Bonus: Post 1,000

And there it is: Happy post 1,000.

I feel like I should have some enormous announcement on the day the counter expands by a digit. But things are more or less plodding along as usual.

The List nearly bottomed out a week ago; I had about 20 titles left, mostly obscure utilities, or esoteric server tools, or patched versions of more popular programs, or modules that install into other applications. Nothing exciting.

So I went out and beat the bushes a little this weekend, and found another two dozen or so programs that are definitely worthy of inclusion. I also scraped through a few very, very old lists of console programs, in hopes of bringing in a few more flashback apps.

I also spun up a homegrown loop to dump all the binaries that appear in coreutils, util-linux and bsd-games back into The List, just to be sure that there’s not something else in one of those packages that’s worth investigating.

I know that sounds like a step backwards (I think I even had all the bsd-games titles but one accounted for), but the list of software I originally had was cherry-picked from those packages by … someone. I have no idea who. So for years I have run the risk of overlooking something wonderful, by relying on the judgment of some unknown fool on the Internet. 😕

The plan is to cull those over the next few days, and hopefully dust off a few more winners that otherwise might have been omitted.

But don’t you worry; there’s no end in sight. Not all of these additions and re-additions are genius of the highest order, but unless they turn out to be catastrophic failures, they’ll certainly suffice for exploratory purposes.

Next stop, post 10,000. Stick around. It’ll be fun, I promise. 😉