As the title says, you can register for BSDCan 2018 now.
(Not leaving this for the weekend BSD summary cause I need to remind myself to plan for travel if possible.)
Accidental theme this week: Social media is a dead end.
- ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard. I… could have sworn I already linked to this but I can’t find it. (via)
- gokrazy – Go userland. Every language eventually reinvents the wheel this way. (via)
- The Game of Everything, Part 4: Civilization and Geography. First 3 parts linked last week.
- It’s Time for a RSS Revival. (via)
- Growth At Any Cost. Facebook is designed to take your data and give it to others. It will never not do that. Don’t participate.
- Cracks in the Wall. Blogging is better than social media, but of course I would say that. (via)
- And here’s some more reinforcement of that idea. (via)
- A 1970s disk drive that wouldn’t seek: getting our Xerox Alto running again. I like the platter shots.
- An oral history of the L0pht. Part 1, with subsequent parts linked. (via)
- The definitive resource for imagemagick scripts. I have needed this many times. (via)
- AlterEgo: A Personalized Wearable Silent Speech Interface. Neat but creepy creepy creepy from the illustations. (via)
- dotdrop, dotfile management. (via)
- Prince of Persia from Apple ][ to BBC Master. (via)
Your unrelated food link for the week: King Arthur test kitchen disasters. Summarized annually on April Fools Day, every year.
Losing power at home this week put a dent in my reading throughput, so to speak, but this will do.
- DragonFFI: FFI/JIT for the C language using Clang/LLVM. Not actually related to DragonFly or really BSD, but I like the synchronicity. (via)
- Simplifying Linux with … fish? Or BSD.
- New BSDMag issue – with a feature on OpenBSD Gaming. (via)
- Tarsnap pricing change.
- BSDCan 2018 schedule is up. Some people from my employer are going; I may too.
- DIY Hardware firewall on OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD 6.3 Released.
- Untangle vs pfSense.
- Nextcloud 13 on FreeBSD. (via)
- 32+ great indie games now playable on -current; 7 currently on sale! Rogue Legacy is fun, though I’ve only played the Windows version, not on any BSD.
- TrueNAS 11.1 – What’s New.
This week’s BSDNow has an intriguing title, and the show covers a number of hardware and software changes – no interview.
Shutdowns are a bit faster in DragonFly, thanks to the addition of a QUICKHALT shortcut. How much faster? It depends on what devices you have mounted, I suspect. I haven’t yet updated and tried.
So, you may have noticed that author Michael W. Lucas has been releasing regular books in his “Mastery” series, focusing on various tools. I like linking to his work because he writes inclusively about BSD, even when it isn’t the topic of the book.
He’s on his 13th Mastery book, and it’s April 1st, April Fools Day. Anyone who knows his sense of humor might suspect he would take advantage of this confluence of minor events. He did: he wrote “ed Mastery“.
ed(1), for those unfamiliar, is a text editor that doesn’t show you what you are working on – it was written more than 4 decades ago when you didn’t have a computer screen – just a printer. It’s a limitation that is positively difficult to duplicate today.
It was present in the very first release of UNIX from AT&T – the operating system was written using it! This does, at first, seem like a bit of a joke – people usually only claim to use ed when they want to show how they triumphed over adversity.
This being a book in the Mastery series, however, means that Lucas explores how to use the tool in-depth. His tongue is firmly planted in cheek, meaning he is taking this seriously and not seriously at the same time. The odd thing is that since this is the proto-editor that stands behind sed, vi, nvi, vim, and sorta emacs, a lot of the movement and control commands apply to everything. The regular expressions here are the model all the following editors stick to, by and large.
It’s humor, and the book knows it’s humorous both in topic and content. But it actually works as an explanation of how to work through ed to accomplish goals. I can’t imagine it’s easy to get into a situation where ed would be your only option… but I can see how the tools for shifting data around or automating text changes come right out of these processes.
It’s available now, through the usual sources and DRM-free from the author.
(Obligatory disclosure: Lucas sent me an electronic copy of the book and asked me to talk about it on April Fool’s Day, if I wanted to. I am bad at payola.)
Accidental theme this week: games.
- AI Anecdotes, with highlights. (via)
- The history of documented Unix facilities. (via)
- Web OS, open sourced. Originally what ran on Palm handhelds. I got to try an unreleased Palm phone just before they folded – it was slick. (via)
- The quest to save Stephen Hawking’s voice. He can literally speak from beyond the grave, if you think about it. (via)
- A Look Back at PLATO. (via)
- Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix. (via)
- The Handheld History Collection. (via)
- The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization and Part 2: Playing Civilization and Part 3: Civilization and the Narrative of Progress.
- The making of Dark Castle. That game fascinated me. (via)
- Edible Dice. Yep, can buy them. (via)
- Stop cherry-picking, start merging: Index.
- groups.io. Way, way better than dealing with Yahoo or Google ‘free’ group products, which is an unavoidable feature of many non-tech groups. (via)
Your unrelated cookbook link of the week: “Texture – A hydrocolloid recipe collection”.