i915 DRM has been updated to match the Linux 4.8.17 version, in DragonFly. It includes some OpenBSD work too, interestingly.
CCC 36 is over, but the videos are on Relive and will eventually be collected. CCC is one of the few remaining big not-a-corporate-event events; always worth viewing. (posting now so it doesn't get lost in the new year.)
There's several accidental themes fighting it out this week.
- Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog. Seriously.
- Blogging Less in the 2020s. Social media demands your complete attention to "succeed".
- Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore. The problem of depending on external services that can be turned off or changed.
- This Page is Designed to Last. I have this worry about the Digest. (via)
- Working on our Thoughts, a publish-in-multiple-formats (website, book, etc) method. (via)
- Back In Time For Xmas. Linked for the picture of fiber wrapped around a large auger; the stuff of nightmares for anyone responsible for network infrastructure.
- Public Sans, a typeface from the U.S. Government. (via)
- PinePhone review.
- Plasma Mobile as Daily Driver on PinePhone. (via)
- Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative. That is kinda linkbaity but what the heck. (via)
- Inkplate 6, crowdfunded, via comments on the previous source.
- reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics. (via)
- 2019 Retrospective. Interactive Fiction. (via)
- Miller, a command line tool for tabular data. (via)
- The tyranny of ideas. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The Blue Tape List. When I do this at a new job, I call it the Crazy List. You have only the first 6 months at a new job before everything that struck you as crazy becomes accepted, and you won't be able to see the problem any more. (via)
- In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle. He created the 6502, which powered it seems like almost every home computer. (via)
- Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feed. I use Tiny Tiny RSS and had no idea how nice the Readability plugin is. (via)
- Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings. Ugh but convincing argument.
- Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg and Crop a video using ffmpeg. Linked cause you'll need it sooner or later.
- The man who made Wolfenstein. One of the few commercially purchased Apple ][ games I ever had - and still have. (via)
Quiet week, so catch up on your reading here.
- putting stuff in a proliant dl325. Not that BSD-specific but still.
- WireGuard OpenBSD Router. (via)
- Elasticsearch on MidnightBSD.
- How Unix Works: Become a Better Software Engineer. Valid, though the writing may annoy you, not just because it misses BSD history completely. (via)
- OpenBSD system-call-origin verification. (via)
- usb(4) and uhid(4) changes.
- unwind(8) no longer uses http to detect captive portals.
- OPNsense 19.7.8 released.
- "New" laptop. Thinkpad X250 + NetBSD 9.0 RC1 + velox (tiling wayland compositor). Linked cause velox is new to me.
- Hyperbola - News: Announcing HyperbolaBSD Roadmap. (via)
- Visual Studio Code port for FreeBSD. (via)
- Noting it late because of the holiday: BSD Now 330: Happy Holidays, All(an).
- Happy Holidays From HardenedBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/12/23.
- OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn't duplicate it with Linux. "... the OpenBSD developers are clearly willing to remove support for something if they feel strongly enough about it".
- The followup, The BSD and Linux approaches to development put coherence in different places. Finally a non-license argument.
- Installing A/UX on the Quadra 610. Odd, and I think had some BSD parts. Lots of other neat hardware on that site. (via)
It's probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I'll of course have the normal weekend features up.
In the meantime, here's something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl's CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with Wordpress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with Wordpress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. Wordpress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.
How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There's probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.
I didn't even know the leave(1) program existed, but now it takes slightly more flexible input.
Accidental theme this week: roguelikes! Maybe with me that's not so accidental.
- Neal.fun. The old weird web. This will eat some hours.
- “Link In Bio” is a slow knife. There's a lot of things I can't link to because they are hidden away just like this.
- blinry's Advent Calendar of Curiosities 2019. (via)
- It's Time to Get Personal. (via)
- Tmux and Vim — configurations to be better together. (via)
- OpenHAB, open source home automation software. (via)
- 36th Chaos Communications Congress, coming up.
- Real time clock for your ISA slot.
- A Spotify playlist of all songs mentioned in the Time Zone Database documentation. I love everything about this without even hearing the music. (via)
- AI Dungeon 2: “My Musical Troupe of Orcs Uses Music to Advance Orc Rights”. (via)
- Roguelike Tutorial: Up-to-Date and Literate. (via)
- Roguelike Tutorial - In Rust, via comments in the last source. There's a lot more links in there, too.
