The hosts of BSD Now are off to FOSDEM 2019, but they stayed on schedule by recording an interview with Niclas Zeising of the FreeBSD graphics team, available now. He's speaking at FOSDEM, too, along with a bunch of other BSD Devroom stuff.
It's been a quiet week and I've finally caught up on my backlog of things to post, so I'll take this moment to say: thank you, for reading. Especially, thank you to the Patreon supporters who have thrown in a few dollars; it's actually paid forward to others I support on Patreon and bought me a nice coffee drink.
Sorta unofficial retro game theme this week.
- Ascending NetHack by breaking the RNG. (via)
- "This is an archive of the source code for various versions of the QED editor." A Git archive with commit dates that predate the creation of Git, cause QED dates to pre-UNIX. (also via)
- aphelia: A light, single-file, minimalist window manager for X11. (via)
- SyncTERM connecting to lobste.rs. (via)
- chezmoi: manage your dotfiles securely across multiple machines. Not necessarily advocating this over plain version control systems. (via)
- Monotonic clocks are not monotonic. Many people get to make this discovery, in many places. (via)
- A NES Emulator written in Emacs. (via)
- A computer built into a mouse. (via)
- Journalbook, a private, completely-offline notes browser app.
- Insects as food, a comprehensive PDF. (via)
- Xenix tales: 8086 and Xenix 386 networking. (via)
- Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode one - crushed legs and eagle guts.
- Dwarf Fortress diary: The Basement Of Curiosity episode two - flailing in a pool of dwarf pus.
- Getting an IBM AS/400 Midrange computer on the internet. (via)
- A Bit about Alphabit. A Commodore64 demo.
- When a cabinet and an automaton love each other very much…
- halting problem :: History of GNOME / Episode 2.0: Retrospective.
- kitty - the fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator. Blurs the line between terminal and windowing environment.
- Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email. (via)
- Random Role Playing Game Inspiration. (via)
- SCRIPT-8, the Javascript-based retro computer. (via)
- 30th anniversary of the Macintosh SE/30. I would not argue with Best Mac Ever assessment. (via)
- 2018 Hard Drive Reliability Stats by Manufacturer and Model. The Backblaze report. (via)
- How You've Been Making Tea Wrong Your Entire Life - BBC. Some of this seems obvious? (video, via)
Your unrelated audio link of the week: Centuries of Sound. The major sounds of a given year, starting in 1859. Yes, 1859. It's like time travel for your ears, with liner notes. (via)
There's some convention stuff scattered in here; we're heading towards the active season...
- Anyone running pfSense on non-netgate hardware in a prod environment?
- vmm(4) for i386 deleted from -current.
- OpenBSD on the Acer Aspire One, At Ten. (via)
- 05/25/2019 : V BSDDAY in Brazil.
- The first report on LLD porting.
- Update Intel Microcode on FreeBSD. (via)
- VPS hosting provider recommendations for OpenBSD.
- The AsiaBSDCon 2019 RFP has only 5 days left. (via)
- pkgstat, an OpenBSD package statistics gatherer. (via)
- The risk that comes from ZFS on Linux not being GPL-compatible.
- Two views of ZFS's GPL-incompatibility and the Linux kernel.
- HyperRogue on OpenBSD/macppc. (via)
- Less Known pkg(8) Features. Applies to DragonFly and FreeBSD.
- avoiding duplicate cronjobs.
- openrsync, a "clean-room BSD-licensed implementation of rsync". (via)
- Nixers Newsletter 110. These newsletters are so jam-packed with links I'm just going to link to them directly instead of cherry-picking.
- Using a Teletype Model 33 mechanical terminal. Proto-BSD. Excellent in-depth explanation.
This week's BSD Now talks about OpenRSync (OpenRsync? Dunno the capitalization on that), convention news, and someone building a "Sun Workstation".
If you have a lot of RAM on your DragonFly system, there's a patch that you may find useful. If you weren't able to install that system, well, there's another potential fix out there.
One advantage of having a link 'backlog' is that I can pick and choose a bit, to present grouped items.
- LiteCLI: A user-friendly command line client for SQLite. (via)
- A holiday gift woodworking project using Clojure. (via)
- 2019 IGF nominees: something notable.
- 2019 IGF nominees: mixed reactions.
