DragonFly BSD Digest

“Interesting personal tech feats” is the mini-theme.

• How you wind up with switches above your office’s false ceiling.  Every office job I ever had, now that I think about it.
• How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks.  Calibre is an astonishingly useful program.
• Entering accented characters in Linux.  Which should be “in X11”, so it should apply to BSD.
• “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”.  Esoteric languages alert.
• The KEXP breakdown of Paul’s Boutique.
• BSD Make extravaganza.  Mandelbrot in bmake.  (via)
• Most Googlebots are fake.  It used to just be “Mozilla” was fake.
• “That was then, this is now“.

It’s a fun links week!

• Decker, a modern tool enough like Hypercard to make me notice.  (via)
• Dinos That Drive, a new book illustrated by the guy who brought you Behold!  The Dinosaurs!
• Be More Party Cannon.
• Hardcore IndieWeb.  (via)
• Describing the early Internet was surprisingly easy.
• The Cybernetics Digital Library.  (via)
• I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to draw (with 9front).  Sometimes the tutorial is the point, not the skill being taught.  (via)
• email encryption.  I have worked at least a little with every protocol mentioned and it was always, always painful.

Tiny computer mini-theme.

• A Minimal Syntax For Quantum Text, the methods used to generate the different-every-printing novel Subcutanean.  The book itself has been linked here before.  (via)
• Li’l Factory AB, a tiny fiction publisher.  (via)
• Asterism Books, another oddities publisher.  (via)
• The Virtual OS Museum, emulated computer setups, pre-prepared as Linux VM images.  (via)
• Declassified Space Invaders.  (via)
• The Book Handling Agency.
• Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader.  I am finding all these Xteink links through Bubbles.
• Sneakerweb.  (via)
• Don’t Panic Cyberdeck.  A full BOM is included.  (via)
• LisaFPGA: the Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA.  (via)
• VapourDeck, DOS games in a handheld.

Your music links of the week: Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch which led me to this 1950 film showing some of Partch’s huge instruments, and here they still are.  Related: The Warped, Wondrous World of Microtonal Jazz on Bandcamp.

 

This is entirely overflow links from last week, pre-posted.

• Cyberdeck Meetup Notes.  (via)  I wish Iffy Books was closer; those are some fun events on the calendar.
• Painting with Light.
• The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows.  I was finding wholesale copies of this Digest back in I think 2008 or so.
• Using Claude Code to Personalise the Xteink X4.  Adding to some previous links about this device.  (via)
• And also this: The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader.
• Also probably related: I don’t need it (and neither do you).
• Gmail Thinks I’m Stupid, So I Left.  (also via)
• Please, Just Stop Ruining “10 PRINT”. Seriously.
• Connect FreeBSD to OpenBSD using WireGuard.
• The Starlog 50.

Some of these links are more… mainstream?

• I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days.  (via)
• Taken.  (also via)
• Feynman’s formula on trying new restaurant foods.
• The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech.  Yeah, clickbait, but accurate.  (via)
• How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer.  (via)
• 21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations.  Movies to watch, mostly stopmotion.  (via)
• Detecting and removing dangerous secrets on dev workstations before Shai-Hulud does.
• Kentucky’s Bourbon problem.  Read to the end.
• SCIFICORRIDORARCHIVE.  (via)
• The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History.  (via)
• I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline.  I am doing something similar but not as drastic.  (via)

There’s some fun stuff here if you have the time to dig.

• Moppetry.  Muppets plus D&D.  (via)
• Using A VT-100 Today.  That reminds me, I have a VT-320 in the basement that I need to hook up.
• NetHack 5.0.0: Release Notes.  (via)
• And you can run it on your Atari.  (via)
• THEC64 Handheld.  (via)
• Claude saved me hours of link cleanup.  Boil the oceans to replicate:%s/http:/https:/g.  (via)
• Ellanew.com posts tagged “obsidian”.  Linked for me to go through later.
• Incidentally, bubbles.town is turning out great for link discovery.   I also even see my own self linked which is quite heartening.
• How I Discover New Blogs, and Why I Still Like the Internet, both related.  Get a RSS reader if you haven’t already and follow their tips.  (via)
• The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books.  (via)
• “these messages “pee in the pool” of internet communication“.  Relevant in a week where I’ve sent (and received, thank you!) multiple ‘hey you don’t know me but I like your blog’ messages with real people.
• “It’s the best articulation I’ve seen yet for a blanket ban on LLM-assisted contributions“.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Angine de Poitrine, Vol II.

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.