6.4.1, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4, is ready to download. The commit log from 6.4.0 to 6.4.1 is available if you want the details.
Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.
- “Open source is everything!“
- Epistemological Slop.
- Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
- MNT April 2025 Update. The handheld prototype is interesting.
- The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one. “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
- Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl. I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem. (first two via)
- A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity. If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
- Poisonify, same but for music. (via)
- The Qwerkywriter.
- DOOM plus DOOM 2. I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
- Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437? (via)
- Digital hygiene. (via)
- Don’t use AI for technical answers.
- If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common? Brian Kernighan’s answer.
- “What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer. Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end. (PDF, via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping. (via)
Aaron LI has made a whole lot of POSIXy updates to timeout(1), of which I think these two are the most informational, but there’s a bunch more if you look at the month. I’m also linking to it cause I didn’t know timeout(1) existed; never used it.
I have definite link overflow – I will start next week’s post now.
- Vim essence.
- “…when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.” Why I keep doing this.
- ‘vibecoded’ saas are a privacy nightmare. (via)
- dated carbon.
- Who Uses To-Do Lists? Donald Knuth’s advice works well. (via)
- Gamer Games for Non-Gamers.
- “An off switch? She’ll get years for that.”
- How I set up VimWiki for notetaking. (via)
- The Curation Paradox. (via)
- The office in Severance is a historic Bell Labs building – where a lot of Unix work happened. Here’s some anecdotes about it.
- “Webster’s Second on the Head of a Pin” by Morris and Thompson. (via)
Mini bot/brute force attacks theme.
- The New Control Society. A very long essay. (via)
- Do Not Comply With the Terms of Service. I don’t necessarily agree with the arguments but the links at the end are useful. (via)
- Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers.
- A different approach to blocking bad webbots by IP address
- and A deeper dive into mapping web requests via ASN, not by IP address
- and then Notes on blocking spam by filtering on ASN.
- Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others).
- A summary of my bot defence systems.
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face.
- And that leads to: iocane. (via)
- Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025. (via)
- KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD on Framework 13.
- FediMeteo.
- Designing A Portable Mac Mini. A fatmac is what it looks like to me.
Old home computers is the accidental theme this week.
- Home Assistant Voice. Runs standalone, but related to ESPHome.
- Necronomicon Ex Mortis, up for sale. (via)
- Clockwork PicoCalc. Kinda a toy but also fun.
- Box124: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. Touches on a lot of topics I’ve linked to here before – but more descriptively. My favorite article this week.
- Haunted Machines, related.
- Free Media Heck Yeah. Some legit links, some pirate, so exercise caution. (via)
- Not Feeling Big Tech This Year? Start an Indie Blog! (via)
- Ultima III for the Vic-20. (via)
- Vic-20 Elite, same author. That’s not an easy fit!
- Four new patches for 2.11BSD released in March 2025!
- Booting A Desktop PDP-11.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Brutalist Riffs: A Guide to Math Rock.