- 2019 IGF nominees: my favorites.
- Privacy Engineer job at Wikimedia.
- Rand Intelligent Terminal Agent (RITA): Design Philosophy. (PDF, via)
- Book review: Retro debugging. (via)
- The 'Say Thanks' Project. Can't help thinking of T.Hanks. (via tuxillo on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Rise and Demise of RSS. Not as common nowadays, but invaluable for these weekend Digest articles. (via)
- Nethack beaten in 7 minutes, 15 seconds realtime. One comment notes that you can, within game rules, die before you start playing. (via)
- Text Games to Watch for in 2019.
- In honor of Donald Knuth's 81 birthday Stanford uploaded 111 lectures on Youtube. (via)
- Facebook is the new crapware. (via)
- 404 Page Not Found: The internet feeds on its own dying dreams. (via)
- Computers in Kids’ Bedrooms. (via)
- Snowflake Archeology: Early computer animation (1960s) for the DEC PDP-1. (via)
- Online Text Tools. For when you don't have a shell handy.
- Sinographs for "tea".
- Misadventures in process containment. Interesting for the history.
- Dawn of the Second Epoch. Coming sooner than Y2038, possibly.
- UNIX in pictures. (via)
- Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time. In-depth article, not just a polemic, getting into how Solid works. (via)
Overflow from the past two weeks. I'll have my email and tab backlog cleared next week.
- Real paragraphs for mandoc HTML output.
- New console font Spleen made default. There's examples.
- OPNSense 18.7.10 released.
- Best BSD filesystem for ssd. All of them.
- LibGDX proof of concept on OpenBSD: Slay the Spire. Has video.
- 2018 recap.
- Ring in the new. KDE/FreeBSD.
- Man pages, as pages.
- Newcomer to FreeBSD.
- How OpenBSD is secure compared to other operating systems?
- FreeBSD Journal is now free, starting with the latest issue. (via)
- SuperTuxKart, the open source Mario Kart clone, achieves beta status with network support. I didn't know you could have a Beastie pilot. (via)
- wtf(1). (via aly on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Project Trident's first -RELEASE. (via)
- Building Spotifyd on NetBSD. (via)
- BSDCan 2019 call for papers closes today.
This week's BSD Now discusses scp vulnerabilities, GhostBSD, and the recent EPYC hardware benchmarks that I have not linked because I don't think they are useful information.
If you'd like to set a particular sysctl(8), you enter it into /etc/sysctl.conf. A common mistake is to copy the command line and put "sysctl foo=bar" in sysctl.conf instead of "foo=bar". This used to cause a warning, but it still bit people, as it would cause a long stream of error messages during boot - with no clear reason, as the kernel tried to understand the command. Now, that typo is handled automatically.
The normal meeting space isn't available this month or next, so tonight's meeting is an informal get-together at 7 PM at Leo's Coney Island. I assume if you are near, you know Leo's. Go if that's you.
Two links I yoinked from conversation in EFNet #dragonflybsd: there's a "powersave" power management page on dragonflybsd.org that for some reason wasn't linked in the main documentation page. I fixed that, and you may want to look at it and change your mwait settings, or look at the corepower(4) module. (From ivadasz's comments; thanks!)
There's also an older page on DragonFly and grub2 that may be interesting to anyone looking to boot. (From aly's comments; thanks!)
Unofficial theme this week: me commenting on almost every link.
- An odd MIME Content-Disposition or two. I like seeing the analysis of parts of traffic people never usually see.
- My one-liner Linux Dropbox client. Not saying to do this specifically, but the tool integration is nice. (via)
- Pathfinding for Tower Defense. That whole Red Blob site has some interesting learning activities. (via)
- The oral history of the Hampsterdance. Nostalgia for something that was always transitory. (via)
- Flashing my Lenovo x230 with Coreboot. I understand why people do it, but I'd be so nervous about creating a laptop-shaped brick. (via)
- We are now closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.
- National Inventors Hall of Fame honors creators of Unix, power drills and more. Power drills and UNIX have a history, though I am sure this was an accidental coincidence. (via)
- Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment. (via)
- Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps. Linking for alternatives, not for ethics. (via)
- ActivityPub: The "Worse Is Better" Approach to Federated Social Networking. (via)
- The New Social Media. Also about federation. (via)
- Google and Facebook are about advertising and not about it at the same time. (via)
- How to Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Need.
