DragonFly now has vkbd(4) (virtual keyboard) and cuse(3) “character device in user space” added in.
NYCBUG’s got a new meeting space to try out, and it’s on September 3rd. Go, if you are near.
Done early!
- The Anti-Subscription Catalogue. Listings of software that doesn’t require perpetual payment. You will find useful tools there. (via)
- The Interim Computer Museum current exhibits. I wish I was closer.
- The Origins of Dwarf Fortress, A 4-part Youtube series. (via)
- Non-AI images for your website. Possibly more than you’ll ever need, really.
- GLOG Class: Lackey.
- Related: apparently there’s a whole “bespoke single-level Cloak-and-Sword class” trend? And other made-up classes, for a fun read.
- I Am An AI Hater. (via many places)
- Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises. Or, reinventing problems. (via)
- Speaking of network issues: NFS is 40 years old – see events at MSST (the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology). (via)
- Speaking of NFS: it worked best on Sun, but NFS Must Die!, but it’s not the different animal that was RFS.
- Fictional Git manpage generator. (via)
Your unrelated video (from my childhood) of the week: Jazz #2. (via)
A couple of these links are from previous weeks, saved because I already had more time-dependent links to post. Still good!
- Filtered for bottom-up global monitoring.
- I mentioned Bill Atkinson’s death a while back – he also invented a superior dithering method, which I only found out by accident, and I suspect it may find new use locations.
- A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop. Classic MacOS inside a PA-RISC / CDE? machine is a combo I have never seen before.
- Those Titles the AI Bot Thought I Had Written.
- ChatGPT agent’s user-agent. Bing and Yandex both indexing your work, with no opt-out.
- 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Quay Brothers. (via)
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The 30 Year Late Review. I almost don’t believe this exists.
- Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl.
- Pimping my Casio: Part Deux. (via)
- Bag of words, have mercy on us.
- Simone’s webdesktops. Fun just to fiddle with. (via)
DragonFly now has a sysctl that will disable the console beep everywhere, not just in a particular shell. This is either unimportant to you or a massive relief.
I’ve had a surplus of links, so this is almost all stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks, pre-scheduled.
- microm8, an Apple][ emulator that adds new features. (via last week’s theme)
- Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?
- Installing *BSD in 2025 part 5. Wrapping up a series with some non-BSD, too.
- Building A Stirling Engine Bike. I don’t think it’s necessarily practical but I like the concept of a Stirling Engine.
- asncounter and grepcidr, two tools I wish I knew about long ago. (via)
- Mastodon has continued to function and grow for longer than the entire existence of Google+.
- Learning, AI, and John Searle’s Chinese Room.
- If OpenSSL were a GUI. (via)
- The New Dinosaurs, 2025.
- Objects should shut the fuck up. (via)
- The Lethal Trifecta and prompt injection.
- confusable_homoglyphs. (via)
Michael Neumann has completed an initial port of uvc, for webcam support, to DragonFly. His commit message lists both how he did it and how to use it.
Not tokens of agreed value, but specifically, crypto(4) and crypto(9). Michael Neumann doesn’t see a use for them any more, so speak up if you need them.
Apple ][ mini-theme.
- Math finds.
- Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards.
- REXPaint – ASCII art editor. (via)
- Baman Piderman returns. (via)
- The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. As a former industrial design student that went on to do nothing directly with my education, I agree.
- Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. I linked to this 8 years ago and it’s time for a reminder link; a gem of a puzzle collection.
- Floor796. You will lose some time searching around. (via)
- INIT HELLO, a new Apple ][ convention that just happened, at The Computer Museum. (via)
- FujiNet, networking for older computers. (via previous link)
- Also, Applesauce.
- Silo, from an interesting design company.
Are you encrypting your disk in DragonFly? If you are using dm_target_crypt, the ‘ng’ version is now the default. You may want to change your loader.conf.
The long-planned next meeting of NYCBUG is tomorrow. If you are going and have a Framework laptop, please bring it for testing HDMI. I assume it’s related to ongoing support work.
Meeting is canceled cause no presenter available.
I hope at least a few of the ideas this week are enjoyably novel to you.
- The original computer mouse. (third link)
- The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning. That first paragraph should be required reading.
- The Hype is the Product. (via)
- Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech. Managing knowledge workers is not a new idea but tech companies want to think it is. (from previous link)
- Curate your own newspaper with RSS. (via)
- Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD. See the CDE wiki for some screenshots; surely you’ve seen it before.
- The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models.
- Vibe code is legacy code. (via)
- TRMNL X. I preordered.
- Projects can’t be divorced from the people involved in them. The “Nazi Bar” idea sort of in reverse.
DRM in DragonFly has been updated to match Linux vers. 4.20.17. See the commit message for the newly-supported video chipsets.
