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

2024/07/212024/07/12

Lazy Reading for 2024/07/21

I wanted to clear all the newsletters items I’ve saved, so you are getting links until my inbox no longer paginates.

Just Use Postgres for Everything. (via)
When web search failed me for Postgres.
The Future of MySQL is Postgres. (target from previous link)
From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency. Or any BSD. (via)
Layers and Gateways, a historical view. Railways vs networks.
The workstation you wanted in 1990, in your pocket.
Paul Ceruzzi has a Substack.
pkgsrc-2024Q2 is out.
X Window System at 40. (via)
Some TENEX history.
Why shitty robots are the antidote of perfectionism, a video. Her store has neat stuff.
Scifiinterfaces.com. I linked to this in 2013 but it’s still going. (reminded via)
Largest old computer I’ve seen a person keep yet. (via)
Tiny TV 2. (via)
UNLICENSED: Bootlegging As Creative Practice, a book. (via)
One Page Dungeon Reviews. (via)

2024/07/142024/07/11

Lazy Reading for 2024/07/14

Almost all links from saved emails instead of RSS, for once.

The history of Alt+number sequences, and why Alt+9731 sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman.
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm. (via)
Entering text in the terminal is complicated. (via)
PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights. (via)
A Mini Monitor for a Pi. (via)
July 19th: Will Wright interviews Chaim Gingold, author of “Building
SimCity”. Note the reversal.
It’s Easy. But Is It Easy Enough? Not necessarily advocating this.
What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days. (via)
Culinary Bibliographic Metadata. The standards for library info look to me like a good example of a standard that evolved based on users, not commercial influence. (via)
Related: Working with ACSM Files on Linux.
BSDCan 2024 on video. Set aside time for watching these. (via)

2024/07/072024/07/05

Lazy Reading for 2024/07/07

I got quote-happy this week.

Ladybird Browser Initiative. (via several places)
Related to the previous link: Mozilla is an advertising company now and Mozilla’s Original Sin.
The new Fantasy Steampunk Storybundle, with orcs! Unrelated to MWL’s about-to-come-out tech book that you should order, or his next book.
Related: Next NYC*BUG: July 10th The State of Email, By: Michael W. Lucas. Note that you should RSVP so you can get access.
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. “Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget.” (via everywhere)
Schotter, part 1 and part 2. “Sometimes it’s fun to pick a rabbit hole and follow it all the way down.” (via)
Donkey Kong: A Record of Struggle. (via)
The time smart quotes prevented the entire Office division from committing code. “Just another example of I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.”
Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets. I am pretty sure you are carrying something similar to this in your pocket right now.
A potpourri of cool-looking scripts. Scripts as in typeface.
1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch. “my wristwatch runs a full n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons.” (via)
The best version of an Apple Watch. (via)
Chernobyl power plant as table lamp. I am OK with linking to this cause I already bought mine. (via I lost it, sorry)

2024/06/292024/06/30

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/30

I was not able to get this done early like the last few posts, but there’s still a good range here.

Can You Make It Bigger? – A Journey In Building Arcade Cabinets. (via)
Via previous story, the Picade.
The 84 Series. On point for current topics and period stylings. (via)
Bat Hauntings on Apple VR. This, then, is the future. (via)
3D Printing My Teeth. (via)
valve.computer. Hardcore analog. (via I lost it, sorry)
Schotter – Georg Nees – Part 1. (via)
The Old Computer Challenge v4 (Olympics edition)
Try out a NetBSD system in 20 seconds (amd64 & amr64).
Things to Make and Do.

2024/06/232024/06/19

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/23

I have a weird schedule this week but I think I came up with sufficient links.

Artifacting. Understanding JPEG encoding will incidentally help understanding MPEG.
Technical Marvels, the start, plus the Lebombo and Ishango Bones. An ongoing series, so I’m interested on what they do with the Antikythera Device. (via)
diff turns 50. (via)
Micropolis, Simcity recreated in-browser and in-progress by one of the original developers. (via)
Random Demonic Incursion Generator. (via)
MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5. (via I lost it, sorry)
Spreadsheet Assassins. Almost my entire IT expense budget at my main job is “Monthly fees”. (via)
Mathematical Art by Henry Segerman.
Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the Hard Way).

