DragonFly BSD Digest – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2025/06/222025/06/17

Lazy Reading for 2025/06/22

I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment.

The Best Interfaces We Never Built.
The 80s were shit. (via)
Memory Banks.
Malleable Software. (via)
Lightweight C compilers.
Exterminate all rational AI scrapers, redux.
A year of funded FreeBSD.
Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74. Few people realize how much of the modern software world came right from what he did. (via)
So you should read Memories of Lisa for the details. (via)
Unveiling the EndBOX: A NetBSD-based embedded box for EndBASIC.
BoxyBSD. (via)
Look for the UNIX license plate.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: What’s the best comic I’ve ever read? Lynda Barry is a master of the form. (via)

2025/06/152025/06/10

Lazy Reading for 2025/06/15

No theme past my grumpy start.

AI web scrapers: a data point.
AI search: a bad data point.
Predictions in the Apple-sphere. Linked for the note that LLMs support existing languages – not new, and therefore slow development.
OK, getting off that theme…
An extensive writeup on terminal colors. (via)
Why you don’t want event-specific time zones.
BBC Micro text mode Xevious. (via)
The Second Annual Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Read down for links to previous submissions of good blog posts
The Magic of Code, out now, and worth reading if the author’s newsletter is any guide.
Related: The Humanistic Computation Project.
An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Ring of Power Delivery Feasibility Study. (via)
Should I Stop Caring and Let IP Address Reputation Sort Them Out? IP blacklist issues over time.
Tinkering with an old-school cable community info channel website. Related to Weather Star 4000.

2025/06/082025/06/04

Lazy Reading for 2025/06/08

More tab-clearing.

modern software 2025 edition.
I’ve just implemented a Forth system. Then, The basics of an indirect threaded code ANS Forth implementation.
Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions.
Using TRMNL to make digital signs with LibCal. I know someone who just bought two TRMNLs just for inside signage.
From that previous link: TRMNL-Kindle. I just found an old Kindle mixed in with some other books, too…
Script to convert HEIC image files to PNG. For my own benefit.
parking_lot: ffffffffffffffff… (via)
Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
What is Glaze? (via)
SysctlTUI is Out!
Come make some candles with me. A worthwhile offer.
Books on Unix security? Given that it’s a list from TUHS readers, it’s probably the most definitive list possible.

Your unrelated music of the week: Left Hand Path from ITX038 – 89! Gloom by Commodo x Gantz.

2025/06/012025/05/27

Lazy Reading for 2025/06/01

Open tab cleanup week! I didn’t even get to the links saved in my email, yet.

subvert.fm, a collectively owned Bandcamp. (via)
Reframing Abundance: Open Tools, Free Games, Distributed Culture. The text is good, and so are the links at the end. (via)
That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List. I’ve linked a few of these before.
The pico-mac-nano and where you can buy the parts or even the assembled thing itself, along with actual 25-year-old Apple parts.
Viral bad plotter art, a TED Talk. (via)
The Underground Designer’s Handbook.
We Need Small Web Communities.
Caddy against the Machines.
When was peak message in a bottle? Most interesting use of a googlewhack.

2025/05/252025/05/24

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/25

I managed to get away from most of my usual themes.

50 Years of Text Games, final overstock sale. This is a unique book; buy it now if you want one of the fancy versions.
Bored Spreadsheet, all the most common minigames of the last few decades, in a spreadsheet interface. (via)
Signal Carnival, swapping a C64’s audio and video outputs. (via)
Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, still available, and there’s a sort-of walkthrough, too. (Thanks, Phil Pirozhkov)
The First Port of UNIX. (via)
Zoomable User Interface, Scrolling User Interface. (via)
How to Quit Streaming, a brief and practical guide. (via)
Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen. Petty but I enjoyed it. (via)
Organizational Edge Cases. Related to UNIX.
Femur, in-browser musical doodads. (via)

2025/05/21

hda updates in DragonFly

If you have an hda(4) sound device – and you probably do – it’s been updated. This is not in the 6.4.2 release.

2025/05/182025/05/08

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/18

Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.

WebSysctl is Now Live! I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it. (via)
The GAFA Stack. Read section 3.
8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
Mute when Locked. (via)
Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students. You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point. (PDF, via)
At one point, “..” did not exist.
Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright. I don’t think people realize the scale of this. It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
Make Stupid Things. (via)
The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
Dumbware, self-hosted solutions. I like this except for the dockering. (via)

Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.

2025/05/122025/05/06

FreeBSD Laptop Desktop Working Group + DJ-BSD redux at NYCBUG

May 14th, NYCBUG has Charlie Li presenting on the FreeBSD Laptop-Desktop Working Group, and DJ BSD? Anyway, go if you are near (but RSVP so they let you in!), and watch the stream if you are not.

2025/05/112025/05/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/11

Oddball link collection.

Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
Think Twice Dice.

Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.

2025/05/102025/05/09

DragonFly 6.4.2 released

6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download. Why so soon? A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed. These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.

2025/05/092025/05/07

Get your own pf lesson

Peter N. M. Hansteen runs a pf tutorial most years at BSDCan, and this year’s BSDCan is no different. He’s prepping now, so if you ask a good question, you’ll get taught the answer.

2025/05/07

Webcam driver progress

Michael Neumann posted a progress report on his webcam work for DragonFly. The short description is: it’s recognizing hardware but not recording yet. You can try it now.

2025/05/042025/05/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/04

Some BSD-specific links mixed in.

Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos. Scroll right. (via)
What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video. (via, via)
RDAP is replacing WHOIS. (via)
The Flywheel Spin Top.
Netnews: The Origin Story. USENET, or nntp, if you prefer. (PDF, via)
The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
Hacker Laws. (via)
TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff. (Thanks, Paul)
NumFOCUS concerns. “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title. (also thanks, Paul)
The History of Solaris. “UNIX is plural.” (PDF, via)
The modern OpenBSD home router. (via)
tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod. (via)

Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point. Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful. (via)

2025/05/012025/04/30

Changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4)

Michael Neumann proposed a lot of changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4); his initial proposal is I think now complete and committed, other than that tcplay(8) was updated instead of removed. Here’s a sorted list of his commits. These are not in the 6.4.1 release.

2025/04/30

DragonFly 6.4.1 released

6.4.1, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4, is ready to download. The commit log from 6.4.0 to 6.4.1 is available if you want the details.

2025/04/272025/04/18

Lazy Reading for 2025/04/27

Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.

“Open source is everything!“
Epistemological Slop.
Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
MNT April 2025 Update. The handheld prototype is interesting.
The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one. “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl. I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem. (first two via)
A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity. If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
Poisonify, same but for music. (via)
The Qwerkywriter.
DOOM plus DOOM 2. I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437? (via)
Digital hygiene. (via)
Don’t use AI for technical answers.
If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common? Brian Kernighan’s answer.
“What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer. Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end. (PDF, via)

Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping. (via)

2025/04/24

Timeout(1) updates

Aaron LI has made a whole lot of POSIXy updates to timeout(1), of which I think these two are the most informational, but there’s a bunch more if you look at the month. I’m also linking to it cause I didn’t know timeout(1) existed; never used it.