The next ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow night, December 10th. Go, if you are near, but also RSVP on the list.
The BSD user’s group in Dusseldorf is also meeting on the 10th. Go there instead, if you are on that side of the ocean.
Accidental theme this week: terminals.
- Teletext’s creative legacy. (via)
- Related: Teletext, the font. (via)
- The Plain Text Project. (Thanks, Benn Collver.)
- TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers.
- IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display. An answer to the recently-linked-here “80×25” post, and perhaps the definitive answer on terminal size. Also: sound delay lines are bonkers.
- The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver™.
- 26th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (2019) winners. (via)
- New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth).
- New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance is Nigh.
- Unlocked Recordings, via the recent Music Modernization Act. This is one of the many reasons to donate to the Internet Archive. (via)
- Migrationator: Open source tool to help migrate away from Google. (via)
- Big Pile of Vim-like. (via)
- It was 20 years ago today. 4 years ahead of me.
Your odd pile of GIFs for the week: more Jan Svankmajer animations than I’ve ever seen in one place. (via)
Accidental theme: BUGs BUGs BUGs and also happy birthday me! It’s a bit brief cause like usual I am working extra.
- NetBSD 9.0RC1 is out.
- Next ChiBUG meeting: December 10th. RSVP on the list if you are attending.
- Next Dusseldorf BUG meeting: also December 10th.
- Next NYCBUG meeting: January 8th.
- ZFS sync/async + ZIL/SLOG, explained. (via)
- ryzen build (for openbsd).
- HardenedBSD Infrastructure Goals. (via)
- Authentication vulnerabilities in OpenBSD. (via)
- Related: syscall call-from verification.
- e2k19 Hackathon Report: At e2k19 nobody can hear you scream (Claudio Jeker).
- sysget: A single front end for every unix package manager. (via)
- Writing a daemon using FreeBSD and Python pt.3.
- Valuable News – 2019/12/02.
- PlayOnBSD Shopping Guide now scraping for sales on GOG and Steam.
This week’s BSD Now talks about, among other things, renaming of ZFS On Linux to OpenZFS, and a bonkers story about Sun.
The Holiday Hardware Swap is happening at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting today, at a new location. Go, if you are near.
Synth logs for dports are now located here on a new machine:
https://sting.dragonflybsd.org/dports/logs/Report/
If there’s only a short list, it’s because the most recent build was probably focused on retrying a broken-but-now-possibly-fixed package. I link both because of the utility and also because the interface is pretty.
If you’ve ever been left watching a “press any key…” line at shutdown of your DragonFly system, there’s now a fix. It’s committed to release, too, so it’s available now.
While you’re at it, there’s a HAMMER2 bugfix that will also be brought in by updating.
I’m going with high-concept material this week. If you have time for some thinking today, you’ll enjoy the links.
- Sounds recreated from pictures, a video and an album. Making sounds exist that were never recorded – a sort of time travel. (via)
- Transformative Tools for Thought. (via)
- A primer on hardware security keys, which I recommend. (via)
- SIMjacking, a new term to me. (also via)
- A history of procedural text.
- To Go Green, the Energy Industry Goes Open Source.
- Yes I do want LEDs and Bluetooth in my d20s.
- Various IF crowdfunds.
- The Information is Beautiful Award Winners 2019. (via)
- Don Libes’ Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool. (via)
- Understanding and repairing the power supply from a 1969 analog computer. So pretty!
- 64 Bits ought to be enough for anybody. (via)
- Notes on Ambient Privacy. (via)
- Command and Conquer, a retrospective. Part of what defined RTS games. (via)
- Sunless Skies, a review. Not defining a genre, but a mood. (also via)