Elements of dsynth, the mass package builder for DragonFly, are now appearing in the base system. It looks like this is most helpful for building packages as part of the base install, but there might be other applications.
This is mostly an ID change, but the Mercusys MW150US USB wifi adapter is now supported in DragonFly.
I missed last week because of a time crunch at 2 jobs, but at least I can make this week up.
- DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs. (via)
- Mechanical Creations. Sort of the opposite of the previous link. (also via)
- Monaspace Fonts. (via)
- Thank you for holding my duck.
- HTML Web Components: an example.
- mud resources. (via)
- Not On Amazon. (via)
- What font are you using now?
- Complex Simulation: Artifacts of a Russian spy.
- The Mediterranean Iron Omni-Spear.
- The Vim features that make me a Vim user instead of a Vi user.
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow at the normal location.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tomorrow, the 21st, with a presentation on shell scripting. It’ll be online through Jitsi. Slides from Nick Holland’s last presentation are available, for the curious.
No natural theme at all this week. Which is OK!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data. I would like to see this on a larger scale. (via)
- An adorably small Connection Machine. The real thing, if you are unfamiliar.
- Also cute: networked tiny TRS-80 model.
- Naming things needn’t be hard. (via)
- Confusing git terminology. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon 2023 report, part 1 and part 2.
- “The ports system exists to not only share misery, but to reliably replicate it“
- My MNT Reform – almost a year on.
- FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization.
- OctOpenBSD. I am a bit late linking that.
- Talk about the Basics.
- Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD.
- Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk. An underappreciated program.
- Presenting Syncthing, discovery server, relay server on OpenBSD.
- A small warning about UDP based protocols.
You can now run devfs(5) and procfs(5) in a jailed environment for DragonFly. As the commit message says, it’s for dsynth but I imagine this may be good for other applications.
NYCBUG is having a combination release party (FreeBSD 14) and swag time (EuroBSDCon stickers). It will be streamed. Go, if you are near.
More wide-ranging this week.
- Patrick Newman’s Software Engineering Management Checklist. (via)
- Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture. (via, via)
- Pool topology, I mean yes but why? (via)
- The difference in penalties in AD&D1 and D&D5.
- The Great Drone Ones.
- The Distractor.
- mii_emu: MII Apple //e Emulator for Linux. Linked for the Total Replay screenshot. (via)
- GET LAMP, which I know I have linked before, but I was reminded.
- Fantasy Inspiration, Era by Era. Books to read by time setting.
- Personal mail server issues. (a good reason for this book.)
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, this recent struct change will require a kernel and world rebuild. If you are running the release, it doesn’t affect you.
All history this week for some reason.
- IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard. Pictures of original hardware. (via)
- A bit of XENIX history. (indirectly via)
- How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet. (via)
- The Instruction Set Edition.
- Museum of Internet Artifacts.
- Remember “Reflections on Trusting Trust“? 40 years later it turns out Ken Thompson figured out how to backdoor the compiler and login.
- Enemies at the Gates. About platforms and how they absorb value.
- Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture. I had to explain to someone yesterday, unsuccessfully, how an open source SDK for a closed source project is useless. (via)
- The print-on-demand version of 50 Years of Text Games is available. It’s worth it.
- Making up a tabletop RPG.
Now this is mostly my backlog of RSS feed items. Eventually I will catch up to everything…
- Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea.
- The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client.
- Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer.
- Bypassing Windows 11 Account Setup. “generally when a vendor tries this hard to get you to do something, it’s not for a user-friendly reason.”
- Mouseless. (via)
- OpenBSD Webzine 15.
- Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1).
- Building a new Apple II?
- Braunstein Resources. (via)
- The whole Whole Earth Catalog.
- The Curse of Dialup World. (via)
New to the DragonFly kernel: jail-like capability restrictions, that may not require a jail to use.
This week I’m cleaning out links from saved emails and newsletters.
- Dragon Quest Disassembly. (related: Tempest)
- A pile of historical computing books.
- Turning software defined radio back into hardware.
- Turning WinAMP into hardware.
- OK maybe too much hardware.
- The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements. Any project, really. (via)
- Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023. (via)
- Backblaze 2023 mid-year drive stats.
- The 808 Edition.
- Making Way for Wayland.
I made it through the third major ERP transition I’ve done professionally, and it was successful. I hope I never have to do another. Also, I have a lot of open tabs.
- BSDCan has a planning blog.
- ChiBUG meets on the 17th.
- Get yourself on a PDP-11 right now. Or others. (via)
- The origins of the stand directory.
- The classic book ‘AWK Programming Language’ is getting an update.
- x/y/zmodem history, and you can still use it.
- Nine years uptime. (via)
- “We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms“. That would be this site right here. (via)
- Open charter companies and relicensing. (via)
- Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step.
- XScreenSaver 6.07 out now. Skulloop!
- tentacular, a new Sharecode film.
- HONK, a new Cyriak film.
- Kagi smallweb. Endless amounts of things to look at here.
- Collections: The Gap in the Armor of Baldur’s Gate and 5e.
- Thinking Seriously About Halfling Empires.
If you are running a headless DragonFly system, you may find this new ‘ifexists’ option for ttys helpful.
Hardening scripts for BSD. There should be a DragonFly-specific one eventually.
I may have missed this if it’s been committed, but if you have a Mercusys MW150US, aka a RealTek USB wifi dongle, there’s a patch to support it in Dragonfly.
ChiBUG’s monthly meeting is later today. Go, if you are near and not mired in ERP transition like I am at work.