- Dungeon Generation in Enter The Gungeon. (via)
- The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained. (via)
I managed to miss the Thursday update to BSDNow (#329) - Michael W. Lucas is interviewed mostly about his unnatural love of gelato BSD books , and he's always an entertaining talker.
- NomadBSD - Installation and First Impressions. (via)
- Building Ansible Training Environment on FreeBSD. (via)
- This is another reason to go to BUG meetings.
- January 8th: next NYCBUG meeting, "What is notqmail?". Note different location than usual.
- FreeNAS 11.2-U7 is out, and a FreeNAS Hardware Guide. Speaking of which, FreeNAS 2020 plans, which mention bringing the interface to non-FreeBSD systems. What's driving that? OpenSSH Key Shielding. (via)
- Block bad hosts with PF. (via)
- Packaging, Vendoring, and How It’s Changing. Related to BSD packaging. (via)
- New PlayOnBSD Steam Grpup [sic] with Curator List of Games for OpenBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/12/16.
- e2k19 Hackathon Report: Stefan Sperling on GoT and wireless.
- Arduino Development on OpenBSD.
You probably type "du -sh *" reflexively when looking at disk usage, or at least I do. On DragonFly, there's also a -t option, which gives the simple file size on disk. That's the amount of data that would need to move when copied; that may differ from other amounts because of compression at the filesystem level.
This is minor, but I'll mention it because it might bite you someday: if you are using powerd to minimize CPU power usage, and also trying to push a high data rate through your serial port, you might drop characters. It's mentioned in the powerd(8) man page, which has an entertaining bugs section.
The BSD.nrw Dusseldorf-Wersten BSD user’s group next meeting is on the 20th. Go, if you are near.
This recent change in kernel memory use may make booting faster. If you're running -current, time your boot before and after this change, and see what the difference is. I'm always curious.
A recent implementation of SMAP would cause a panic on some machines; that's now fixed (including on release). So if you had a panic from ACPI between May and now - please retry.
Some deep dives here; take your time today.
- The ZedRipper: Part 1. 16 cores, 83 MHz. (via)
- Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.
- Links of the 2010s. There's a lot here.
- 3 Wyrd Things: Robin the Fog. Listen to Catch 22-20, on that page; a skipping recording that skips with the right timing to create coherent music.
- Two malicious Python libraries caught stealing SSH and GPG keys. (via)
- DNote, self-hosted personal note saving.
- Unreleased Infocom Game Unearthed (from 1986).
- “The Unbeatable Deck of Ronan Shin” by Kiyash Monsef. (via)
- Think App Updates Suck? Try Upgrading a Programming Language. Every language gets to find this out.
- Freebies. Oddball desktops, etc. (via)
- Vim 8.2 is out. (via)
- Andy Baio Uses This. Linked cause he's a superior link source.
- What I want for CES.
- It's a good idea to label all of the drives in your desktop.
Lots of variety this week.
- NetBSD Advent Calendar 2019. (via)
- ARM64 and BSD discussion.
- Notqmail, the presentation topic for the January NYCBUG meeting and maybe for SEMIBUG at some point too.
- HAMBSD, presented at NorthernRST. (via)
- BSD-Licensed Combinatorics library/utility. This is neat.
- "The Microsoft LSG (former Open Source Technology Center) FreeBSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE on Azure."
- BSDCan 2020's Call for Papers is out.
- December 2019 Infrastructure Status. (HardenedBSD)
- KDE plasma flavor now available. (FuryBSD)
- Developers shouldn't distribute their own software. Touches on BSD ports. "Note: This article presumes that proprietary/nonfree software is irrelevant, and so should you."
- Clang build bot now uses two-stage builds, and other LLVM/LLDB news.
- Manage Contacts the UNIX Way.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 19 – Configuration – Plank – Skippy-XD.
- Valuable News – 2019/12/09.
- Learning from OpenBSD can make computers marginally less horrible. (via)
- Artworks for the Euro BSD Con 2020 in Austria.
- Infinity Engine on OpenBSD.
- Meet Radiant Award Recipient Claudio Jeker.
- Playing CrossCode within a web browser.
If you have an Elantech touchpad IC type 15 on your laptop (and you do if it's a ThinkPad L480 or Huawei Magicbook), it's now supported in DragonFly. Thanks to K Staring for the fix.
BSD Now 328 is out, and it's covering various news items; the common thread seems to be "please test this new tech", which is always exciting.
The i915(4) driver now supports some newer models of Intel GPU, thanks to Francois Tigeot.