2024/06/162024/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/16

Text tools this week.

CommonMark, a Markdown specification.
LyX, a TeX editor. (this and previous from this thread.)
nvi command summaries. Follow the thread.
BSD User Group Düsseldorf Juli 2024.
Programming Prayer: The Woven Book of Hours (1886–87).
XScreenSaver 6.09 out now.
Greatest Comics Of All Time as Chosen by 45 Writers and Artists. (via)
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. (via many)
EuroBSDCon is in September.
ASCII-Silhouettify. (via)

Music of the week: The Deep Ark, 8 hours of 90s electronica. (via)

2024/06/092024/06/08

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/09

Technical reading is the accidental theme.

Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat. This is a far more capable machine than I ever knew about.
Terminal Text Effects. Much showier than I expected. (via)
Losing Sight of Creators. Ad-blockers aren’t the answer; finding ways to support creators without ads is.
City in a Bottle. Via multiple places.
Replacing my OPNsense gateway hardware by a Protectli appliance.
Classic Computer Brochures. (via)
Clip art. A higher quality collection than you’d expect. (also via)
A UNIX Primer. (via)
Mike Karel’s final presentation.
Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine. About simulation in general, not just the one game series. (via)
Running XVNC through inetd. Might be useful to you.
Multiple vi reference charts. (via multiple posts)

The Kickstarter for Michael W. Lucas’s Run Your Own Mail Server book is ending later today. It’s been so successful that he’s been adding copies of his other books as rewards for every backer – which means if you buy this book at any tier, you get (at last count) 7 more books. It’s a good deal, but you have only this afternoon to get it.

2024/06/05

NYCBUG tonight

NYCBUG is meeting tonight at a changed location. There’s going to be discussion of the just-finished BSDCan plus talk about membership growth and handling streaming events.

2024/06/022024/05/27

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/02

This week, extended commentary on the links.

Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links. “Even today, thirty years after Jerry and David, I still visit bookmarked webpages that maintain human-curated lists of links.” You can guess my opinion of that.
Higher Intellect, a huge repository of documents of the sort you’d find squirreled away on the Internet in the late 90’s. There’s a PHRACK section, for instance, or nice copies of US WW2 posters.. (via)
Defeating Mouse Lint. Mechanical mice only existed for a specific period in time, and probably never will again.
The Tomb of Horrors. I had heard of this ‘impossible’ D&D module but never actually tried it.
how-to.computer. This is the 2020s versions of old homesteading guides. Can you self-host too much? I think not. (via)
LaTeX for Complete Novices. Nobody ever seems excited about LaTeX but people always report “I did a ton of work with it without issue”. (via)
The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing. There’s some great quotable bits in this but my favorite is “The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. “
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder. Even if it was a blunder, the effects would have been limited by the lack of consumer Internet. (via)
LibreOffice Substitutes. Something here to try for everyone.
Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the idea of software platforms that doesn’t exist to disintermediate users and extract revenue intriguing.
Two important things: the longest domain name I’ve seen yet, and the Kickstarter for Run Your Own Mailserver, an important technical book and also because SMTP is becoming hard to do at any scale other than “huge”. (via)
I signed up for the aforementioned Kickstarter as should you; note there’s a Signed Useless EBook edition. Don’t buy it, just be entertained by the concept.

2024/05/262024/05/21

Lazy Reading for 2024/05/26

No theme this week, but some neat history items.

Modern cactus.
Winamp goes open source. (via)
Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159. (via)
Next NYCBUG meeting: June 5th. It’ll be a post-BSDCan recap.
“udm=14” is now useful for Google searches much like you had to turn on literal search to avoid ‘helpful’ spelling fixes.
The Nature of Shareware. Mentioned: Ambrosia Software, a former local company. Not mentioned: the 1-2% pay rate for shareware, if you’re lucky.
When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim.
A history of Spelljammer. (via)
Archie, rediscovered. (via)
Retro tech in anime supercut. (via)
sshd(8) is getting split.

2024/05/192024/05/14

Lazy Reading for 2024/05/19

No mini-theme this week.

