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

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.