 Skills Everyone Should Master

25 Years of Apple Mouse Evolution

Guide to The 21st Century

the FM