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.
I preassembled this list of links over time, so some of them have probably changed. For the “I’m sorry…” link, that just means more material.
- Precision Clock Mk IV. Not kidding about the precision part. (via)
- Calibre News. An excellent complement to RSS.
- TMG, or Transmogrifier, a compiler for PDP-7. Not what I first thought. (via)
- Mark V. Shaney, really an early LLM. (via) Plus, this followup.
- Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine. I was in the same regional blizzard mentioned.
- I’m sorry I’ve written a joke.
- tmux cheat sheet. (also via)
- The Webcomic List. This re-acquainted me with some comics I haven’t seen in years. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Why Some Satellites Use NetBSD? (indirectly via)
- can an email go 500 miles in 2025? A nice sequel of sorts to the 500-mile email.
- The A2DVI gives the Apple II DVI and HDMI output.
- Towards a Complete List of Excellent Medieval/Fantasy Combat Scenes.
I missed this some time ago, but: you may see errors about certctl(8) when upgrading your packages. It’s not necessary, yet.
Some of these links are relevant to my personal history. (dinosaurs, mining)
- forbidden secrets of ancient X11 scaling technology revealed.
- The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. (via)
- Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting.
- The Historical Tech Tree. (via)
- watch(1) utility added to -current. Does what it sounds like.
- XScreenSaver 6.12. More Wayland changes.
- Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD.
- The Wild Wild Web.
- AI-operated vending machines and business process innovation (sorry). A decent analysis, though I feel like too many LLM examples are for avoiding feedback, when you want the opposite.
- Which leads me to Paul Pangaro’s Cybernetics page.
- New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal.
- FreeBSD 14.3 on FrankenPad T25. Linked for the FrankenPad.
- Some notes on X terminals in their heyday.
- Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. Preorders are open.
Your unrelated music of the week: Chali 2na x Cut Chemist – Melt Like Plastic. (via)
RPG mini-theme this week.
- You’ll have to scroll a bit, but: Hal Foster images. (via)
- A modern version of the 1968 game Hammurabi. (via)
- I feel open source has turned into two worlds.
- Classic Computer Replicas. (via)
- Deep Fishing, a Sinclair game. (indirectly via)
- FIST, a paranormal A-Team RPG. (via)
- XScreenSaver 6.11 out – for the Wayland experimenters.
- listfile: help your scripts process a list of things.
- Blink and you’ll miss it! 4096 colours and flashing text on the console!
- KDE Plasma 6.4 has landed in OpenBSD.
- pkgsrc-2025Q2 has been released.
- The Apple Johnathan, new to me. (via)
- Microscope RPG, a GMless game for building a world. (via, via)
- my official list of post-glitch.com hosting options.
- How to install FreeBSD on providers that don’t support it with mfsBSD. I’ve linked to this sort of method before.
- Ghostty is available for FreeBSD, from a comment last week.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Beanbag metal.
Some odd, fun links.
- Tattoy: : a text-based terminal compositor. (via)
- wobbly letters.
- The Yale ‘E’ editor and the RAND “Ned” editor, design documents. It’s interesting to see how the requirements were defined, and how they match the current day. (via)
- Brain Freeze. One of the features of the Internet is to find strange things taken seriously.
- McMaster Nerf Blaster. If you aren’t familiar with McMaster and their billions of parts, this is a good first step.
- The Internet Archive’s gif badge search. The announcement of this came with this image, which I can’t actually find at the archive but is great.
- Preserving a History of Digital Mapmaking.
- How prompt injection works.
- Ban autonomous systems. Also Trying to understand the bots.
- Babelcarp, an old-school site for tea terms. (via)
- jemalloc postmortem and phkmalloc, contrast and compare. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Peanut Butter Breaks.
ifconfig now has ‘proxy’ and ‘-proxy’ options. The ‘proxy’ option is now on by default, so a given IPv6 interface will respond to neighbor solicitations when forwarding is on. Use ‘-proxy’ to turn it off; the previous default.
(This was back in May, and I missed posting it before.)
I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment.
- The Best Interfaces We Never Built.
- The 80s were shit. (via)
- Memory Banks.
- Malleable Software. (via)
- Lightweight C compilers.
