Links week 52/2025

Selected bookmarks since week 1/2025. "Publishing much smaller link-dumps in the notes section" didn't happen. So here's another annual dump. ;-)

• Garfield Minus Garfield - "is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle." - D. Walsh

(D. Walsh, garfieldminusgarfield.net)

Space, Astronomy, Atmospheric sciences & Physics

• Voyager backgrounder - "The design, configuration, and instrumentation of the Voyager spacecraft is presented. Mission experiments conducted by the spacecraft are described." - ntrs.nasa.gov

• If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - "A tediously accurate map of the solar system" - J. Worth

• Life after death - "Europa in the evolving Habitable Zone of a Red Sun" - 05/2025 - E. Mullens, Britney S. et al.

• Astronomers discover 3I/ATLAS — third interstellar object to visit our Solar System - "For only the third time in history, astronomers have discovered a new interstellar object that originated from outside our Solar System. The object, known as 3I/ATLAS, is likely a comet and is much faster than any other interstellar object found before." - 07/2025 - J. Bowler

• Was Life on the Early Earth Purple? - "Early life-forms on Earth may have been able to generate metabolic energy from sunlight using a purple-pigmented molecule called retinal that possibly predates the evolution of chlorophyll and photosynthesis." - 10/2018 - K. Cooper, astrobiology.nasa.gov

• As the climate warms, new data shows huge swaths of land across the globe are quickly drying, threatening humanity’s supply of fresh water. - "If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable." - 07/2025 - A. Lustgarten

• The Galmon GNSS Monitoring Project - "Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN." - galmon.eu

• Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars - "Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let's discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth." - 09/2024 - A. Burneko

• Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuel production in flow - "Direct air capture is an emerging technology to decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but it is currently costly and the long-term consequences of CO2 storage are uncertain. An alternative approach is to utilize atmospheric CO2 on-site to produce value-added renewable fuels, but current CO2 utilization technologies predominantly require a concentrated CO2 feed or high temperature. Here we report a gas-phase dual-bed direct air carbon capture and utilization flow reactor that produces syngas (CO + H2) through on-site utilization of air-captured CO2 using light without requiring high temperature or pressure." - 02/2025 - S. Kar, D. Kim et al.

• Mirror-image life - "..is a hypothetical form of life using mirror-reflected molecular building blocks.[1] This alternative life form has never been discovered in nature, although certain mirror-image components of molecular machinery have been synthesized in the laboratory and efforts to chemically synthesize a mirror-image ribosome have been ongoing since 2016." - Wikipedia

• Quantum teleportation between photons from two distant light sources achieved - "Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have [..] made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the quantum repeater." - 11/2025 - J. Witte

Medicine, Biology & Psychology

• Terminal lucidity - "is an unexpected return of consciousness, mental clarity, or memory shortly before death in individuals with severe psychiatric or neurological disorders." - Wikipedia

• Population bottleneck - "..is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling." - Wikipedia

• Extinction event - ".. is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp fall in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms." - Wikipedia

Information Technology & Programming

• The day Return became Enter - "In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple: at some point in the 20th century, someone attached a CPU and a screen to a typewriter, and that turned it into a computer. But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted. The transition was meandering and lengthy, and traces of its many battles and decisions remain scattered across keyboards today. And no key might better represent the complexity of that journey than the Return key." - 12/2023 - M. Wichary

• FUTEL - "At Futel, we believe in the preservation of public telephone hardware as a means of providing access to the agora for everybody, and toward that goal we are privileged to provide free telephone calls, voicemail, and telephone-mediated services." - futel.net

(Image: futel.net)

• Earthstar - "..is a small and resilient distributed storage protocol designed with a strong focus on simplicity, and the social realities of peer-to-peer computing kept in mind." - earthstar-project.org

• Collapse OS - "..is a Forth [..] operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse." - collapseos.org

• Common Crawl - "..maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." - commoncrawl.org

• Kiwix - "Kiwix is a non-profit organization and a free and open-source software project dedicated to providing offline access to free educational content." - kiwix.org

• The Open Source Torment Nexus - "[..] when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus?" - 02/2025 - tante/J. Geuter)

• CLISH - "A modular framework for implementing a CISCO-like CLI on a *NIX system. Arbitary command menus and actions can be defined using XML files. This software handles the user interaction, and forks the appropriate system commands to perform any actions." - clish.sourceforge.net

• European alternatives for digital products - "We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products." - european-alternatives.eu

• MLVWM - "(Macintosh-Like Virtual Window Manager) is an X11 window manager with a classic MacOS appearance." - T. Hasegawa, M. Aldridge et al.

