BSD Now 334 is posted, with juuuust the right mix of items; some advocacy, some license confusion (for Linux), etc. I notice linked in the bottom section the February, er March NYCBUG meeting will have Paul Vixie talking at their meeting, which hasn’t even been mentioned on the NYCBUG site yet.
Font installation in DragonFly
I imagine this may work for any BSD, really. Aaron Li has the instructions, which may be especially useful for non-English readers.
SEMIBUG, SNMP, tonight
SEMIBUG’s next meeting is tonight, with Michael Lucas talking about SNMP. Go, if you are near.
Lazy Reading for 2020/01/19
No theme, just lots of links.
- 1978 “Heathkit” D&D Digital Dice Tower. Homebrew, Nixie tubes, D&D dice; this was made for me to link.
- VisiData, command line tabular data manipulation. (thanks, Paul Ivanov)
- The History of Games conference Call for Papers is out. (via)
- No leap second this year.
- Related: Did you know there is a global institution covering the rotation of the earth? The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. They graph Earth’s spin. (via)
- The Beasts of Europe. More graphs! (Thanks, brother)
- Why are modern computers so slow? Scroll to the Technology section; there’s a collection of writeups about modern latency, some of which I’ve linked before but all are worthwhile.
- 2020 IGF nominees: puzzles, Shakespeare, topical games, interactive storybooks, and adventure plus.
- The Roots of Doom Mapping. Goes with the ReDoomEd link yesterday. (via)
- The Art of the Post-Internet.
- Using Computer Modern on the web. For the TeX-lovers. (via)
- Ganymede Series 01 Watch Arrived. A deliberately confusing interface.
- Retro Review: Zeven OS. (via)
- Opening up the Baseboard Management Controller. (via)
- My review of the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM powered laptop. I want to see some in-depth BSD experiences on that hardware. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/18
Unofficial theme: conventions. There’s lots of options this year; you should go. If you are reading this, you’re the right demographic to enjoy one.
-
- Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1.
- VVVVVV seems to work fine on OpenBSD (6.6-current #595).
- ReDoomEd – works on BSD. (via)
- BSDCan 2020 is June 3-6 in Ottawa, and the Call for Papers ends tomorrow.
- Other BSD-related conferences. (via)
- SEMIBUG’s next meeting is next Tuesday, with Michael Lucas talking about SNMP. He knows.
- The slides from the January 8th NYCBUG meeting are available, showing off notqmail. For further edification, here’s a podcast on the same topic.
- iked(8) automatic IPv6 blocking removed. (OpenBSD)
- Improving the ptrace(2) API and preparing for LLVM-10.0.
- Working towards LLDB on i386.
- GSoC 2019 Final Report: Incorporating the memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme into NetBSD. Completed just in time for GSoC 2020.
- OPNsense 19.7.9 released.
- Pinebook-Pro with Manjaro Linux running accelerated qemu-system-aarch64 FreeBSD -current. Emulated, so the comment there led me to this tweet about NetBSD on Pinebook.
- LPI and BSD working together.
- Switching DistroWatch over to FreeBSD – AMA.
- Valuable News – 2020/01/13.
- Using the OpenBSD ports tree with dedicated users.
- Run broot on FreeBSD. Can’t use without saying “I am broot!” over and over.
Easy bsdstats fix
If you installed BSDStats but it didn’t work, here’s why – with a fix.
BSD Now 333: Unix Keyboard Joy
The most recent BSD Now episode is unfortunately not all about legacy hardware as I would enjoy, despite the title, but the usual mix of news items – mostly about new platforms to find BSD.
dragonflybsd.org line height
I for some reason set line height properties in the style sheet for dragonflybsd.org years ago, and it made scroll bars appear around all <pre> text. It’s taken me years, but I finally removed it. Anyone notice other effects than the lack of those odd scrollbars?
Learning 2 things
Sometimes you get 2 nice tips: I like seeing this NetBSD->FreeBSD->DragonFly cross pollination in this commit, and also now I know I can fsck a FAT volume on BSD.
3rd bonus: that last sentence sounds terribly rude.
ChiBUG monthly meeting tomorrow
ChiBUG meets tomorrow at the usual place. Go, if you are near.
Lazy Reading for 2020/01/12
Accidental themes this week: keyboards and game remakes.
- Indieweb; something I plan to explore more.
- Autocomplete as an interface.
- Heroes of Might and Magic 3, as open source game engine. (via)
- Hello World, a comparative exercise. (for one meaning of “better”)
- Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS? (via)
- Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy.
- Weird Keyboards, Programmable Keyboards. The author sells some bonkers keyboards. (via)
- How to create a handheld Linux terminal (v2). Or BSD! (via)
- The Planck Keyboard, via comments on the previous source. Apparently a “40% keyboard” is the phrase that describes this sort of smaller keyboard.
- tmux-resurrect. Somewhat magical. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Class of 2020: New in the Public Domain today! I linked to a different article before, but this one talks about outside the U.S.
- BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X. (via)
- A Decentralized Web Primer: Dat. “The read/write web”. (via)
- Unciv, an open source Civilization V; probably could run with openjdk8? Haven’t tried. (via)
- A retrospective of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. (via)
- Society for the History Of Technology call for papers is out. (via)
- 2020 IGF nominees: a good mood and 2020 IGF nominees: hit and miss.
