May 2025 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2025/05/252025/05/24

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/25

I managed to get away from most of my usual themes.

50 Years of Text Games, final overstock sale. This is a unique book; buy it now if you want one of the fancy versions.
Bored Spreadsheet, all the most common minigames of the last few decades, in a spreadsheet interface. (via)
Signal Carnival, swapping a C64’s audio and video outputs. (via)
Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, still available, and there’s a sort-of walkthrough, too. (Thanks, Phil Pirozhkov)
The First Port of UNIX. (via)
Zoomable User Interface, Scrolling User Interface. (via)
How to Quit Streaming, a brief and practical guide. (via)
Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen. Petty but I enjoyed it. (via)
Organizational Edge Cases. Related to UNIX.
Femur, in-browser musical doodads. (via)

2025/05/21

hda updates in DragonFly

If you have an hda(4) sound device – and you probably do – it’s been updated. This is not in the 6.4.2 release.

2025/05/182025/05/08

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/18

Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.

WebSysctl is Now Live! I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it. (via)
The GAFA Stack. Read section 3.
8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
Mute when Locked. (via)
Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students. You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point. (PDF, via)
At one point, “..” did not exist.
Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright. I don’t think people realize the scale of this. It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
Make Stupid Things. (via)
The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
Dumbware, self-hosted solutions. I like this except for the dockering. (via)

Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.

2025/05/122025/05/06

FreeBSD Laptop Desktop Working Group + DJ-BSD redux at NYCBUG

May 14th, NYCBUG has Charlie Li presenting on the FreeBSD Laptop-Desktop Working Group, and DJ BSD? Anyway, go if you are near (but RSVP so they let you in!), and watch the stream if you are not.

2025/05/112025/05/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/11

Oddball link collection.

Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
Think Twice Dice.

Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.

2025/05/102025/05/09

DragonFly 6.4.2 released

6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download. Why so soon? A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed. These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.

2025/05/092025/05/07

Get your own pf lesson

Peter N. M. Hansteen runs a pf tutorial most years at BSDCan, and this year’s BSDCan is no different. He’s prepping now, so if you ask a good question, you’ll get taught the answer.

2025/05/07

Webcam driver progress

Michael Neumann posted a progress report on his webcam work for DragonFly. The short description is: it’s recognizing hardware but not recording yet. You can try it now.

2025/05/042025/05/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/05/04

Some BSD-specific links mixed in.

Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos. Scroll right. (via)
What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video. (via, via)
RDAP is replacing WHOIS. (via)
The Flywheel Spin Top.
Netnews: The Origin Story. USENET, or nntp, if you prefer. (PDF, via)
The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
Hacker Laws. (via)
TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff. (Thanks, Paul)
NumFOCUS concerns. “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title. (also thanks, Paul)
The History of Solaris. “UNIX is plural.” (PDF, via)
The modern OpenBSD home router. (via)
tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod. (via)

Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point. Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful. (via)

2025/05/012025/04/30

Changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4)

Michael Neumann proposed a lot of changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4); his initial proposal is I think now complete and committed, other than that tcplay(8) was updated instead of removed. Here’s a sorted list of his commits. These are not in the 6.4.1 release.