- Exterminate all rational AI scrapers, redux.
- A year of funded FreeBSD.
- Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74. Few people realize how much of the modern software world came right from what he did. (via)
- So you should read Memories of Lisa for the details. (via)
- Unveiling the EndBOX: A NetBSD-based embedded box for EndBASIC.
- BoxyBSD. (via)
- Look for the UNIX license plate.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: What’s the best comic I’ve ever read? Lynda Barry is a master of the form. (via)
No theme past my grumpy start.
- AI web scrapers: a data point.
- AI search: a bad data point.
- Predictions in the Apple-sphere. Linked for the note that LLMs support existing languages – not new, and therefore slow development.
- OK, getting off that theme…
- An extensive writeup on terminal colors. (via)
- Why you don’t want event-specific time zones.
- BBC Micro text mode Xevious. (via)
- The Second Annual Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Read down for links to previous submissions of good blog posts
- The Magic of Code, out now, and worth reading if the author’s newsletter is any guide.
- Related: The Humanistic Computation Project.
- An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Ring of Power Delivery Feasibility Study. (via)
- Should I Stop Caring and Let IP Address Reputation Sort Them Out? IP blacklist issues over time.
- Tinkering with an old-school cable community info channel website. Related to Weather Star 4000.
More tab-clearing.
- modern software 2025 edition.
- I’ve just implemented a Forth system. Then, The basics of an indirect threaded code ANS Forth implementation.
- Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions.
- Using TRMNL to make digital signs with LibCal. I know someone who just bought two TRMNLs just for inside signage.
- From that previous link: TRMNL-Kindle. I just found an old Kindle mixed in with some other books, too…
- Script to convert HEIC image files to PNG. For my own benefit.
- parking_lot: ffffffffffffffff… (via)
- Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
- What is Glaze? (via)
- SysctlTUI is Out!
- Come make some candles with me. A worthwhile offer.
- Books on Unix security? Given that it’s a list from TUHS readers, it’s probably the most definitive list possible.
Your unrelated music of the week: Left Hand Path from ITX038 – 89! Gloom by Commodo x Gantz.
Open tab cleanup week! I didn’t even get to the links saved in my email, yet.
- subvert.fm, a collectively owned Bandcamp. (via)
- Reframing Abundance: Open Tools, Free Games, Distributed Culture. The text is good, and so are the links at the end. (via)
- That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List. I’ve linked a few of these before.
- The pico-mac-nano and where you can buy the parts or even the assembled thing itself, along with actual 25-year-old Apple parts.
- Viral bad plotter art, a TED Talk. (via)
- The Underground Designer’s Handbook.
- We Need Small Web Communities.
- Caddy against the Machines.
- When was peak message in a bottle? Most interesting use of a googlewhack.
I managed to get away from most of my usual themes.
- 50 Years of Text Games, final overstock sale. This is a unique book; buy it now if you want one of the fancy versions.
- Bored Spreadsheet, all the most common minigames of the last few decades, in a spreadsheet interface. (via)
- Signal Carnival, swapping a C64’s audio and video outputs. (via)
- Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, still available, and there’s a sort-of walkthrough, too. (Thanks, Phil Pirozhkov)
- The First Port of UNIX. (via)
- Zoomable User Interface, Scrolling User Interface. (via)
- How to Quit Streaming, a brief and practical guide. (via)
- Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen. Petty but I enjoyed it. (via)
- Organizational Edge Cases. Related to UNIX.
- Femur, in-browser musical doodads. (via)
If you have an hda(4) sound device – and you probably do – it’s been updated. This is not in the 6.4.2 release.
Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.
- WebSysctl is Now Live! I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it. (via)
- The GAFA Stack. Read section 3.
- 8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
- Mute when Locked. (via)
- Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students. You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point. (PDF, via)
- At one point, “..” did not exist.
- Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
- The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright. I don’t think people realize the scale of this. It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
- Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
- Make Stupid Things. (via)
- The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
- Dumbware, self-hosted solutions. I like this except for the dockering. (via)
Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.
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.
Oddball link collection.
- Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
- Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
- windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
- Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
- GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
- Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
- XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
- The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
- checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
- I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
- Think Twice Dice.
Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.
6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download. Why so soon? A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed. These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.