- DAN64, an AVR based 8-bit microcomputer. Crazy but neat. (via)
- Your USB Serial Adapter Just Became a SDR. Software Defined Radio if you didn't know. (via)
- HelenOS 0.8. New to me. (via)
- Building a Spotify player for my Mac SE/30. I love the FatMac shape. (via)
- ATDT relief. I admit I have done something similar to this with Asterisk and callfiles to exit meetings. (via)
Literally the first 45 minutes of me picking from saved links is all it took for this week.
- pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p2 now available.
- GlusterFS Cluster on FreeBSD with Ansible and GNU Parallel. (via)
- Some thoughts on FreeBSD as a desktop platform. (via)
- People who run BSD. Linked here before but recently updated. (reminded via)
- Linux network-scripts being deprecated is a problem for my home PPPoE link. Linked here cause this sort of CADT approach doesn't happen so much on BSD...
- BSD BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO OBSOLETE EQUIPMENT. (via)
- tons of updates, more coming… (hope I didn’t break anything ?) MirBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/01/04.
- The process of upstreaming support to LLVM sanitizers has been finalized.
- Ingo Schwarze -mandoc Better documentation – on the web and for LibreSSL video is now published.
- How NetBSD came to be shipped by Microsoft. (via)
- MWL’s 2018 Wrap-Up. More BSD books on the way!
- GhostBSD 18.12 Now Available. (via)
Your BSD smug linksfor the week: I saw these two posts in my RSS feed, one right after the other: "Get ready to patch your Linux systems with systemd, 3x new CVEs out there as of yesterday. These enable any user to escalate to root." and "Windows 10 Bsod on three different machines after updates. On was new out of box. Any ideas? "
This week's BSD Now talks about merchandise! No, it's really starting with a license discussion. A merchandise-finding episode would be a good idea, though.
I usually get all happy when I see sharing happen across BSDs, and note it here. Here's an unexpected one: between DragonFly and Haiku.
Unofficial theme: DOOM
- Plaintext parts of email are fading away (in spam and non-spam).
- Solving murder with Prolog. (via)
- Fancy Vim Plugins. This is the first time I've seen a focus on the visual effect of the plugins rather than the underlying task. Something you wouldn't expect for a terminal-style editor - and a good idea! (via)
- Reflections on DOOM’s Development. (via)
- DOOMBA. (via)
- How DOOM fire was done. (via)
- Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES. (via)
- A Most Unusual Osborne 1. (via)
- Why it’s time to reappraise the humble Choose Your Own Adventure book. (via)
- Comparing Architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium and X86-64. (via)
- The old guard of Mac indy apps has thrived for more than 25 years. I link that because I've used several of the programs named, and they are excellent, excellent examples of doing something well. (via)
- XScreenSaver 5.41.
- These products seem designed to confuse.
- Most people don't realize how much wifi pollution there can be. (via)
- Christian Gingras: The Man Who Fixed Robotron. (via)
- How Atari created the iconic Star Wars arcade game. The cabinet design was as important an element as the game itself, I think. (via)
- Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6. (via)
- some images i saved to my laptop in 2018. (via)
I like when I can get Net, Free, and Open items all in the same week.
- Is any C code from 1970s Unix still used today in macOS or BSD?
- razer blade stealth. The BSD part is at the end.
- Let's try on OpenBSD: NeuroVoider.
- Is the BSD community dedicated to free software? Sealioning, maybe.
- Using the Open Suse build service to build for FreeBSD?
- Installing OpenBSD over FreeBSD.
- SMB/CIFS on FreeBSD.
- KDE4 on FreeBSD, post-mortem.
- toying with wireguard on openbsd
- How I did start using FreeBSD. (via)
- Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, a Proposal. (via)
- pkgsrc-2018Q4 branch announcement.
- NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support.
- Hyper-V and GhostBSD - lockup.
- Removing ROP Gadgets from OpenBSD. The source link also links to the slides, from EuroBSDCon 2018, and I don't think I linked them before.
- Modern KDE on FreeBSD. (via)
- Welcome to New Subscribers and Goals for 2019. r/openbsd_gaming.