Thanks to Daniel Fojt, awk(1) has jumped from the 2012 version in DragonFly, to the 2020 version. The commit message shows the highlights so you don’t have to read through the whole history. Given that DragonFly’s awk is the One True awk, that eight years are only a small percentage of the overall history.
Did you know there’s a default size limit to pf’s routing table? I did not, but it makes sense that there is one. If for some reason you bump into this limit (difficult for home use, I’d think), here’s how you change it.
Minor computer history theme this week.
- Odeon theaters in LEGO.
- The guy who created the View-Master also was the first to figure out plastic trash cans.
- Home Computer Cultures and Society Before the Internet Age. (via)
- roguelike celebration 2020 is happening virtually.
- The Gigatron, a no-microprocessor retrocomputer. Available as a solder-yourself kit.
- The Smithsonian’s Computer Oral History Collection. Grace Hopper, others, recorded. (via)
- The ACM has free access to its books for the next few days; go now, before it ends. See the source post for this for some ideas on what to read.
- A special item in that list, the Antikythera Mechanism. I had never seen recreations of the device before. (via)
- The Return of the 90s Web.
- Comments on that last link.
- 5 days with the MX Ergo. I link these things just for the X notes.
- Speaking of which, Input events on X have an old world and a new world.
- The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk. The one thing from Xerox PARC that didn’t take over the world. (via)
- Recent Database Tech. (via)
- The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM.
Overflow again, finally.
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- BSD Resources, a list of BSD-based products. Missed one. (via)
- FreeBSD Day shifted. (via)
- Throw-Away Browser on FreeBSD With “pot” Within 5 Minutes. See also. (also via)
- WireGuard Merged Into OpenBSD. (via)
- Related: Trying out WireGuard’s kernel support in OpenBSD’s -current snapshots. (via)
- Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro. (via)
- More FreeBSD HPE Microserver homelab answers.
- Rubenerd Show 411: The FreeBSD cat(1) episode.
- Valuable News – 2020/06/22.
- Renaming and replacing zroot filesystems using mfsBSD.
- My FreeBSD Laptop Build. (via)
- The End of OS X. Touches a bit on early BSD history. (via)
- FreeBSD on the Intel 10th Gen i3 NUC. (via)
- TLS defaults changed in ldapd(8).
Aaron LI has updated head(1) and tail(1) in DragonFly – new switches for head, a new switch for tail, and tac.
The most recent BSD Now covers a number of different topics, some of which you may have already seen linked. There’s some reader questions too, which I’m sure you have not seen.
I deliberately made the headline obscure for fun. Anyway, the most recent bugfix release for dhcpcd, 9.1.2, happens to set capiscum/pledge-style privilege separation for the program – without requiring those technologies to be built into the system.
If you have a UEFI system, efibootmgr(8) is now available.
It’s teeny models week. I am reaching outside my normal topics this week, too.
- Typology of LEGO Computers. (via)
- Last Pole, the remnant of an international network. (via)
- Tactical Computer Terminal. Probably super-heavy, too.
- Political Compasses in Odd Topologies. No, they don’t make sense, but I love graphs. (via)
- Old computers made of paper. (via)
- DIY Adafruit projects. (via)
- Power Outage. The PowerPC transition for Apple. Topical for the long-rumored ARM move.
- Haiku R1/beta2 has been released. Related to the processor discussion in that Power Outage article, through BeOS. (via)
- Interaction Design.
- Reclaiming Keynes. I am not necessarily Keynesian. (via)
- Algonuts. Peanuts via StyleGAN2. See the about page for a good discussion of what this sort of reproduction means. (also via)
- Exploded Fatmac.
- Bring That Beat Back, a book review. (via)
- An Occult Psychogeography of Hawksmoor’s London Churches. From Hell is one of the best comics ever, and I say that because of the artist. (via)
- Heck, most everything from Top Shelf is good.
- The Small Web. (via)
A relatively calm week.
- I was late and didn’t link to it before, so: BSD Now 355: Man Page Origins.
- National FreeBSD Day just happened. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.4 is out.
- .Xcompose tips. Not really BSD but that’s where you’d use it.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 21 – Configuration – Compton.
- Valuable News – 2020/06/15.
- System Shock on OpenBSD. (via)
- HardenedBSD June 2020 Status Report.
- Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM. (via)
The serial port in DragonFly is now set by default to 115200, not 9600 as anyone over 40 probably has memorized (along with the numbers 640, 1024, and 4.3M).
shutdown(8) and reboot(8) have some changes, which I find entertaining: “harder to kill“.
DragonFly’s sysclock_t is now a 64-bit value. This is a dramatic change, but should be invisible to userland. Meaning, you don’t have to recompile world/update packages/etc. It’s interesting but not eventful.
The first version of HAMMER took automatic snapshots, set within the config for each filesystem. HAMMER2 now also takes automatic snapshots, via periodic(8) like most every repeating task on your DragonFly system.
Wide topic range, again.
- Pie Marches On, the best book about pie making I’ve ever read – and it’s about 80 years old.
- The Success and Failure of Ninja. (thanks, Tse Gratis)
- Google Code-In is finished. Summer of Code and Summer of Docs is still running.
- Remembering John Conway’s FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language. (via)
- Jagged Little Tapes. One of the few things VHS did well.
- Miniature cardboard synthesizers. (via)
- Why sysadmins don’t like changing things, illustrated.
- ADM-3A Dumb Terminal Home Automation Hub. “because why not?”
- The Symbolic Links Virtual Machine. (via)
- Wireless is a trap. I have come to agree with this.
I like having shorter link texts so they all line up, but sometimes it’s unavoidably descriptive.
- FreeBSD’s new Code of Conduct.
- Gaming on OpenBSD.
- FreeBSD HEAD Binary Upgrades. (via bsdweekly)
- Install OpenBSD 6.7-current on a PineBook Pro 64. (via bsdweekly)
- TrueNAS is Multi-OS. My hot take is that this is a side effect of ZFS becoming commoditized.
- Speaking of which, ZFS: adding a drive back into the zpool.
- DRM update committed. It’s OpenBSD, so direct render, not digital rights.
- pfSense 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1 Now Available.
- Valuable News – 2020/06/08. Argh, there’s ad popups on what is otherwise a very nice site.
- “Blood” (game) ported to NetBSD.
- Booting FreeBSD off the HPE MicroServer Gen8 ODD SATA port.
- Import DHCP reservations from Synology DHCP Server to OpenBSD dhcpd(8).
- OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines APU4D4.
BSD Now is out for this week; no specific theme but there is a link to something I didn’t know existed: the Scotland Open Source podcast.