• Nping - "Nping is a Ping tool developed in Rust. It supports concurrent Ping for multiple addresses, visual chart display, real-time data updates, and other features." - hanshuaikang

• Thinkserver: my web-based coding environment - "I've made my own web-based coding environment for working on little projects." - 02/2025 - C. Lawson-Perfect

(Image: C. Lawson-Perfect, checkmyworking.com)

• Jujutsu - "A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful" - jj-vcs.dev

• DOOM Captcha - "The project works by leveraging Emscripten to compile a minimal port of Doom to WebAssembly and enable intercommunication between the C-based game runloop (g_game.c) and the JavaScript-based CAPTCHA UI." - https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/

(Play DOOM and kill at least 3 monsters)

• Recursive self-improvement - "..is a process in which an early or weak artificial general intelligence (AGI) system enhances its own capabilities and intelligence without human intervention, leading to a superintelligence or intelligence explosion." - Wikipedia

• Make a paper hexadecimal calculator! - "Programmatics, Inc. might live on today but they certainly are not handling out cool paper hexadecimal calculators. Use these templates to create your own copy!" - brutman.com

(From: brutman.com)

• pure bash bible - "A collection of pure bash alternatives to external processes." - dylanaraps

• Big Book of R - bigbookofr.com

• Mox - "modern full-featured open source secure mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email" - xmox.nl

• Delta Chat - ".. is a decentralized and secure messenger app" - delta.chat

• coma - "..is a minimalistic X11 Window Manager." - J. Vink

• ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS - "As of 28 January 2025, the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) will be the definitive source for delivering generic top-level domain name (gTLD) registration information in place of sunsetted WHOIS services." - 01/2025 - icann.org

• That time I recreated Photoshop in C++ - "I recreated Photoshop in C++ and Windows API!" - M. Foss

• The 5 Levels of Configuration Languages - "There are 5 levels of power for configuration languages. If you design a new schema, be aware of all of them." - 04/2025 - A. Zwinkau

• Demystifying the #! (shebang): Kernel Adventures - 04/2025 - B. Croci

• Everyone knows your location - "tracking myself down through in-app ads" - 02/2025 - T. Sh

  • Everyone knows your location, Part 2 - "try it yourself [..]" - T. Sh

• Boxie - an always offline audio player for my 3 year old - 04/2025 - M. Zechner

• A simple search engine from scratch - "Chris and I spent a couple hours the other day creating a search engine.." - 05/2025 - M. Bernstein, C. Gregory

• gnuit - "GNU Interactive Tools" - gnu.org

• Occurrences of words in the Linux kernel source code over time - "How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out!" - vidarholen.net

• Writing Toy Software Is A Joy - "Toy programs follow the 80:20 rule: 20% of the work, 80% of the functionality. The point is not to build production-worthy software (although it is true that some of the best production software began life as a toy). Aggressively avoid over-engineering, restrict yourself to only whatever code is necessary to achieve your goal. Have every code path panic/crash until you’re forced to implement it to make progress. You might be surprised by just how easy it is to build toy versions of software you might previously have considered to be insummountably difficult to create." - 06/2025 - J. Barretto

• Project MINI RACK - "is a guide for miniature rack builds, for compact Homelabs, RF battlestations, and portable network racks." - J. Geerling

(10' Mini Racks by J. Geerling)

• Don't pick weird subnets for embedded networks, use VRFs - "Don't pick random subnets to avoid IP address conflicts on foreign networks, use VRFs!" - 08/2025 - M. Braam

