August 2025 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2025/08/312025/08/29

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/31

Done early!

The Anti-Subscription Catalogue. Listings of software that doesn’t require perpetual payment. You will find useful tools there. (via)
The Interim Computer Museum current exhibits. I wish I was closer.
The Origins of Dwarf Fortress, A 4-part Youtube series. (via)
Non-AI images for your website. Possibly more than you’ll ever need, really.
GLOG Class: Lackey.
Related: apparently there’s a whole “bespoke single-level Cloak-and-Sword class” trend? And other made-up classes, for a fun read.
I Am An AI Hater. (via many places)
Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises. Or, reinventing problems. (via)
Speaking of network issues: NFS is 40 years old – see events at MSST (the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology). (via)
Speaking of NFS: it worked best on Sun, but NFS Must Die!, but it’s not the different animal that was RFS.
Fictional Git manpage generator. (via)

Your unrelated video (from my childhood) of the week: Jazz #2. (via)

2025/08/242025/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/24

A couple of these links are from previous weeks, saved because I already had more time-dependent links to post. Still good!

Filtered for bottom-up global monitoring.
I mentioned Bill Atkinson’s death a while back – he also invented a superior dithering method, which I only found out by accident, and I suspect it may find new use locations.
A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop. Classic MacOS inside a PA-RISC / CDE? machine is a combo I have never seen before.
Those Titles the AI Bot Thought I Had Written.
ChatGPT agent’s user-agent. Bing and Yandex both indexing your work, with no opt-out.
11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Quay Brothers. (via)
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The 30 Year Late Review. I almost don’t believe this exists.
Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl.
Pimping my Casio: Part Deux. (via)
Bag of words, have mercy on us.
Simone’s webdesktops. Fun just to fiddle with. (via)

2025/08/182025/08/09

Disable console bell globally

DragonFly now has a sysctl that will disable the console beep everywhere, not just in a particular shell. This is either unimportant to you or a massive relief.

2025/08/172025/08/14

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/17

I’ve had a surplus of links, so this is almost all stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks, pre-scheduled.

microm8, an Apple][ emulator that adds new features. (via last week’s theme)
Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?
Installing *BSD in 2025 part 5. Wrapping up a series with some non-BSD, too.
Building A Stirling Engine Bike. I don’t think it’s necessarily practical but I like the concept of a Stirling Engine.
asncounter and grepcidr, two tools I wish I knew about long ago. (via)
Mastodon has continued to function and grow for longer than the entire existence of Google+.
Learning, AI, and John Searle’s Chinese Room.
If OpenSSL were a GUI. (via)
The New Dinosaurs, 2025.
Objects should shut the fuck up. (via)
The Lethal Trifecta and prompt injection.
confusable_homoglyphs. (via)

2025/08/132025/08/09

Camera support via uvc in DragonFly

Michael Neumann has completed an initial port of uvc, for webcam support, to DragonFly. His commit message lists both how he did it and how to use it.

2025/08/112025/08/09

Do you need crypto/opencrypto?

Not tokens of agreed value, but specifically, crypto(4) and crypto(9). Michael Neumann doesn’t see a use for them any more, so speak up if you need them.

2025/08/102025/08/08

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/10

Apple ][ mini-theme.

Math finds.
Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards.
REXPaint – ASCII art editor. (via)
Baman Piderman returns. (via)
The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. As a former industrial design student that went on to do nothing directly with my education, I agree.
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. I linked to this 8 years ago and it’s time for a reminder link; a gem of a puzzle collection.
Floor796. You will lose some time searching around. (via)
INIT HELLO, a new Apple ][ convention that just happened, at The Computer Museum. (via)
FujiNet, networking for older computers. (via previous link)
Also, Applesauce.
Silo, from an interesting design company.

2025/08/07

dm_target_crypt change in DragonFly

Are you encrypting your disk in DragonFly? If you are using dm_target_crypt, the ‘ng’ version is now the default. You may want to change your loader.conf.

2025/08/052025/08/05

NYCBUG Wednesday: pkgsrc on Mac OS X/PowerPC and AIX

~~The long-planned next meeting of NYCBUG is tomorrow~~. If you are going and have a Framework laptop, please bring it for testing HDMI. I assume it’s related to ongoing support work.

Meeting is canceled cause no presenter available.

2025/08/032025/08/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/03

I hope at least a few of the ideas this week are enjoyably novel to you.

The original computer mouse. (third link)
The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning. That first paragraph should be required reading.
The Hype is the Product. (via)
Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech. Managing knowledge workers is not a new idea but tech companies want to think it is. (from previous link)
Curate your own newspaper with RSS. (via)
Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD. See the CDE wiki for some screenshots; surely you’ve seen it before.
The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models.
Vibe code is legacy code. (via)
TRMNL X. I preordered.
Projects can’t be divorced from the people involved in them. The “Nazi Bar” idea sort of in reverse.