NYCBUG’s trying out a new location tonight – go, if you are near.
Done while traveling.
- The $69 Billion Domino Effect. Another reason for open source. (via)
- pf reconsolidation. I’d hope for One True pf.
- curl is in your car. (via)
- How Social Media shortens your life.
- Before UNIX there was MULTICS. Before MULTICS there was GECOS, and there’s still people hacking on it. (via)
- Incidentally, there’s a “GECOS field” in /etc/passwd that comes from that, I think.
- No leap second this year. (via)
- humanely dealing with humungus crawlers.
- Boombox City. Linked for the design styles; ignore the text. (via)
- Magical Systems Thinking. 20 years ago this was called “skunkworks”. (also via)
- SDF Plan 9 Boot Camp Registration. (via)
Your unrelated video link of the week: new Cyriak video. (via)
I have a good mix today.
- Open hardware model rocketry.
- vimrc: settings based on terminal background.
- Choose Your Own Adventure, a history.
- MacPaint 1-bit patterns. (via)
- HTTP headers that tell syndication feed fetchers how soon to come back.
- Voynich Manuscript Structural Analysis. (via)
- Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD by Jeff Frasca. Video.
- KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD. Includes install instructions.
- How I felt in love with calendar.txt. (via)
- Quality-of-life on Tetris games.
- Underworld Amusements. A niche literary interest.
- Playing the Open Source Game. (via)
- ++080925.
Your unrelated music video of the week: Return of the Phantom by VOID. 2025 or 1985? Can’t easily tell.
I think I find these link collections most satisfying when I have can point at history, opinion, and “oddity” links all at the same time.
- PalaeoGames. “Scientifically accurate content for your palaeontology-themed tabletop role playing game”. Dungeons and
DragonsDinosaurs. (via) - The power we use and the power we give. (via)
- Related: Meta’s Cyber Necrocide. (via)
- Open Source is one person. (via) Insert XKCD cartoon here; you know which one.
- Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa, YouTube. (via)
- Aseprite, a pixel art / sprite animation tool. (via)
- 16 Pixel Dungeon, a game. (via)
- Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS. (via)
- Discuss.systems: Discussion of computer systems research & practice.
- Previous link comes from Rob Ricci’s Are We Decentralized Yet?
- ded, a variant on ed(1). (via)
- Which means I have to bring up Ed Mastery, the book.
- The Fortean Times is still running! It is crazy. (via)
A little bit of a thread here on the current crawling plague.
- The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services.
- Why I prefer rST to markdown. Nobody remembers SGML, but everyone reinvents it. (via)
- gpart on FreeBSD to partition and format a USB key.
- stylish bugs.
- The Magic Switch. Surely I’ve mentioned this story before? This is the actual hardware.
- Box131: You’re a National Security Project, Harry. Read the first point, about accuracy and how it can be counterproductive.
- Yet Another Roguelike Tutorial, Parts 0 and 1. (via)
- The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web.
- Related to the previous: “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don’t like me!”
- And more followup: A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet.
- VIC-20 Ultima I. (via)
- My other email client is a daemon. (via)
NYCBUG’s got a new meeting space to try out, and it’s on September 3rd. Go, if you are near.
NYCBUG’s next meeting is in a new location on October 1st. Go if you are near. It sounds like November 5th and December 3rd events are lined up too.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DRM in DragonFly has been updated to match Linux vers. 4.20.17. See the commit message for the newly-supported video chipsets.
I waited to post this cause there’s a few setup details that may or may not affect you when you try it.
This week is the right level of esoteric.
- WWVB, the radio protocol for time synch. I knew this existed as a concept but not the details. (via, via)
- Digital hygiene. The work/home separation is an underappreciated idea. (via)
- Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. Those are active, working, embedded Mac emulators on the web page. (via)
- If you are able, use the tools you’ve got.
- John Stezaker, collage artist. Here’s my favorite one I’ve seen. (via)
- The Shape of the Heavens. “Pity the poor d12”
- The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001). (via)
- Introducing CaptchaStash. (via)
- The Library of Congress publishes an updated “recommended formats” for data, which seems as authoritative a resource as it could be.
- A reminder you can log into various historic UNIX systems right now thanks to the ICM and SDF.
- BYO TRMNL.