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reads, oddities & one from the vault · 172 articles

HTTP 418 · Oddities

How id Software's Quake shareware CD cracked itself

Fabien Sanglard dissects the 1996 Quake shareware CD-ROM, which shipped encrypted versions of id's entire catalogue. Cracking group GNOMON needed only 39 days, because the unlock tool on the disc generated the serial loc…

DEV · Reads

What to Expect From DuckDB's Upcoming 2.0 Release

A community piece previews the next major version of DuckDB, the in-process analytical database popular with data engineers. Worth a read for anyone running DuckDB in production or evaluating it, since a major version bu…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

A Digital Museum Dedicated to Solid Desktop Backgrounds

Desktopcolors.com catalogs every solid background color ever shipped by desktop operating systems, from Windows 1.0's dithered cyan to KDE Plasma 6's Breeze blue. The open-source archive currently holds 194 colors across…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

1963 Mechanical Toy Computer Gets a Rubber-Band Reboot

Chris Staecker restored a well-preserved Digi-Comp I, a mechanical educational toy computer released in 1963 by E.S.R. Programmed by sliding tubes on rails that trigger spring-loaded levers via a manual clock switch, the…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Daily WTF Takes Aim at Jira's Workflow Maze

In a new Daily WTF feature, editor Remy Porter argues no ticket-tracking tool is truly good, and ranks Jira among the worst. A reader named Klinsten shares a workflow diagram so tangled, with transition labels mixing Dut…

DEV · Reads

Buf ships language server support for Protobuf

Buf has released LSP support for Protocol Buffers, bringing IDE features like completion, navigation and diagnostics to .proto files. The announcement, discussed on r/programming, also drew comments on Buf's pricing: 36 …

HTTP 418 · Oddities

AmigaDOS architect Tim King dies

Dr. Tim King, whose Tripos multitasking system became AmigaDOS, has died at the end of July. A Cambridge PhD holder and founder of Perihelion, King shaped early microcomputer OS design and remains a pivotal figure in Ami…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

DOS Klondike Solitaire Game Compressed to 3 Kilobytes

TinySol, a hand-written assembly solitaire for DOS, squeezes full gameplay into just 3 KB. The minimal version runs on IBM 5150 hardware with CGA/EGA/VGA support; a 3.5 KB build adds mouse and save features. It fits insi…

HTTP 418 · Oddities

Rust's RangeFrom Type: A Decade of Design Decisions

A detailed historical account of how Rust's RangeFrom type evolved from its 2014 introduction through 2026, examining the deliberate overflow behavior, documented boundary quirks, and recent API stabilization via RFC 355…

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