Tomorrow’s presentation at NYCBUG is VIDAR, a FreeBSD-based automatic firewall program. Read the event description for details. Go, if you are near. The announcement doesn’t mention streaming so you may need to be in-person.
There’s some rabbit holes here.
- Next NYCBUG meeting: it’s a social meeting (no guest speaker), August 5th.
- The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything. Everyone’s played at least one Sim game in their lifetime, correct?
- Weird Side Projects. (via)
- Diane Lindo, stop motion animations. (also via)
- A terminal version of Obsidian. Different from the official CLI.
- MNT June 2026 Update. Notes that OpenBSD runs on the Pocket Reform.
- Fish Shell.
- A pocket computer history museum.
- Ditch your Alexa.
- Cutting the cord to the cloud.
- LibriVox, free public domain audiobooks.
- “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?” Linked for the animation showing an IBM 1401 console in action.
I should maybe create a Thinkpad category.
- NYCBUG’s having a social meetup on July 1st; stories about BSDCan will be told, I’m sure.
- When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars. This seems like a named aesthetic. (via)
- Building a serial and VGA “everything console”. Linked cause the author is using one of the IBM keyboards I always wanted.
- Key, In Sight. The keyboard in the center of this also looks like one of those same keyboards. Marcin says it’s a Shinobi, which I’ve wanted to get before.
- ‘Vim’ has many faces.
- Aeonic Nebular Character Generator, for a game jam for games that do not exist.
- Powering up a module from the IBM 604. Linked for the computer styling that says “forties”.
- That new Commodore phone is running Sailfish.
- pkgsrc-2026Q2 is out.
- The freebsd-update(8) Screensaver.
- FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop. Linked for the Thinkpad-specific parts.
- The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy.
I found a stash of saved emails/links that I don’t think I ever posted, so they’re mixed in here.
- FreeBSD sh for MacOS.
- Biggest DynaTAC ever.
- 3D.City. (via)
- Dice Soup. (via The Glatisant. Lots of other links in that source.)
- The best secondary prompt string possible.
- A hat on your calculator. (via)
- Related: modern versions of HP calculators. (via)
- Video for NYC*BUG Nov 2025: The Once and Future COBOL, by James Lowden.
- Games for Freaks, a game magazine.
- the totalisator.
- Daniel Temkin – FORTY-FOUR ESOLANGS, The Art of Esoteric Code, a book review.
- Some games that happen to be all about music.
- I don’t know how to describe this. (via)
I’m posting this now cause it’s timely: there’s a remote-only FreeBSD presentation at SLUUG so everyone can watch.
Because of Circumstances, I didn’t post earlier about this – but there is a stream to watch right now at the NYCBUG website for tonight’s “OpenBSD Security Mitigations” presentation with Brian Callahan.
No theme, just links.
- Let’s find out how to get predictable IPv6 addresses assigned to OpenBSD VMs. Linked in part just for the IPv6 details.
- Fractions in HTML. Linked to remember it for next time I need to write a fraction, though not here. WordPress will eat the HTML entities when saving.
- DinoCon 2026 schedule. I won’t make it, but it sounds fun.
- The vi Family. (via)
- rsstrogen/CLAUDE.md. (via)
- Your Dinner Got Worse on Purpose. (via)
- Actually, just go look at the most recent Things entry. Too many good links to cherry-pick.
- Obsidian Ecosystem Overhaul Announced.
- OpenSMTPd instead of exim.
- Orion PDA. I can think of remote locations where this would be useful.
- Three Things about Data. “Gather less of it” is a surprisingly practical rule.
Reminder: NYCBUG‘s next event is in two days. It’s “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. You should go; it’s a chance to talk directly with the author of foundational software.
Update: apparently the slides for this talk have been ready for 48 years or so.
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)
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.
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.
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“.
Michael W. Lucas is speaking at NYCBUG’s next meeting, April 1st, a week from now. “What’s Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way – a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS.” Go, if you are near, and watch the livestream if you are not.
whee
- BSDCan registration is open. 5 tutorial sessions this year!
- Print and fold your own mini-comic. (via)
- Actually Existing Solarpunk. (via)
- finally we have created the silver bullet. Brooks’ Law rules.
- bsd.rd breakdown. I always like looking at emergency repair tools in non-emergency situations.
- A.I. Isn’t People and Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions? Two essays on LLMs, not in opposition to each other.
- Diomidis Spinellis’ video talk about integrating the newly rediscovered V4 UNIX into his UNIX history repo. Note the first commit in that repo is 57 years ago.
- How much it costs to run OpenBenches. Extrapolate to any other independent website that isn’t a store. (via)
- No leap second needed this year.
- Physical Phones. (via)
No theme!
- Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now. Go, if you are near.
- On pressing the space bar for the cabinet.
- The state of Linux music players in 2026. A subset of that is BSD music players of course. (via)
- ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering. (via)
- The Dunking Decree. (via)
- Bending ePaper To Our Will with Custom LUTs. E-paper ‘pixels’ are not binary on/off.
- This is magic. Good comments from Youtube, a rarity.
- The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed) and Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess. The important thing to me is the note that vi exists as a specification, not just different software variations.
- Sorta related: Design Deconstruction, Vim as video editor.
- Things that are not backup solutions.
- All Your Base, slight remaster.
NYCBUG’s holiday party / lightning talks event is tonight. If you can’t make it, it’ll be streamed on the website and available on IRC.
Note that the recorded stream from the last event, The Once and Future COBOL, is available on YouTube and PeerTube. I heard the speaker, James K. Lowden, talk about FreeTDS years ago and enjoyed it too.
That’s two days from now, on 11/5: James Lowden will be talking about COBOL and the gcobol in GCC, which is in part his fault. This should be good. RSVP and go, if you are near. Stream if you are not.
Update: here’s the video:
Youtube: https://youtube.com/
It’s short link title week!
- Networking for System Administrators (2nd Edition) is definitely happening.
- Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web. (via)
- Replacing Music Streaming Services with a Self-hosted Stack. (via)
- ELIZA turns 60. Check the bibliographic links at the end. (via)
- BSD-USER 4 LINUX or the BSDULATOR. (via)
- Selling Lemons.
- Abagious Tactics, a sort of sequel to Oblique Strategies. (via)
- PIRACYKILLS, a clever method to turn pirates into customers. (via)
- A dumb use of AI.
- A clever use of AI.
- MUNG origin.
- Other tech trees.
- Special admin tools. (via)
- Simple X11 configuration. Saved for my own benefit. (also via)
Current event: Roguelike Celebration 2025 is happening right now if you read this soon enough. If you missed it, there’s a related Steam sale filled with roguelike games.
There’s a certain amount of aspirational ideas this week.
- Aspire Zine. An e-book that is a poster or vice versa.
- Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? A chunk of Internet history that passed me by. (via)
- Why I prefer human-readable file formats. You should not be surprised by any of these reasons. (via)
- EU CRA: It’s Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up! An indirect explainer of what the CRA requires.
- Shamogu: a roguelike developed on OpenBSD!
- Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin’s ideas at home. What might have been. (via)
- Qavg po fnoppy.
- The broad state of ZFS on Illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD (as I understand it) Describing the branches and status.
- Spending time with the material.
- Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs. So much chatter.
Your unrelated video link of the week: Lessons in Questioning.
NYCBUG’s trying out a new location tonight – go, if you are near.