Reminder: NYCBUG‘s next event is in two days. It’s “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. You should go; it’s a chance to talk directly with the author of foundational software.
Nostalgia might be creeping in here.
- “Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay.” Pseudo-ASCII design tools.
- Old-School Essentials Online Rules Reference.
- Root Loops, cereal-themed terminal colors. (via this discussion of tmux config, via)
- “Don’t eat your seed corn”, about homogenization of ideas.
- Who Is That Knocking At My (SSH) Door? Incidentally a fabulous domain name on that link.
- The implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, RFC1149, 25 years later.
- A list of list of alternative service providers. (via)
- Open web vs AI: what can W3C do? A lot, as it turns out…
- HyperCard on the Macintosh. A retrospective of a fantastic tool.
- ‘Slimline’ Commodore 64C Ultimate: BASIC Beige. This is going to be really exciting for anyone with a liking of Commodore hardware.
- The GPS III Rollout Is Almost Complete, But What Is It? A nice summary of what will be nearly invisible to everyone… if it goes well.
Your unrelated subscription item of the week: The Cacao Barista Snail Mail Club. I’ve been running a small chocolate manufacturing company for several years now and I’ve tasted a lot of chocolate from many sources. Map Chocolate is some of the best.
Several of these links were discovered via bubbles.town, including a min e-ink hardware trend you’ll notice below.
- The Utah teapot in tandem with the recent Unix V4 tape discovery. (via)
- Roguelike Celebration 2026 Call for Proposals. Look at previous years to see the topics.
- The Adventure Shell, your shell prompt as text adventure. (via)
- Apple History in Prototypes. (via)
- Knight Rider 2025. (via)
- An Ode to bzip. Linked for the compression algorithm descriptions. (via)
- Open Source Has a Bot Problem. Prompt injection to help classify AI patches. (via)
- Strawberry Music Player, linked cause I read somewhere it filled the same niche as Winamp. I tried it – and yep, it scratches that itch very well.
- Crosspoint Reader for the XTEInk X4.
- Related: XTEInk X4 notes, including moving Markdown files to it.
- Also related: A local epub eBook server for my xteink.
- Lovecraft Investigations Season 5 – Official Crowdfund Trailer. Posted cause I enjoyed all the previous seasons and I’ve been reading the author’s blog for some time. It’s a story structured as if it was a real podcast which makes it remarkably immersive.
- A few thoughts on the AYN Thor. Linked cause small hardware is always fun.
The DragonFly site has a recently-updated page describing how DPorts is assembled and the process to contribute.
It does need the criterion for when it’s ready to release – either a number of working ports, or certain key ports buildable, or a combination of the two. Something like “Chrome, Apache, nginx, MariaDB, Postgres, and X11 build, and over 75% of packages in general are successful, with less than a 10% decrease in buildable packages from the last dports release”. I just made that up, so it’s not an actual threshold. But it could be?
Several conferences are linked here; check your calendar accordingly.
- The BSDCan 2026 Schedule is up, plus some other event details.
- pcc lives again, with details.
- Silvio Lorusso: Serif Populism, Hyperpolitics and the Diminishing Returns of Graphic Design Culture. (via)
- A dictionary of demons. Not daemons. (also via)
- Roguelike Conference 2026 is in October.
- SSH escape sequences. Social media posts are the worst way to archive information, of course. (via)
- Charcuterie: A visual explorer for Unicode. (via)
- The Western Electric 500 phone. I have one of these phones; it is … iconic? I don’t have the right word.
- I Connected a Desktop Phone to a FreeBSD Server, so Now I Can Call It. Related to the previous link; I’ve set up a Model 500 via an ATA in a similar fashion, though it needed some voltage fiddling to get the mechanical ringer to ring. (via)
- 2026 Hugo Award finalists. Use as a “to-read/view” list.
- Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now. I like the idea that there’s an incentive to debug / secure more open source projects, though that can cut both ways. (via)
- A love letter to cassette futurism. (via)
I have been looking at a lot of Markdown-formatted files lately because reasons.
- Signboard is a kanban app that writes Markdown files. This makes an astonishing amount of sense as a format. (via)
- Select a Security Question. Made me snort.
- Women of the early early era of industrial music.
- “everyday objects made specifically to annoy people“. (via)
- Things to say when you’re losing a technical argument. (via)
- “Failover” CPUs to handle faults used to be a thing.