• xBrowserSync - "..is a free and open-source alternative to browser syncing tools offered by companies like Google, Firefox, Opera and others. The project was born out of a concern for the over-reliance on services provided by big tech, who collect as much personal data as they can.." - xbrowsersync.org

• ggwave - "Tiny data-over-sound library" - G. Gerganov

• Processing - "..is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology." - processing.org

• Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape - "I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon." - 09/2025 - B. Ionescu

• How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-like Container From Scratch - "In this post, we'll assemble a tiny but realistic, Docker-like container using only stock Linux tools: unshare, mount, and pivot_root. No runtime magic and (almost) no cut corners. Along the way, you'll see why the mount namespace is the bedrock of container isolation, while other namespaces, such as PID, cgroup, UTS, and even network, play rather complementary roles. By the end - especially if you pair this with the container networking tutorial - you'll be able to spin up fully featured, Docker-style containers using nothing but standard Linux commands." - 12/2025 - I. Velichko

• Contiki - "..is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Contiki is used for systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitoring and alarms. It is open-source software released under the BSD-3-Clause license." - Wikipedia

• friendly_neighbor - "Automatic sleep and wake-on-demand for Linux" - 2022 - D. Gross

• Programming in the Sun - "A Year with the Daylight Computer" - 10/2025 - O. Wickström

• framadate - "..is an online service for planning an appointment or making a decision quickly and easily. It's a community free/libre software alternative to Doodle." - framadate.org

• Software Engineering for Internet Applications - " This is the textbook for the MIT course "Software Engineering for Internet Applications". The course is intended for juniors and seniors in computer science" - 2006 - E. Andersson, P. Greenspun, A. Grumet

• Magic Earth - "Smooth navigation, live traffic, 3D maps, and offline access to enhance your travel experience. Privacy first, by design" - magicearth.com

• The Authoritarian Stack - "How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next" - F. Bria, J. Bautista, Supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

• Download Valley - "..is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software. The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads." - Wikipedia

• Hunting For North Korean Fiber Optic Cables - "This was a rabbit hole that I recently went down and I probably have more questions than answers, but I still wanted to document what I had found so far." - 12/2025 - Nick, nkinternet.com

• Perl's decline was cultural - "According to the Discourse, somebody killed perl" - 11/2025 - C. M. Strickland

• ACME - "Acme is a powerful text editor, development environment and textual-user-interface platform developed by Rob Pike originally for Plan 9 from Bell Labs research operating system, and now has ports available for all major platforms." - acme.cat-v.org

• Sam - "A minimalist text editor with a graphical user interface, a very powerful command language and remote editing capabilities. Written by Rob Pike." - sam.cat-v.org

Computer Security

• Virus hoax - "..is a message warning the recipients of a non-existent computer virus threat." - Wikipedia

• Root Shell on Credit Card Terminal - "After booting it up and aimlessly clicking through the UI, I did a quick port scan, but couldn’t find anything interesting. So naturally, I started to take it apart." - 06/2025 - S. Gloor

• The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" - "About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through system(3) or sh -c. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world..." - 01/2021 - C. D. Craciun

• How I Scanned all of GitHub’s “Oops Commits” for Leaked Secrets - S. Brizinov

• First Malicious MCP in the Wild - "The Postmark Backdoor That's Stealing Your Emails" - 09/2025 - I. Dardikman

Smallweb

• Nightfall City - nightfall.city

• smallweb - "smallweb is a carefully curated collection of neat indie websites that get less attention than they deserve." - smallweb.cc

• indieblog.page - "Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time." - indieblog.page

• HTML Zine Club - "HTML Zine Club is a community for people who are interested in making hand-made webpages and fun Internet visual culture!" - htmlzine.club

• Accidental complexities of the IndieWeb - "I live on the internet, in an ancient unix shell account [..]. If I should ever type up a little textfile during other activities on the computer, it only takes me ten seconds to put it on my webpage. Unlike most people, for me the barriers against publishing on internet have entirely evaporated". Such a way of working is of course a trade-off. [..] - 01/2025 - F. Holzer

• Publii - "..is a desktop-based CMS for Windows, Mac and Linux that makes creating static websites fast and hassle-free, even for beginners." - getpublii.com

