DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

 

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)