- Video of the celebration of 80th anniversary of ENIAC Day.
- EditionCrafter, open source software for publishing digital editions of historical documents. (via)
- Origin of the “swap should be 2x RAM” idea. Some familiar names in there. (via)
- The ReCode Project, recreating classic computer art with more recent code. (via)
Your unrelated game of the week: Kolydr. From the same person who did Canabalt and a lot of other games I hadn’t seen. (via)
NYCBUG‘s next event, on 2026/05/13, is “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. If you aren’t familiar with that name, you are probably using his software or something derived from it right now.
I managed to get much of this done early and not post it on the wrong day too.
- Updates 2025/Q1. Linked for the pictures of keyboard stores in Seoul.
- Breaking up with Big Tech – Progress update. A Uses This of sorts.
- OSHintosh – an open source 68000 Macintosh. (via)
- XScreenSaver 6.15 is out.
- Which led to Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.
- Notes on clarifying man pages.
- A Quick and Easy Guide to tmux.
- And then Make tmux Pretty and Usable.
- “I like to use Soviet control panels as a starting point.”
- zipcodefirst.com. (via)
- The Book of PF, 4th Edition: It’s Here, It’s Real.
- Digital Collections. (via)
- 2.11BSD is 35 years old and getting more updates.
- Every 4-5 months or so, Joshua Stein writes another “install OpenBSD to a new device” article; the newest is the Pomera DM250.
Happy chocolate egg day!
- The Vault of the Atomic Space Age. (via)
- Mud Map Magazine. Examination of imagery. (also via)
- Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Linked for the note on Verbatim Mode, but read to the end for the alternatives. (also also via)
- Macs of Unusual Size. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Remember, despite new weird rules in the US, BSD-based routers are a good option. And in software.
- System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance.
- A eulogy for Vim. “Vim Classic” as a fork. (via)
- TENEX and TOPS-20 history, a parallel realm to UNIX. (via)
- I set all 376 Vim options and I’m still a fool. (via)
- [SIGCIS-Members] Our “Women in Computing” book display. See the attachment for the actual list.
- Indie Media list, on Garbage Day.
- Frustration detection via regex. Claude Code source leak. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Big Hairy Dog, from the same person who created badger badger badger.
Michael W. Lucas is speaking tonight at NYCBUG and it’s streaming, so you can see it too. He also has launched a new 10-days-only Kickstarter for “Networking for System Administrators: The Defenestrated Edition“.
Posted at the right time.
- Arabesque, discussion of Unix tool usage.
- Troika Dungeon Stocking, for items in a megadungeon.
- Goblin Farmer, in early access.
- CHM Live | Apple at 50: Five Decades of Thinking Different, recorded.
- Here’s a good anecdote from that presentation about why you had to drop the Lisa to make it work. (via)
- Blogs Are Back, a free RSS reader that runs locally in your browser. If you aren’t using a RSS reader yet, get started here. (via)
- OpenBSD Stories. I’ve linked before, but it’s been updated. (reminded via)
- Assorted less(1) tips. (via)
- The reason to type “sync; sync”.
- The Social Smolnet. Another email-as-underlying-protocol setup. See Eddie link from last week.
Michael W. Lucas is speaking at NYCBUG’s next meeting, April 1st, a week from now. “What’s Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way – a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS.” Go, if you are near, and watch the livestream if you are not.
Accidentally pre-published early, so you might have briefly seen these already. I write links into a post as I see them, so it builds over the course of the week. Or weeks, if I have enough items to post ahead.
- Every layer of review makes you 10x slower. Network effects run both directions!
- Vibe coding toward the incident horizon. Always up for a Mickens-style column.
- Speaking of which: I did not expect this from a tenured Harvard professor.
- Or this.
- Similar: The Shaw Brothers Youtube channel. Lots of violence. Surely you know about the 36th Chamber? (via)
- How to Stop Jumping Ship. (via)
- d20 Gameable Ideas from a 12th-Century Travelogue. (also via)
- Simple sabotage of agents.
- The Web is bearable with RSS. Also some links to start with, with some excellent tips. (via)
- If you aren’t using an RSS reader, you should; it’s great.
- Eddie, email as scaffolding. (via)
- Timeframe, a very sophisticated signboard. (via)
My backlog is close to clear.
- An Oral History of UNIX. (via)
- How old are README files? Probably the 1970s, possibly earlier. Found in a thread that ends with this.