• The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person - "There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. [..] This renewed interest made me take a fresh tour through the current Gemini protocol spec and I decided to write down some observations for you." - 05/2023 - D. Stenberg

• uggly - "Protocol for TUIOW (terminal user interface over the wire)" - R. Endicott

  • uggly-server - "This project is a sample server designed to be easy to use for people unfamiliar with the project to serve content using the uggly protocol to an existing client." - R. Endicott

(uggly-server by R. Endicott)

• How to Build a Low-tech Website? - "Our new website is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content." - 09/2018 - solar.lowtechmagazine.com

• Happy Net Box - "is an experimental internet social experience based on the arcane and near-forgotten retro internet protocol known as FINGER." - happynetbox.com

• Formatting for Gopher with GNU troff - "Gopher is a text-first medium. Gopher clients are responsible for formatting the output that a user sees, and this usually consists of no more than wrapping lines at the terminal width. [..] GNU troff gives us a rich set of commands for formatting text." - 03/2018 - D. Bucklin

• ELPiS - "full-fledged monthly magazine about web 1.0, small web, and indie web" - elpis.ws

Retrocomputing

• Windows 2: Final Fantasy of operating systems - "It is common knowledge that Final Fantasy could have been the "final" game for the studio, the first and the last in the series. It is far less known that Windows 2, released around the same time, faced a similar fate. If anything, things were more certain: even Microsoft firmly believed that Windows 2 would be the last." - 12/2024 - N. Kalinina

• TempleOS - "..is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew Bible. It was created by American computer programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God." - Wikipedia

• Throwback Thursday: KDE 2 on SuSE Linux 7.3 - マリウス.com

(KDE2 on SuSE Linux 7.3, Image: マリウス.com)

• residential networking over telephone - "[..] many of you probably know that there have been a number of efforts to install IP networking over installed telephone wiring in a residential and SOHO environment. There is a broader category of "computer networking over things you already have in your house," and some products remain pretty popular today, although seemingly less so in the US than in Europe." - 02/2025 - J. B. Crawford

• Psion - "Psion PLC was a designer and manufacturer of mobile handheld computers for commercial and industrial uses." - Wikipedia

(Mobipocket on a Psion Series 5 PDA, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schoschi)

• oldcomputer.info - "Here you will find information about old computers, their parts and peripherals." - oldcomputer.info

• Walnut Creek CDROM - "..was an early provider of freeware, shareware, and free software on CD-ROMs." - Wikipedia

• glyphdrawing.club - H. Lotvonen

• Blue9 - "Blue9 is a modern and lightweight Linux desktop experience with the look of classic Macs. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with various OS9 themes and icons." - blues.win

(XFCE with Blue9, Image: blues.win)

• Evertop - "E-ink IBM XT clone with solar power, ultra low power consumption, and ultra long battery life." - E. Jenott

(The Evertop by E. Jenott)

• Tiny Emus - A. Weissflog

• Minnesota Internet Users Essential Tool - "..(Minuet) is an integrated Internet package for DOS operating systems on IBM-compatible PCs." - Wikipedia

(Screenshot of Minuet Version 1.0_BETA_18A)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager - "MWM first appeared in the early 1990s, along with the Motif toolkit." - Wikipedia

(Screenshot of MWM, the Motif Window Manager)

• 16COLORS - "ASCII and ANSI art archive" - 16colo.rs

• AOL is ditching dial-up. - "They’re not required to continue running their dial-up service forever. But it would sure be nice." - 08/2025 - E. Smith

• asciiskyline - "A starry city skyline drawn in ASCII in the terminal." - Whelk

• Project Xanadu - "..was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web [..] Wired magazine published an article entitled "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu 'the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry'" - Wikipedia

• Software Spotlight: 30 years of Windows 95 - "It's been almost 30 years since Microsoft Windows 95 was released. Glimpses of what Microsoft was planning were available in the form of betas as early as 1993. For a lot of people, that was the first Windows version they were exposed to, or used professionally. After 30 years, there are plenty of people now who have never seen it at all." - 05/2025 - winworldpc.com

• Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 - "In 2002 I asked a number of developers/Unix people for screenshots of their desktops. I recently republished them, and, seeing the interest this generated, I thought it’d be fun to ask the same people* again 13 years later. To my delight I managed to reach many of them. (* Sans Dennis Ritchie and itojun, who are no longer with us.)" - 12/2015 - A. Jensen-Urstad

• UNIX V4 tape from University of Utah (raw) - "This is the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum's Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek's readtape tool." - Computer History Museum, archive.org

(Retro-) Gaming

• CityCat - "A game where you play as a cat with amnesia trying to find his roots. Just walking through the city streets looking for adventure, interacting with the locals, getting into situations and solving little puzzles. [..] Please note, we are developing the PC Windows version first, all graphics will be C64 ready for porting. The .crt version is the latest C64 development however the Windows PC version will be more developed and more accessible." - Polytricity

(CityCat, Image: c64universe.com)

• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - "An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons filled with dangerous monsters in a quest to find the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot." - crawl.develz.org

• WayBeyond - "Procedural open world ARPG/roguelite." ("Gameplay is highly incomplete. All feedback is much welcome, especially regarding controls, usability, and gamefeel." - B. Magyar (balintmagyar.com)

• SSH TRON - "Multiplayer Tron in your terminal. Just run the command [..] and you'll be playing in seconds." - sshtron.zachlatta.com

(Screenshot of SSH TRON)

• How to draw a Space Invader - "I recently made the Space Invader Generator for Creative Coding Amsterdam code challenge. I made it for fun of course... and galactic domination too! You can see how it looks below and in this post I'll show you how it works using an interactive animation." - 08/2025 - S. Tadić

• The Secret of Donkey Island - "..is an English translation of 'Tajemství Oslího ostrova', the first nationally distributed Czech PC game. The game was developed by two Czech teenagers, as a parody to 'The Secret of Monkey Island' series. It was primarily created using their school computer, and first released in June 1994." - donkeyisland.zip

(Donkey Island, Image: donkeyisland.zip)

• The Sierra Chest - "..is a fan site, dedicated to preserving the legacy of the gaming giant Sierra through its many incarnations [..] Covering over three decades of Sierra products, history and more in staggering detail, collaborating with numerous fan sites, developers and Sierra alumni, as well as offering a wide range of community features [..]" - sierrachest.com

• Emulator Zone - "..is your source for the latest emulators for classic video game consoles and home computers" - emulator-zone.com

• Blitz Basic - "Ein neuer Stern am Programmiersprachen-Himmel" - 03/2001 - J. & T. Antoni

• Writing our own Cheat Engine - "This is part 1 on the Writing our own Cheat Engine series" - 02/2021 - Lonami

• Mad Monks' Revenge - Definitive Edition - "This project is a fan made cross-platform clone of Lode Runner Online: The Mad Monks' Revenge. We played Lode Runner on and off over the years, but when it no longer played nice with modern OS's, we decided rather than just not play it and remember it how it was, we'd re-create it!" - mmr.quarkrobot.com

• SimCity 2000 portable - Portable runner and patcher for SimCity 2000 win95 edition to run on Windows Vista/7/8/10 - S. Streicher

• How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack - "Released in June 1996, Quake had to ride three technological shock-waves during its lifetime. Besides the emergence of 3D hardware accelerator cards and the growth of the Internet, an operating system shift put game developers in a tough position." - 11/2025 - F. Sanglard

• XPilot - "is a multiplayer video game. It is open source and runs on many platforms. Although its 2D graphics have improved over time, they still resemble the style of Thrust." - Wikipedia

(Screen capture of XPilot NG running under fvwm on Linux)

• Ultima VII: Revisited - "A replacement engine for Ultima VII The Black Gate (and eventually Serpent Isle) that presents a new camera angle and other improvements." - ViridianGames

(Ultima VII: Revisited, Image: ViridianGames)

• Principles of Autonomy and Decision Making Project - "This text is taken from the GNU Robots manual, written by Jim Hall." - 11/2004 - N. Roy

(GNU Robots)

