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.
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.
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.
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/
NYCBUG’s trying out a new location tonight – go, if you are near.
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.
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.
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.
This Wednesday, Jim Brown presents on QEMU at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting. Go, if you are near, but RSVP first so you can get in. It should be streamed too.