- Monoid: open source coding font. (via)
- 2019 Income Sources. Interesting since a chunk of that is BSD books.
- A Compiler Writing Journey. (via)
In Other BSDs for 2020/01/11
No theme evolved, but lots more links this week.
- Nextcloud 17 on FreeBSD 12.1.
- BSD user groups in Italy. (via)
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q4 release. (via)
- HEADS UP: Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux. (pkgsrc, via)
- Unlock Your UNIX Laptop with Your Phone. I normally pull vermaden items directly from RSS, but the Lobste.rs comments may also be interesting.
- Valuable News – 2020/01/06.
- The BSDCan 2020 call for papers closes on the 19th; get yours in soon!
- ChiBUG meets on the 14th. I’ll post a reminder.
- Using rsnapshot for easy backups.
- Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge. Someday, you will thank you.
- Firefox pkg for 6.6-stable will not receive latest updates. (OpenBSD)
- FreeBSD end-of-year recap by adridg. FreeBSD, Calamares.
- Hunspell on FreeBSD. (via)
- Bastille Containers on FreeBSD.
- Related: A practical guide to containers on FreeNAS for a depraved psychopath.
- OpenBSD on DigitalOcean. The comments in the source link note you can get any BSD installed that way.
BSD Now 332: BSD Hyperbole
Today’s BSD Now rhymes, but you probably have to say it out loud to tell. They cover the new-at-least-to-me HyperbolaBSD, among other topics.
cpdup and microseconds
cpdup(1), a DragonFly copying tool that really should be more used, now uses microseconds for comparison. This is probably related to the sysctl vfs.timestamp_precision also now using microseconds.
This probably won’t affect your usage of cpdup unless you are copying some very actively modified files, but I like to mention it in case someone feels like porting it to OpenBSD/NetBSD – it’s already in FreeBSD, though I assume it’s a slightly older version.
Webmentions on the Digest
I’ve added Webmentions on the Digest. If you don’t know what that is, let me save you the Google search. It’s a method to connect discussion between blogs, similar to having a conversation on Twitter or whatever, except you aren’t storing your words away on someone else’s platform.
The option to add your Webmention URL is at the end of each post; if you have your own blog and want to comment, this is the time to install Webmentions and use it!
NYCBUG meeting tomorrow
The next NYCBUG meeting is tomorrow, January 8th. It’s not the normal location. Go if you are near.
2 more laptops for DragonFly
Thanks to Pierre-Alain Toret, we know 2008 Macbooks and Samsung NP370R5E-A04FR laptop models support Dragonfly. If you have DragonFly running on a model not mentioned, please add it.
Lazy Reading for 2020/01/05
I very nearly scheduled this to January 01, 2019. And then fixed it for the right year but not the day, so you may have seen an early draft of this. Oops; it’s here now.
-
- The link that will eat the most of your time: href.cool links of the decade: there is a lot to look at in here. Some highlights: Smash TV (video collage), esp8266.net (ultracheap hardware hacking), Magic Mirror (achievable tech), SPACEPLAN (clicker game), and Line Wobbler (physical roguelike). If I hadn’t linked to some of these things before, I should have.
- ASCII graffiti. Not really ASCII but that’s OK, still fun to see. (via)
- The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland. My current peeve: following a link in a newsletter and getting a popup over the content … to subscribe to the newsletter. This is not hard to fix. (via)
- Public Domain Day 2020.
- multicians.org. Pre-UNIX. (via)
- Time will end in 2038… for Unix. (via)
- Managing my dotfiles as a git repository. Not a new idea, but has a nice host-specific setup.
- Inter-networking.
- Chesterton’s Shell Script. (via)
- Black Hack 2nd Edition and Apocalypse World, 2 RPGs recommended.
- Can We Build Trustable Hardware? Like any headline posted as a question, the answer is “no”, but this is Bunnie Huang, so there’s a much more complex but real solution.
- The Joys of UNIX Keyboards.
- Good times create weak men. (via)
- fingers.today, like wandering through someone’s $HOME. (via)
- A brief history of liquid computers. “Billiard-ball computing”. (via)
- Rhasspy: a completely offline voice assistant. That’s what I want. (via)
- X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach. Requires no new technology.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cankor. (click on preview button) I saw Cankor pages years ago; it’s disturbing in a good way.
In Other BSDs for 2020/01/04
It was an abnormally quiet week – probably because of the Christmas holiday, or maybe because I cleared my BSD link backlog last week.
- perl updated to 5.30.1. (OpenBSD)
- a glimpse into 2020.
- Do you see what I see?
- Theo De Raadt Interview between Ottawa 2019 Hackathon and BSDCAN 2019.
- How job control made the
SIGCHLDsignal useful for (BSD) Unix. - How To: Contributing Language Translations to FreeNAS.
- The Year 2019 in Review: This Was, Once Again, Weirder Than the Last One. The ongoing spamtrap saga.
- Found this while going through my cd box, brings back memories!
- Valuable News – 2019/12/30.
An update for iwm(4) users
There’s a refresh of the iwm(4) driver in DragonFly, which will apparently help most for iwm-9000 and iwm-9260 owners.
I don’t know which product names correspond with those chipsets, but you may be able to tell who you are. Interesting note: original driver via OpenBSD, then synced from FreeBSD version. Cross-pollination!