Miscellaneous

• In Poznan, Poland, eight clams get to decide if people in the city get water or not - "[..] These biological systems are comprised of eight mussels with sensors hot-glued to their shells. They work together with a network of computers and have been given control over the city’s water supply. If the waters are clean, these mussels stay open and happy. But when water quality drops too low, they close off and shut the water supply of millions of people with them." -

(Image credits Julia Pełka / GRUBA KAŚKA via Reddit)

• Rasmussen and practical drift Drift towards danger and the normalization of deviance - "[..] systemic migration of organizational behavior toward accident under the influence of pressure toward cost-effectiveness in an aggressive, competing environment [..] - 03/2022 - E. Marsden

• Birds Aren't Real - "..is a satirical conspiracy theory which posits that birds are actually drones operated by the United States government to spy on American citizens." - Wikipedia

(From: Andrewj0131, commons.wikimedia.org)

• stitched together a (relatively) decent resolution pic of mulder’s desk - 09/2020 - u/peachkissbabylips

(A stitched reconstruction of Mulders desk, Image: reddit/u/peachkissbabylips)

• How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look? - "Human-Citrus Interaction" - 04/2025 - A. Ellis

(Human-Citrus Interaction, A. Ellis, alexanderell.is)

• Beer on Board in the Age of Sail - 08/2017 - J. Blakely

(Empty barrels of beer come in handy on a voyage in this woodcut illustration from Conard Gessner’s Historia animalium, Liber 4 of 1558)

• ABSURD - "We create absurd products & services. This is our art. One public work is released each month." - absurd.website

• Probe lenses and focus stacking - "the secrets to incredible photos taken inside instruments" - 05/2025 - A. Ferguson

(Photo: Charles Brooks; 'This remarkable photo captures the interior of the first violin I successfully photographed.')

• Pierre Barraud de Lagerie - Digital drawings made with MsPaint, JsPaint, Paint Brush - P. Barraud de Lagerie

(P. Barraud de Lagerie: Digital drawings made with MsPaint, JsPaint, Paint Brush)

• Darvaza gas crater - ".. also known as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, officially the Shining of Karakum, is a burning natural gas field collapsed into a cavern near Darvaza, Turkmenistan." - Wikipedia

• Neko - ".. is a cross-platform open-source animated cursor-chasing cat screenmate application." - Wikipedia

• The defense against slop and brainrot - "I used to type The Great Gatsby word for word, page after page, at my desk when I couldn't write a single original sentence. The idea came from Hunter S. Thompson, who re-typed Fitzgerald and Hemingway just to feel world-class prose move under his fingers." - 09/2025 - P. Jun

• Misnomer - "is a name that is incorrectly or unsuitably applied. Misnomers often arise because something was named long before its correct nature was known, or because an earlier form of something has been replaced by a later form to which the name no longer suitably applies." - Wikipedia

• The Decline of Deviance - "Where has all the weirdness gone?" - 10/2025 - A. Mastroianni

• SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL - "Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3" - 01/1944 - Office of Strategic Services

• Letterlocking - "..is the act of folding and securing a written message (such as a letter) on papyrus, parchment, or paper, without requiring it to be contained in an envelope or packet. It is a traditional method of document security that utilizes folding and cutting." - Wikipedia

• Götterdämmerung - "Suicide Music and the National Self as Enemy" - 05/2014 - P. Demopoulos

• Modern Walkmans - "Cassette Players for the Modern Digital Age" - walkman.land

• Carlos Kaiser - "..is a Brazilian con artist and former footballer. Although his abilities were far short of professional standard, he managed to sign for numerous football teams during his decade-long career. He never played a regular game, the closest occurrence ending in a red card whilst warming up, and hid his limited ability with injuries, frequent team changes, and other ruses." - Wikipedia

Regional (Leipzig und Umland)

• KulturLeben Leipzig & Region - "..ermöglicht Menschen mit geringem Einkommen den kostenfreien Zugang zu Kultur- und Sportveranstaltungen in Leipzig & Region." - kulturleben-leipzig.de

• Die Wassertürme von Leipzig und Umgebung - wasserturm-leipzig.de