December 2017 – DragonFly BSD Digest

Last anything for the year! I packed in as much reading material as I could.

"Bits, in this case, are actual physical objects." About the newest MAME.
piu-piu-SH, a horizontally-scrolling shooter for the console. (via)
Reviving the Apple 410 Color Plotter. (via)
Print Color PDF Apple II Print Shop Christmas Cards. (via) The microm8 idea sounds interesting overall.
Computer latency: 1977-2017. Maybe I need an Apple][ category?
winss, a process-supervision init system for Windows based on s6, an init system designed for Unixish systems. (via)
Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply. Nice pictures! (via)
The 2018 internet resolution everyone should have: Bring back your browser bar. (via)
The Hardest Computer Game of All Time. (via)
The text adventures of 1991.
The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't. (via)
About the Use of Dot-Slash in Commands. (also via)
The Wayland Zombie Apocalypse is Near. Linked mostly cause I didn't know Samsung kept an open source blog. (also via)
Evil Coding Incantations. Mentions the wat presentation, which I have linked here before, but if you haven't seen it... (also via)

Last of the year!

iXSystems' Best of 2017. Some useful links, like the Community Hardware Recommendations guide.
If you want to create a BSD-based Vagrant BSD system, Rickard von Essen has Packer templates for all the BSDs - including DragonFly. (via)
More TS-440S hijinx, or "ok, what if you wanna homebrew a digital hookup?"
"Cyan Beastie on my laptop :)"
Looking for a BSD snapshot tool for live boot
How to choose your *BSD OS to begin with? (via)
What BSD do you all use for your desktop computer?
NetBSD 7.1.1 released.
FreeBSD Q32017 Status report.
StorageCrypter Ransomware: Security Threat or Clickbait? BSD vendor, linked to for the Shodan report on all the places people are running Samba, Internet-exposed.
Eleven syscalls that suck. Linux syscalls, of course. Eleven syscalls that rock the world seems to mention the BSDs. Hmm. (via)
You may be able to catch the last 34c3 livestreams today, or watch recordings - there are some BSD-specific talks there. (via)

Don't forget any end-of-year donations you want to make, either.

the md5(1) utility on DragonFly now does SHA512 checksums, thanks to Rimvydas Jasinskas. You can see it as a separate 'sha512' binary in /sbin, but it's a hard link back to the original md5, if I'm reading the commit right.

I'm a bit late posting this, since I've been on the road, but: BSDNow 226 is up, diving into recent FreeBSD status and Foundation reports, OpenBSD work, and other details.

There's been a number of commits lately from Sascha Wildner with mentions of "Tianocore EDK II" a term that's new to me. Googling for it tells me it's a development environment for UEFI programs, useful for anyone booting on modern hardware.

I'm throwing in some end-of-year lists cause now's the time for it.

The Best Bandcamp Metal albums of 2017. #1 on the list, Power Trip, is my new favorite band.
Polygon’s 50 best videogames of 2017. Some not-what-you-would-expect games in there. (via)
AF_UNIX comes to Windows. (via multiple sources)
The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix. (via)
Uncle Miod's Machineroom. (via a comment in the previous source)
XScreenSaver 5.38. Note that the Android release is now a manual download.
Repairing a 1960s-era IBM keypunch. (via)
The Quest for a Desktop email client. (via multiple)
ScummVM 2.0 released. (via)
Ron Mueck's Giant Skulls. I've linked to this artist before.
Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 2: MUD.
Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 3: The Persistent Multiplayer CRPG.
Vim: My Shiniest Gems (via)
How to Setup a Unix News Server (1999). Nostalgia, at this point. (via)
Squinting at ASCII.
Oops. (via)

Last minute, of course.

This week's BSDNow talks about TrueOS, natch. Lots of other news, including an interesting odd hardware find.

Peeter Must has added evdev support in DragonFly. It's a 'generic input event interface', meaning at least at first it's for keyboards and mice. It requires a kernel rebuild with 'device evdev' and 'options EVDEV_SUPPORT' included.

I'm far enough backlogged that Sepherosa Ziehau's igb(4) update is already in, but as a side effect, a PC Engines apu2b4 is a good DragonFly machine. However, if you have em(4), here's your chance to help test.

If you run 'top -M', CPU states are reported on a per-CPU basis. It turns out that having over 110 CPUs will cause a segmentation fault - but not any longer! I wish I had a screenshot for this.

The Semibug Christmas dinner is tomorrow. They need reservations, so if you want to go and haven't told anyone yet - hurry!

Lots and lots this week!

Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. (via)
TIC-80: a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games. (via)
FPGA-Based Disk Controller for Apple II. (via)
52 weeks of Unix Newsletter. You too can subscribe. (via)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987). (via)
Pancake – a CLI/Emacs web/gopher/file browser. Linked really because of the gopher mention. (via)
File crash consistency and filesystems are hard.
Computers suck: episode 17787 of 31279.
What media/pop culture "easter eggs" are format-specific? (via
The Internet Archive. Neat hardware!
Debugging an evil Go runtime bug. (via)
Use pax. Already installed! (also via)
Stuff the kids know and stuff they don't.
Internet protocols are changing. A good summary of what's coming/here. (via)
An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage.

Last minute, because for some reason I didn't see much BSD stuff until Friday night.

No interview but a lot of topics in this week's BSDNow.

If your DragonFly-current system was built between December 6th and 10th, you should upgrade. There's a memory corruption bug that may bite you otherwise - but it only existed for those 4 days.

You could, if you are running DragonFly-current, create a vkernel using HAMMER2, and try out HAMMER2 even if your underlying disk is HAMMER1. Odd, but useful.

Syscons now holds 10 screens back, not 4. Every few years, I really, really need that.

If you are running DragonFly-current, you can get your floppy drive running again. This is actually hard to test; floppy drives are becoming an endangered species.

Accidental theme this week: the 1990s.

Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard. Matches every place I've ever worked. (via
The Advent of Void. I wish someone would do this with BSD packages. (via)
wiby, a 90s-only search engine. (via)
What Have We Learned from the PDP-11? (via)
VPN recommendations.
Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 1: Strategy and Simulation. You will surely have heard of some of these games, even if you never encountered them.
90s CD-ROM games.
The man with a DiscMan. More 90s.

Your unrelated photo of the week: untitled.