DragonFly BSD Digest

No pessimism in this batch!

• Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables.  Surely someday I will need this 3 foot 50 pin Centronics cable?  (via)
• PICOmputer FLIP – pocket ZX Spectrum.  Mostly I like the Psion-ish shape.  The ZX part is just emulated.
• Disk Mood Board.  I bet there’s at least one format on here you’ve never seen.
• Thefractals.net.  Design fractals in your browser.  Or drag your browser rendering to a halt.  (via)
• The Voynich Viewer.  If you are not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, here’s the explainer.
• Lightink, a solar power e-ink watch.  References Watchy, which I linked back in 2022.
• Are We Sixel Yet?  Terminals supporting bitmapped images.  (Via a quxnet post.)
• Clair De Lune, a somewhat hypnotic Rube Goldberg animation.  (via)
• Rex’s Dino Store.  (via)

Foundations is perhaps the theme?  Support?  Underlying structures?

• As much as it is easy to complain about big tech companies, sometimes they quietly do the right thing.
• Related: The people holding up the Internet.  (via multiple places)
• Adafruit Halloween projects.
• BYU’s fossil vending machine.
• Obfuscated, self-evaluating bash script by CDN Akamai being supplied to consumers via retail stores.
• Previous link from Some Measured Fractal Dimensions, worth a read on its own.
• quxnet, submitted by the admin.  Old-school messages, almost like USENET circa 1995.
• Related: quux == four.  I hope that exists already in your brain and you know why.
• Ron Pippin.  I’ve lost track of where I got this link, but it’s neat stuff.
• The Institute of Network Cultures and their publication Fragments of Tactical Media, available as PDF or more interestingly as Etherport.  (via)
• The Most Accurate Watch that Doesn’t Tell Time.
• Hammer Horror, a quick explainer in time for Halloween.

Your unrelated music video of the week: Return the Goat.  Next in the story: Helm Yeah.  Yes, it’s a gimmick, but the music is good.

 

Set up early cause I am/were traveling.

• The RetroTINK.
• Become worthless (to tech companies).  Good steps, not difficult ones.  (via)
• Experiencing a Victorian London street in 3D.  (via)
• “One printed IP/ICMP “ping” packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149″.  (via)
• Bastardica.  (via)
• A note on content restrictions and One possible future for websites is pervasive gatekeepers, two articles that I think are more significant when read together.
• Display mood board.
• A trick to render all 1.1M Unicode characters in your browser.
• The Invention of the MMO.  (via)
• How a combination lock works.  I’ve linked to that site before; something to dive into.  (also via)

Unrelated music links: The best metal, electronic, and jazz on Bandcamp for September.

 

No theme.

• Inflight Simulator. Flight sim where you aren’t the pilot.  Seems obvious but I can understand if nobody wants to play.  (via)
• Turning a $40 Surface Go into an always-on camera monitor.  Neat but also you can buy the same result off the shelf.
• Vim’s Ctrl-w.  Vi command muscle memory is built one action at a time.
• Small Web 101.
• Oglaf Book 5, a Kickstarter.  Read the comic or perhaps their Patreon if you aren’t familiar with the humor.
• Design Fiction Mood Board.
• Book Corners, a library finder.  (via)
• tmp.out, which I linked to in 2021, has continued to publish nearly-yearly.  (reminded via)
• Technology work at the Metropolitan Museum.  (via)

At least one of these links is going to eat some of your day, in a fun way.

• That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler.  (via)
• They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.  Neovim vs. Vim.
• Similar: s/Neovim/Helix/g.  I’m not picking on Neovim on purpose, rather this is just the particular rabbit hole I fell into.
• The Jef Raskin “3 Laws” quote in the previous link led me to find his book.
• New Cyriak: Sea Life.
• Rethinking space opera, by Charlie Stross.  The article itself is good, but it also led me to some other interesting links, like the next two:
• The Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Krugman.  Relativistic time vs trade in goods and services.  Sci-fi-adjacent.
• Starship Stormtroopers: Michael Moorcock.  Fun for what he says about science fiction, useful for the new (to me) authors and books mentioned at the end, despite being written in 1977.
• And from the comments: all three seasons of Connections are on the Internet Archive.  If you have not watched, you should.

Your unrelated video/animation of the week: CAPAREZZA – A COMIC BOOK SAVED MY LIFE.  My first encounter with Italian hip-hop.  (via)

I had a lot of open tabs, enough that Chrome was having memory issues, so this sort of link dump was necessary.

• Notes on Software Quality.  (via)
• What’s new with robots, 2026 edition.  Linked for the consumer hardware.
• Tesserae: Self-hosted dashboards for e-ink displays.  (via)
• Vim’s UserGettingBored autocmd.
• The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer.  Linked for describing the Gridfinity standard.
• Public Domain Art Resources.  (via)
• ekkoBSD 2.1 released, 20 years after the last release.  (via)
• XScreenSaver 6.16 is out with 4 new hacks.
• LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects.  (via)
• Hyperuplink, a new bit of forum software that sounds… maintainable?
• A review of the Flipper BUSY Bar.
• hc2html, convert Hypercard stacks to web pages.  (via)
• The RAM shortage takes a dark turn.

Your unrelated music suggestion of the week: SETI by Joker.

I’m only a little reactionary with this batch.

• City Builders.  The SimCity genre has kept going.
• “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”  I remember playing this at least once.
• BeepAlive – keeping my soundbar from going to sleep.
• How I use Home Assistant to help with my cats.  Far more ambitious than I expected.
• Found via the recent DinoCon: multiple high–quality small–company dinosaur reproductions.
• Tim Hunkin’s History Of Arcade Machines.
• Introducing Avogadro: A parametric waffle recipe generator.
• I love reading lists of people’s favorite books, especially when I’ve never seen any of them.
• WebZFS.  (via)
• Michaelsoft Binbows.  This is fun but the link has only worked intermittently for me.  (via)
• Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same.  (via)

Cleaning out some old links.

• “Gravity is worth asking about.”  Linked for describing the “zero-one-infinity” rule, but applied to things you don’t want.
• reTerminal Sticky, a new reader in the now-popular ‘Xteink’ form factor.
• A Network Filesystem for 2.11BSD.  (via)
• Visiting the History of Computing and Play.  Look for “abbreviated history of floppy disks in a single photo”.
• Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C.  1963 ASCII didn’t have } or {, and neither did the hardware.  (via)
• “non-Unix stories about important Unix people“.
• BoxyBSD, virtual BSD systems for people to try out different flavors of BSD.  The base machine is free.  (via)
• UNIX in a Hostile Environment, or Mouse Watching by a Cat – go to page 13.  (via)
• Where UNIX Runs Today.  An interesting article, and a built-in shooter game at the same time?  (via)
• Telehamster.  (via)

“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.