- The scariest bootloader code. (via)
- Self-Hosted Software Names You’re Probably Mispronouncing.
- Build your own Obsolescence Guaranteed PiDP-11/70.
- Does it hurt to go to space?
- The E-Typer.
- Lightning on demand is back. Anything involving SRL is great.
- Modifying the already-modifiable Framework computer keys.
- Artefact, a single player TTRPG that will look great to you if you remember the old Special Artifacts table III.E listing in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide. (via)
- Composting Mobile Phones. Linked both for the subject and for the thorough setup. (via)
- OverTheWire: Wargames. Security exercises / games via SSH. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Class of ’86: Unsung Classics From The Year Thrash Broke.
Every few years, something happens and Hammer’s snapshotting saves me. Last week, this host had a power outage and MySQL managed to mangle the WordPress database for this site. Fixing it needed only:
- cd /var/hammer
- cd var/[date of last good snapshot]/db/mysql
- cpdup -VV -v . /var/db/mysql
I am writing this down in part because I am sure I’ll need it again in a few years.
whee
- BSDCan registration is open. 5 tutorial sessions this year!
- Print and fold your own mini-comic. (via)
- Actually Existing Solarpunk. (via)
- finally we have created the silver bullet. Brooks’ Law rules.
- bsd.rd breakdown. I always like looking at emergency repair tools in non-emergency situations.
- A.I. Isn’t People and Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions? Two essays on LLMs, not in opposition to each other.
- Diomidis Spinellis’ video talk about integrating the newly rediscovered V4 UNIX into his UNIX history repo. Note the first commit in that repo is 57 years ago.
- How much it costs to run OpenBenches. Extrapolate to any other independent website that isn’t a store. (via)
- No leap second needed this year.
- Physical Phones. (via)
No theme!
- Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now. Go, if you are near.
- On pressing the space bar for the cabinet.
- The state of Linux music players in 2026. A subset of that is BSD music players of course. (via)
- ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering. (via)
- The Dunking Decree. (via)
- Bending ePaper To Our Will with Custom LUTs. E-paper ‘pixels’ are not binary on/off.
- This is magic. Good comments from Youtube, a rarity.
- The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed) and Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess. The important thing to me is the note that vi exists as a specification, not just different software variations.
- Sorta related: Design Deconstruction, Vim as video editor.
- Things that are not backup solutions.
- All Your Base, slight remaster.
Clearing as many open tabs as possible.
- The Day the telnet Died. (via)
- Reports of Telnet’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated. (via)
- Offpunk 3.0 (via)
- How I Scrobble.
- Ultima IX. Falling out of where I was familiar with the games.
- Penrose, diagram creation with text. (via)
- Related: Penrose Tiling, in case you weren’t familiar with it.
- Freakpages, sorta like what I do here. (via)
- The Squarp Hapax, linked because of the name. (via, via)
- The Decision Before the Work.
- The consoles of UEFI, serial and otherwise, and their discontents.
- Exploring Docker containers on FreeBSD.
- Windows 11 Update. (via)
One link is very modern, the others are not.
- Places to Telnet. This should keep you busy for a bit. (via)
- The Visible Zorker Project (and Patreon).
- Meshtastic and Meshcore, which I am seeing more often.
- Tcl: The Most Underrated, But The Most Productive Programming Language. (via)
- A short list of good games.
- The Home Computer Hybrids: Atari, TI, and the FCC.
- Top 20 Newsgroups. USENET is still active. (via)
- Entries in the 2026 Public Domain Day Film Contest, using 1930 material that just became available.
- Running and administrating a 2.11 BSD system.
- TOPS-10 Survival Guide, to get an idea of what it’s like without having to run it.
I’m only complainy with some of these links.
- Your Search Button Powers my Smart Home.
- Typeframe PS-85, which I’ve linked before, but now you can get the plans. (via)
- Good Web Search. Google searches and even searching within my own Gmail account have become unreliable.
- What should I use to make a website?
- Clicks Power Keyboard. And Clicks Communicator. (via) ReTreo, I’d call it.
- Odd SYN attack, parts one and two.
- Favourite well-made apps and sites summary from the person behind Shift Happens. Too many good links to pick out.
- The two subtypes of one sort of package managers, the “program manager”. People always want to merge them.
- Time Machine inside a FreeBSD jail. Layers inside layers. (via)
- I’m back to building my own digital music collection.