April 2026 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2026/04/30

A DPorts explanation

The DragonFly site has a recently-updated page describing how DPorts is assembled and the process to contribute.

It does need the criterion for when it’s ready to release – either a number of working ports, or certain key ports buildable, or a combination of the two. Something like “Chrome, Apache, nginx, MariaDB, Postgres, and X11 build, and over 75% of packages in general are successful, with less than a 10% decrease in buildable packages from the last dports release”. I just made that up, so it’s not an actual threshold. But it could be?

2026/04/262026/04/23

Lazy Reading for 2026/04/26

Several conferences are linked here; check your calendar accordingly.

The BSDCan 2026 Schedule is up, plus some other event details.
pcc lives again, with details.
Silvio Lorusso: Serif Populism, Hyperpolitics and the Diminishing Returns of Graphic Design Culture. (via)
A dictionary of demons. Not daemons. (also via)
Roguelike Conference 2026 is in October.
SSH escape sequences. Social media posts are the worst way to archive information, of course. (via)
Charcuterie: A visual explorer for Unicode. (via)
The Western Electric 500 phone. I have one of these phones; it is … iconic? I don’t have the right word.
I Connected a Desktop Phone to a FreeBSD Server, so Now I Can Call It. Related to the previous link; I’ve set up a Model 500 via an ATA in a similar fashion, though it needed some voltage fiddling to get the mechanical ringer to ring. (via)
2026 Hugo Award finalists. Use as a “to-read/view” list.
Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now. I like the idea that there’s an incentive to debug / secure more open source projects, though that can cut both ways. (via)
A love letter to cassette futurism. (via)

2026/04/192026/04/17

Lazy Reading for 2026/04/19

I have been looking at a lot of Markdown-formatted files lately because reasons.

Signboard is a kanban app that writes Markdown files. This makes an astonishing amount of sense as a format. (via)
Select a Security Question. Made me snort.
Women of the early early era of industrial music.
“everyday objects made specifically to annoy people“. (via)
Things to say when you’re losing a technical argument. (via)
“Failover” CPUs to handle faults used to be a thing.
Video of the celebration of 80th anniversary of ENIAC Day.
EditionCrafter, open source software for publishing digital editions of historical documents. (via)
Origin of the “swap should be 2x RAM” idea. Some familiar names in there. (via)
The ReCode Project, recreating classic computer art with more recent code. (via)

Your unrelated game of the week: Kolydr. From the same person who did Canabalt and a lot of other games I hadn’t seen. (via)

2026/04/16

NYCBUG: The Design of Unix Shell, on May 13th

NYCBUG‘s next event, on 2026/05/13, is “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. If you aren’t familiar with that name, you are probably using his software or something derived from it right now.

2026/04/122026/04/10

Lazy Reading for 2026/04/12

I managed to get much of this done early and not post it on the wrong day too.

Updates 2025/Q1. Linked for the pictures of keyboard stores in Seoul.
Breaking up with Big Tech – Progress update. A Uses This of sorts.
OSHintosh – an open source 68000 Macintosh. (via)
XScreenSaver 6.15 is out.
Which led to Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.
Notes on clarifying man pages.
A Quick and Easy Guide to tmux.
And then Make tmux Pretty and Usable.
“I like to use Soviet control panels as a starting point.”
zipcodefirst.com. (via)
The Book of PF, 4th Edition: It’s Here, It’s Real.
Digital Collections. (via)
2.11BSD is 35 years old and getting more updates.
Every 4-5 months or so, Joshua Stein writes another “install OpenBSD to a new device” article; the newest is the Pomera DM250.

2026/04/052026/04/01

Lazy Reading for 2026/04/05

Happy chocolate egg day!

The Vault of the Atomic Space Age. (via)
Mud Map Magazine. Examination of imagery. (also via)
Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Linked for the note on Verbatim Mode, but read to the end for the alternatives. (also also via)
Macs of Unusual Size. (via I lost track, sorry)
Remember, despite new weird rules in the US, BSD-based routers are a good option. And in software.
System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance.
A eulogy for Vim. “Vim Classic” as a fork. (via)
TENEX and TOPS-20 history, a parallel realm to UNIX. (via)
I set all 376 Vim options and I’m still a fool. (via)
[SIGCIS-Members] Our “Women in Computing” book display. See the attachment for the actual list.
Indie Media list, on Garbage Day.
Frustration detection via regex. Claude Code source leak. (via)

Your unrelated video of the week: Big Hairy Dog, from the same person who created badger badger badger.

2026/04/01

Michael W. Lucas on air and in print

Michael W. Lucas is speaking tonight at NYCBUG and it’s streaming, so you can see it too. He also has launched a new 10-days-only Kickstarter for “Networking for System Administrators: The Defenestrated Edition“.