Yao Ge has created a new DragonFly mirror in Nanjing, China. It’s on the mirrors page too.
Merry almost Christmas!
- Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read. (via)
- An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. The birth of fuzzing. (PDF, via via)
- Copyright law is living in the past. A good explanation of music copyright oddities.
- ARCC opens for login tomorrow. Buy a ticket as a present to yourself.
- The UX of delivering parcels. Reminds me of the long-ago Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research. (via)
- Val Town. (via)
- Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet. I endorse this. (via)
- The sound of Wikipedia. Bells for additions, string plucks for removals, pitch to indicate size of edit. (via)
- Early Computer Art by Barbara Nessim. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon is happening in Dublin in September 2024. (via)
- A vt100 compatibility question that led to talk about termcap hacking and printer shenanigans. (follow all those links)
Here’s a weird confluence of things all based on me searching out links and stories for this blog: Based on the recommendation of Cooking Issues listeners, I visited Hi-Collar last weekend, a Japanese kissaten (which I know of because of Craig Mod’s mailing list / book) while I stayed at St. Marks’s Hotel, which I know about through NYCBSDCon. Meal was good, and all these things would not have come together without these years of Lazy Reading posts.
- BSD on Windows. A product I never heard of. (via)
- A List of Lists. I have linked to at least one of them before.
- Children of the Geissler Tube. Seems like something to buy at United Nuclear. (via)
- From a comment on last week’s Lazy Reading: CCC is coming up.
- The original UNIX Lab had left-handed lightbulbs. Note the author of the post.
- History of SMTP. (Video, via)
- DateTime, an XKCD cartoon. Painfully accurate.
- Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. (via)
-
Ctrl+Alt Museum pictures.
- Dungeons & Directories. (via)
- Umberto Eco Formulates The AI Novel In 2011.
- Apple ][ copy protection affecting how a game plays. A game world being affected by a physical aspect of a legal status in the real world.
- Finishing Up a FreeBSD Experiment. I like seeing what people use. (via)
- “the plural of regex is regrets“. (via)
ChiBUG is meeting in the normal place tomorrow on the 19th. Go, if you are near. (Plans changed after I posted this.)
Old hardware – really old – minitheme.
- ARCC tickets 30% off with code CH3AP.
- Fun with DNS TXT Records. Password storage, bizarre but hilarious. (via)
- The BSDCan 2024 page is up.
- The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard. (via)
- Decker, Hypercard clone that builds web pages. (via)
- User Manual for Babbage’s Difference Engine #2. Which exists. And you can build it. Or 3D print it. (via)
- Saturn V Apollo Flight Configuration. Poster to print. (via)
- Fake mainframe, real lights and switches.
- The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer. Linked cause I remember seeing “PC-98” in I think the FreeBSD installer. (via)
If you have a TP-Link TL-WN722N v2 wireless adapter, you are in luck.
No theme other than maybe interesting hardware.
- Four Kinds of Optimisation.
- Investigating why Steam started picking a random font. I will always link Y2038 issues. (via)
- Dragons Reviewed and Ranked.
- MNT Reform hardware hacking. (via)
- My Useful Shell Functions. (via)
- B3ta’s 404 error pages.
- The Spectrum of Openness. The first good multidimensional explanation I’ve seen.
- WE 1981. For Western Electric employees, with a shot of a crane lowering a new central office unit into place. (via)
- VT320 Repair. And terminal tetris. (via)
- $500M Mars Rover Mistake. The value is the way they dealt with it. (via)
Elements of dsynth, the mass package builder for DragonFly, are now appearing in the base system. It looks like this is most helpful for building packages as part of the base install, but there might be other applications.
This is mostly an ID change, but the Mercusys MW150US USB wifi adapter is now supported in DragonFly.
I missed last week because of a time crunch at 2 jobs, but at least I can make this week up.
- DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs. (via)
- Mechanical Creations. Sort of the opposite of the previous link. (also via)
- Monaspace Fonts. (via)
- Thank you for holding my duck.
- HTML Web Components: an example.
- mud resources. (via)
- Not On Amazon. (via)
- What font are you using now?
- Complex Simulation: Artifacts of a Russian spy.
- The Mediterranean Iron Omni-Spear.
- The Vim features that make me a Vim user instead of a Vi user.
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow at the normal location.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tomorrow, the 21st, with a presentation on shell scripting. It’ll be online through Jitsi. Slides from Nick Holland’s last presentation are available, for the curious.
No natural theme at all this week. Which is OK!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data. I would like to see this on a larger scale. (via)
- An adorably small Connection Machine. The real thing, if you are unfamiliar.
- Also cute: networked tiny TRS-80 model.
- Naming things needn’t be hard. (via)
- Confusing git terminology. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon 2023 report, part 1 and part 2.
- “The ports system exists to not only share misery, but to reliably replicate it“
- My MNT Reform – almost a year on.
- FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization.
- OctOpenBSD. I am a bit late linking that.
- Talk about the Basics.
- Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD.
- Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk. An underappreciated program.
- Presenting Syncthing, discovery server, relay server on OpenBSD.
- A small warning about UDP based protocols.
You can now run devfs(5) and procfs(5) in a jailed environment for DragonFly. As the commit message says, it’s for dsynth but I imagine this may be good for other applications.
NYCBUG is having a combination release party (FreeBSD 14) and swag time (EuroBSDCon stickers). It will be streamed. Go, if you are near.
More wide-ranging this week.
- Patrick Newman’s Software Engineering Management Checklist. (via)
- Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture. (via, via)
- Pool topology, I mean yes but why? (via)
- The difference in penalties in AD&D1 and D&D5.
- The Great Drone Ones.
- The Distractor.
- mii_emu: MII Apple //e Emulator for Linux. Linked for the Total Replay screenshot. (via)
- GET LAMP, which I know I have linked before, but I was reminded.
- Fantasy Inspiration, Era by Era. Books to read by time setting.
- Personal mail server issues. (a good reason for this book.)
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, this recent struct change will require a kernel and world rebuild. If you are running the release, it doesn’t affect you.
All history this week for some reason.
- IBM Beam Spring: The Ultimate Retro Keyboard. Pictures of original hardware. (via)
- A bit of XENIX history. (indirectly via)
- How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet. (via)
- The Instruction Set Edition.
- Museum of Internet Artifacts.
- Remember “Reflections on Trusting Trust“? 40 years later it turns out Ken Thompson figured out how to backdoor the compiler and login.
- Enemies at the Gates. About platforms and how they absorb value.
- Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture. I had to explain to someone yesterday, unsuccessfully, how an open source SDK for a closed source project is useless. (via)
- The print-on-demand version of 50 Years of Text Games is available. It’s worth it.
- Making up a tabletop RPG.
Now this is mostly my backlog of RSS feed items. Eventually I will catch up to everything…
- Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea.
- The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client.
- Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer.
- Bypassing Windows 11 Account Setup. “generally when a vendor tries this hard to get you to do something, it’s not for a user-friendly reason.”
- Mouseless. (via)
- OpenBSD Webzine 15.
- Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1).
- Building a new Apple II?
- Braunstein Resources. (via)
- The whole Whole Earth Catalog.
- The Curse of Dialup World. (via)
New to the DragonFly kernel: jail-like capability restrictions, that may not require a jail to use.