July 2022 – DragonFly BSD Digest

No mini-theme this week, just a mix.

No leap second this year.
BUY NOW, the BeOS screensaver. (via)
The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 1, day 2, day 5, done!
An SPA alternative. (via)
The History of User Interfaces. Linked for the screenshots. (via)
Status Update on LS1028A Open Hardware CPU Module. Mntre is serious about that open hardware thing. (via)
Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.2. FVWM disguised as CDE. (via)
Enginomics.
Digital dice towers built in beautiful retro cases.
The Codecs of Streams Past. Linked cause reading about RealVideo and Silverlight gave me painful flashbacks.
Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet. (via)

Whee!

Demystifying High Availability In pfSense Software. I've used it; it's a little magical to reboot machines and have users never notice.
Tailscale on pfSense Software!
arttime 1.8.0: "Enabled desktop notifications for BSD Unixes."
So I've patched KDE Plasma/Wayland under CheriBSD for pure-capability mode. It works. (via)
How to use sshfs on OpenBSD.
Guest Post: FreeBSD in Science.
KDE Plasma 5.25 delayed on FreeBSD.
My new Sony NW-A55 Walkman! Also a review. Linking just because rsync works to move files onto it, therefore BSD-compatible. I can't simply put files on an iPhone the same way.

The lead link in this week's BSD Now is the sort of thing I like to link to: debugging Lisp in space. There's more than that.

This will matter most to you if your connection to the Internet is poor: fetch(1) now will time out on data transfers too.

Old machines week.

An excellent payphone project.
The Goriest Fight Scenes from The Iliad, Pt. 1. I enjoyed those books for a reason.
A tiny Pinball Fantasies table - Intro.
Crypto Ancienne 2.0 now brings TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things (except BeOS). Linked for the screenshots.
The Commodore 64 Smartwatch can now sync with your Commodore 64 desktop. Not a sentence I expected to type.
In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard Issue 1 - PDF Released. I just found my copy of the Peridot the other day, which was a fun read.
Macintosh Common Lisp. (via)
Contributing to Open Source Beyond Software Development. For example, this very blog.
Sweet Mars inspired theme for WindowMaker.
Writing and Running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus. Somewhat bonkers.

No mini-theme this week.

An assortment of timestamp formats found in our (Unix) logs.
How efficient can cat(1) be?
NetBSD can also run a Minecraft server.
Related: rjc shows Minecraft running on OpenBSD too.
Also: DragonFly too; I did it.
Valuable News – 2022/07/18.
Game of Trees 0.74 released.
OpenBGPD 7.5 released.
Using BSD make for your (small) project. A mini-tutorial. (via)
NetBSD is using a fork of the tz database. There's a backstory.
-current has moved to 7.2-beta.
What is the most minimalistic BSD for desktop?

I mentioned a new committer for DragonFly, Sergey Zigachev, recently. He hasn't shown in the commit logs for DragonFly directly - cause he's fixing up dports. I'm mentioning that because the amount of work that goes into dports to keep all those ports working on DragonFly is separate and unseen - but necessary.

BSD Now 464 is out for the week, and has the normal roundup. Nothing unusual to point out, just good reading.

SEMIBUG is having a presentation on Jupyter notebooks tonight, online. The presenter is using them for genome sequencing, so this should the interesting.

I think I cover all the popular Lazy Reading topics: old computers, RPGs, graphs...

Doom on Doom.
An explanation of phone firmware using the PinePhone as the base example.
Watches that don't tell time. (via)
The Impact of Open Connectivity.
Your Adventure Ends Here, blogging 'playthroughs' of choose-your-adventure books. (via)
Rewilding PowerPoint.
Supertab for vim.
god damnit adrian stop it.
@defensecharts. I have encountered some of these in the wild.
The Lost Tron Arcade Documents. (via)
CP/M is (more) officially open source.

Your unrelated music link of the week: Better Living Through Synthesizers.

Started with overflow from last week.

Toolchains adventures - Q2 2022.
Your next C compiler is a D compiler: Introducing DMD's ImportC.
Comparative BSD cheatsheet?
From 0 to Bhyve on FreeBSD 13.1.
/bin/true used to be an empty file. (via)
How we run a Minecraft server.
Self-hosting a static site with OpenBSD, httpd, and relayd.
Looking for a USB WiFi adapter that is compatible with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.
rpki-client 7.9 released.
Porting OpenBSD pledge() to Linux. (via)
How Unix didn't used to support '#!', a brief history.
Valuable News – 2022/07/11.
Desktop Environments Resource Usage Comparison. It's been a long time since E17.
helloSystem version 14-experimental is tagged.

This week's BSD Now gets into some history, as you can guess from the title.

SLUUG, the St. Louis Unix Users Group, has a short presentation tonight from James Conroy: "What You Should Get with GIT" and a longer presentation of "Locking Down Your Web Browser" with Scott Granneman. It's online so anyone can go. It's not BSD-specific, but it will all apply. (Thanks to Johnathan Drews for the reminder.) .

Welcome Sergey Zigachev, new DragonFly committer who has already committed an amdgpu fix.

The "Weird Coding Experiment..." link is a good one.

Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I). The 'effective strategy' part makes sense to me.
Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II).
Give Up GitHub - Software Freedom Conservancy. (via)
Walkmellotron, combining the best features of the Mellotron and the Walkman.
The Old Computer Challenge V2: back to RTC.
Retrospective: Wizardry. I never played this; always Ultima.
1970s desktop email notifier.
SourceHut is committed to making IRC better. IRC generally has the same learning curve (and power) as vi.
Microsoft To Ban Commercial Open Source from App Store. I can't tell if this is misinterpreted panic or Microsoft attempting to stop open source from being a paying job.
The modifiers vs. the keepers. I think 3-shift keyboards should make a return. (via)
Weird Coding Experiment: A Virtual Retro PC... that plays Sierra games!? If you want a retro computer and don't have room in the house. (via)
Upscaling Sierra graphics. (same source as last)

Lots to read this week.

This week's BSD Now has several links, though I'd want to point at the Yubikey/ssh/OpenBSD login one as the most interesting to me.

It'll probably involve some drinking. Go, if you are near, and RSVP so there's space.

If you pay attention to your daily security run emails on your DragonFly system, you may see entries like this:

+nlookup() at nlookup+0x623 0xffffffff806eff13
+kern_rmdir() at kern_rmdir+0x25 0xffffffff80706db5
+sys_rmdir() at sys_rmdir+0x4c 0xffffffff80706f0c
+syscall2() at syscall2+0x11e 0xffffffff80bd9f9e

I see it on the machine where I run this Digest, as the caching mechanism adds and deletes files rapidly. Matthew Dillon has placed it behind a sysctl, so your messages log will be a little less noisy by default.

Whee!

Mesopotamia, a nice online version of a museum exhibit. (via)
50 Years of Text Games bonus article: Amnesia.
MNT Pocket Reform, the smaller version of something I've linked before.
The least friendly keyboard ever, but certainly interesting.
The Internet as a Public Good.
GitHub Copilot and open source laundering. This applies to AI art too.
A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt). Linked cause I wondered out loud "why that change, in version 36?"
Dangit, Git!? (via)
A strategy to defeat AI chessbots.
The Dwarf Fortress Development Plan. Some of this sounds more like writing an epic novel than a game, which is good! They have a dirt-simple Patreon, too, and graphics are on the way? All news to me.
Plan 9 was almost a music disk, too. (via)

Your unrelated cartoon of the week: Mega.