I waited to post this cause there’s a few setup details that may or may not affect you when you try it.
This week is the right level of esoteric.
- WWVB, the radio protocol for time synch. I knew this existed as a concept but not the details. (via, via)
- Digital hygiene. The work/home separation is an underappreciated idea. (via)
- Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. Those are active, working, embedded Mac emulators on the web page. (via)
- If you are able, use the tools you’ve got.
- John Stezaker, collage artist. Here’s my favorite one I’ve seen. (via)
- The Shape of the Heavens. “Pity the poor d12”
- The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001). (via)
- Introducing CaptchaStash. (via)
- The Library of Congress publishes an updated “recommended formats” for data, which seems as authoritative a resource as it could be.
- A reminder you can log into various historic UNIX systems right now thanks to the ICM and SDF.
- BYO TRMNL.
I preassembled this list of links over time, so some of them have probably changed. For the “I’m sorry…” link, that just means more material.
- Precision Clock Mk IV. Not kidding about the precision part. (via)
- Calibre News. An excellent complement to RSS.
- TMG, or Transmogrifier, a compiler for PDP-7. Not what I first thought. (via)
- Mark V. Shaney, really an early LLM. (via) Plus, this followup.
- Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine. I was in the same regional blizzard mentioned.
- I’m sorry I’ve written a joke.
- tmux cheat sheet. (also via)
- The Webcomic List. This re-acquainted me with some comics I haven’t seen in years. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Why Some Satellites Use NetBSD? (indirectly via)
- can an email go 500 miles in 2025? A nice sequel of sorts to the 500-mile email.
- The A2DVI gives the Apple II DVI and HDMI output.
- Towards a Complete List of Excellent Medieval/Fantasy Combat Scenes.
I missed this some time ago, but: you may see errors about certctl(8) when upgrading your packages. It’s not necessary, yet.
Some of these links are relevant to my personal history. (dinosaurs, mining)
- forbidden secrets of ancient X11 scaling technology revealed.
- The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. (via)
- Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting.
- The Historical Tech Tree. (via)
- watch(1) utility added to -current. Does what it sounds like.
- XScreenSaver 6.12. More Wayland changes.
- Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD.
- The Wild Wild Web.
- AI-operated vending machines and business process innovation (sorry). A decent analysis, though I feel like too many LLM examples are for avoiding feedback, when you want the opposite.
- Which leads me to Paul Pangaro’s Cybernetics page.
- New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal.
- FreeBSD 14.3 on FrankenPad T25. Linked for the FrankenPad.
- Some notes on X terminals in their heyday.
- Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. Preorders are open.
Your unrelated music of the week: Chali 2na x Cut Chemist – Melt Like Plastic. (via)
RPG mini-theme this week.
- You’ll have to scroll a bit, but: Hal Foster images. (via)
- A modern version of the 1968 game Hammurabi. (via)
- I feel open source has turned into two worlds.
- Classic Computer Replicas. (via)
- Deep Fishing, a Sinclair game. (indirectly via)
- FIST, a paranormal A-Team RPG. (via)
- XScreenSaver 6.11 out – for the Wayland experimenters.
- listfile: help your scripts process a list of things.
- Blink and you’ll miss it! 4096 colours and flashing text on the console!
- KDE Plasma 6.4 has landed in OpenBSD.
- pkgsrc-2025Q2 has been released.
- The Apple Johnathan, new to me. (via)
- Microscope RPG, a GMless game for building a world. (via, via)
- my official list of post-glitch.com hosting options.
- How to install FreeBSD on providers that don’t support it with mfsBSD. I’ve linked to this sort of method before.
- Ghostty is available for FreeBSD, from a comment last week.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Beanbag metal.
Some odd, fun links.
- Tattoy: : a text-based terminal compositor. (via)
- wobbly letters.
- The Yale ‘E’ editor and the RAND “Ned” editor, design documents. It’s interesting to see how the requirements were defined, and how they match the current day. (via)
- Brain Freeze. One of the features of the Internet is to find strange things taken seriously.
- McMaster Nerf Blaster. If you aren’t familiar with McMaster and their billions of parts, this is a good first step.
- The Internet Archive’s gif badge search. The announcement of this came with this image, which I can’t actually find at the archive but is great.
- Preserving a History of Digital Mapmaking.
- How prompt injection works.
- Ban autonomous systems. Also Trying to understand the bots.
- Babelcarp, an old-school site for tea terms. (via)
- jemalloc postmortem and phkmalloc, contrast and compare. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Peanut Butter Breaks.
ifconfig now has ‘proxy’ and ‘-proxy’ options. The ‘proxy’ option is now on by default, so a given IPv6 interface will respond to neighbor solicitations when forwarding is on. Use ‘-proxy’ to turn it off; the previous default.
(This was back in May, and I missed posting it before.)