Soft Electronics. Linked for the physical designs. (via)
Magic Numbers. What shaped the 1500 byte Ethernet MTU.
Languages as Symbols. (via)
Odie Directory. Found Google Docs turned into HTML. (also via)
NON-OBJECTIVE. All sorts of neat clock faces. (also also via)
Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History. I worry that there will be so many knockoffs you can’t find originals.
Another example of knockoffs overwhelming the originals.
Emoji history: the missing years. Thanks, Ben Collver.
“using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture” (via)
Thumb Nation: How We Learned to Play With Our Fingers. (via)
Reversing Choplifter. (via)

2024/05/162024/05/14

Time service on DragonFly

Dan Cross is looking to set up a hardware time service on DragonFly. It worked out, and there’s a patch coming to support this.

2024/05/14

BSDCan in two weeks

Only a BSD conference announcement would include a note about changing your SSH listening port. Also, BSDCan in 2 weeks!

2024/05/14

A DragonFly BSD Taste

A ‘first try’ document for DragonFly.

2024/05/122024/05/07

Lazy Reading for 2024/05/12

Mini-theme of art.

How are zlib, gzip and zip related? (via)
All Internet Roads Lead Back to 2014. (via)
Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling. The forks part is most interesting.
Jeff Keen’s Amazing Rayday Comic collages. (via)
Creating A Productive Terminal Environment. (via)
Steeped in chemistry: A nice cup of tea, molecularly. Prewarm your pot, open your cup, agitate your tea. (via)
.emacs bankruptcy. (via)
The Computers of Voyager. Possibly the most extreme reliability engineering.
Last chance to buy the Edible Games Cookbook.
Scott Bradner – A History of the Internet. (via)
Roguelike Celebration 2024 Call for Presenters Now Open.

2024/05/052024/05/03

Lazy Reading for 2024/05/05

What’s the history of Cinco de Mayo? (updated since last linked in 2016.)

SNOBOL, ICEBOL, SPITBOL, et al.
What is Computer Science? (via)
Live performance of Blur’s Song 2 on a modular synth.
A history / greatest hits of dedications and footnotes. (via)
How I search in 2024. Saved for the links. (via)
Some nice UOttowa rooms are available for BSDCan.
A Thousand Suns. Original sci-fi shorts. (via)
Announcing the long-awaited Links relaunch. Good links, from where I grew up.
Type-in. I am assuming you know the text being parodied.
Practical Vim command workflow. Complex but useful steps. (via)
pcrowDoodle, my “desirable difficulty” laptop. (via)
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so… I plan to be out of the computing field by the end of 2037 no matter what.

Your unrelated music of the week: you bet from Drass, an artist previously linked here as Shardcore. (via)

2024/04/30

May 1 NYC*BUG: Demystify ZFS Replication

Tomorrow night, NYCBUG’s monthly meeting is about ZFS. There’s simultaneous chat in IRC and livestream video, too.

2024/04/282024/04/24

Lazy Reading for 2024/04/28

No accidental theme this week.

DVD.yay.boo, found through a comment from last week.
All of yay.boo is fun to explore, really.
humans.txt. (via)
Memory remapping over 15 billion miles and 5 decades. (via)
Lecture as performance art. Or performance art in the form of lecture.
Ballmer Peak has been found. See page 48 – it’s about 0.05BAC. (via)
MS07-052: Code execution results in code execution.
FreeBSD SSDF Attestation. This is either nothing to you or fantastic, depending on where you work.
An IBM slide from 1979. (via)
Some inside details on how complex it can be to run open source orgs. (thanks, Paul Ivanov)
Experimental art tools. (via)
80’s RPG Fringeworthy. I love the charts of course.

2024/04/262024/04/24

Check your signal to noise ratio

Michael Neumann’s recent iwm(4) update fixes signal to noise display in ifconfig. I am linking it to remind you to check your existing ratios now, while your network is fine. You then can tell what has changed weeks, months from now when your network goes haywire and you’re looking for a reason.

2024/04/24

Improved input device support for DragonFly

If you’ve had trouble with the touchpad on your laptop, this recent update may help. Note that the commit lists some config changes needed to take advantage of the new features.