The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow at the normal location.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tomorrow, the 21st, with a presentation on shell scripting. It’ll be online through Jitsi. Slides from Nick Holland’s last presentation are available, for the curious.
No natural theme at all this week. Which is OK!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data. I would like to see this on a larger scale. (via)
- An adorably small Connection Machine. The real thing, if you are unfamiliar.
- Also cute: networked tiny TRS-80 model.
- Naming things needn’t be hard. (via)
- Confusing git terminology. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon 2023 report, part 1 and part 2.
- “The ports system exists to not only share misery, but to reliably replicate it“
- My MNT Reform – almost a year on.
- FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization.
- OctOpenBSD. I am a bit late linking that.
- Talk about the Basics.
- Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD.
- Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk. An underappreciated program.
- Presenting Syncthing, discovery server, relay server on OpenBSD.
- A small warning about UDP based protocols.
You can now run devfs(5) and procfs(5) in a jailed environment for DragonFly. As the commit message says, it’s for dsynth but I imagine this may be good for other applications.
NYCBUG is having a combination release party (FreeBSD 14) and swag time (EuroBSDCon stickers). It will be streamed. Go, if you are near.
More wide-ranging this week.
- Patrick Newman’s Software Engineering Management Checklist. (via)
- Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture. (via, via)
- Pool topology, I mean yes but why? (via)
- The difference in penalties in AD&D1 and D&D5.
- The Great Drone Ones.
- The Distractor.
- mii_emu: MII Apple //e Emulator for Linux. Linked for the Total Replay screenshot. (via)
- GET LAMP, which I know I have linked before, but I was reminded.
- Fantasy Inspiration, Era by Era. Books to read by time setting.
- Personal mail server issues. (a good reason for this book.)
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, this recent struct change will require a kernel and world rebuild. If you are running the release, it doesn’t affect you.
All history this week for some reason.
- IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard. Pictures of original hardware. (via)
- A bit of XENIX history. (indirectly via)
- How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet. (via)
- The Instruction Set Edition.
- Museum of Internet Artifacts.
- Remember “Reflections on Trusting Trust“? 40 years later it turns out Ken Thompson figured out how to backdoor the compiler and login.
- Enemies at the Gates. About platforms and how they absorb value.
- Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture. I had to explain to someone yesterday, unsuccessfully, how an open source SDK for a closed source project is useless. (via)
- The print-on-demand version of 50 Years of Text Games is available. It’s worth it.
- Making up a tabletop RPG.
Now this is mostly my backlog of RSS feed items. Eventually I will catch up to everything…
- Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea.
- The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client.
- Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer.
- Bypassing Windows 11 Account Setup. “generally when a vendor tries this hard to get you to do something, it’s not for a user-friendly reason.”
- Mouseless. (via)
- OpenBSD Webzine 15.
- Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1).
- Building a new Apple II?
- Braunstein Resources. (via)
- The whole Whole Earth Catalog.
- The Curse of Dialup World. (via)
New to the DragonFly kernel: jail-like capability restrictions, that may not require a jail to use.
This week I’m cleaning out links from saved emails and newsletters.
- Dragon Quest Disassembly. (related: Tempest)
- A pile of historical computing books.
- Turning software defined radio back into hardware.
- Turning WinAMP into hardware.
- OK maybe too much hardware.
- The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements. Any project, really. (via)
- Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023. (via)
- Backblaze 2023 mid-year drive stats.
- The 808 Edition.
- Making Way for Wayland.
I made it through the third major ERP transition I’ve done professionally, and it was successful. I hope I never have to do another. Also, I have a lot of open tabs.
- BSDCan has a planning blog.
- ChiBUG meets on the 17th.
- Get yourself on a PDP-11 right now. Or others. (via)
- The origins of the stand directory.
- The classic book ‘AWK Programming Language’ is getting an update.
- x/y/zmodem history, and you can still use it.
- Nine years uptime. (via)
- “We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms“. That would be this site right here. (via)
- Open charter companies and relicensing. (via)
- Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step.
- XScreenSaver 6.07 out now. Skulloop!
- tentacular, a new Sharecode film.
- HONK, a new Cyriak film.
- Kagi smallweb. Endless amounts of things to look at here.
- Collections: The Gap in the Armor of Baldur’s Gate and 5e.
- Thinking Seriously About Halfling Empires.
If you are running a headless DragonFly system, you may find this new ‘ifexists’ option for ttys helpful.
Hardening scripts for BSD. There should be a DragonFly-specific one eventually.
I may have missed this if it’s been committed, but if you have a Mercusys MW150US, aka a RealTek USB wifi dongle, there’s a patch to support it in Dragonfly.
ChiBUG’s monthly meeting is later today. Go, if you are near and not mired in ERP transition like I am at work.
A bit short this week – I am in the final parts of a large software transition at work.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tonight with a presentation from iXSystems on TrueNAS. There’s a video link in the posting.
Comfortably all over the map this week.
- Recreating a Cyberpunk 2077 game prop.
- Backblaze drive stats for 2023Q2. I just found out how cheap b2 storage can be.
- Awesome Inferno. (via)
- “Why would you do that?” The management review of yacc.
- What’s special about this number? (via)
- Dobbstown Mirror, $1. You should subscribe; I’ve enjoyed 3 issues so far.
- I did not know: vim exists via Atari/Amiga vi ports.
- Futurism Restated, an electronic music blog. I mean Substack. The lines blur. (via)
- v8 /etc/motd.
- Tiny life hack: paint your mouse dongles. I wish I had read this years ago.
- Inflation in 1983 must have been horrible. Linked just because 9 year old me thought the Elephant Memory Systems logo was cool.
- STIRred AND SHAKEN. Boring, but quietly important.
- The first color e-ink monitor I’ve seen.
- On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions. A certain amount of open source work is built on the tailings from venture capital, and from corporate waste.