BSDNow 264 is available now and has the usual roundup of news, including discussion of Threadripper performance that I’ve avoided.
Chromium, the open sourced base of the Chrome browser, builds on BSDs, including DragonFly. But not without some work.
There’s a SemiBUG meeting at 7 PM tonight. Bring your troubleshooting lightning talks.
For anyone considering the purchase of a Ryzen system given the good benchmarks/power usage, here’s some discussion on users@ about which model is which.
Unofficial history theme this week – but not UNIX-specific, for once.
- Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape. Don’t tell the loaders at my workplace; they are crap. (via)
- Making Ubuntu bug reports seems to be useless (or pointless).
- Hex codes for all emoji. (via)
- Mechanical keyboard / Cherry history.
- Rise of the Stupid Network. (via)
- A software archaeology screwup.
- Dealing with a disclosure embargo in the 1970s. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, as programs. (via)
- Realtime VGA ASCII Art Converter. It’s hardware, so it can work with any VGA output.
- DevTube, developer talks on video. If you can get over universal partially bearded twentysomethings in t-shirts, you can find something useful here. (via)
- Document comments as automatic GitHub issues. It’s not without problem, but this is a good solution to an ugly problem.
- Knityak, computationally generated knitwear. (via)
- Roguelike Universe: Visualising Influence. Neat charts! (via)
- 8 megabytes of RAM in this picture. Also 7 million dollars. (via)
Your unrelated baking video of the week: Round Cake Production with Unifiller Depositors and Decorating Equipment. I’m not recommending this as a food; it’s just somewhat hypnotic to watch the robot production of something you usually imagine as lovingly handcrafted.
Built almost entirely with overflow from more than a week ago.
- GSoC 2018 Reports: Configuration files versioning in pkgsrc, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. (via)
- NextCloud on OpenBSD. (via)
- Anon Games, BSD games available freely through ssh. Or telnet, but don’t do that. (via)
- Let’s Try on OpenBSD: Baldur’s Gate 1 with gemrb and widescreen mod. Video. I link cause it’s interesting to see the setup work before the gameplay.
- Automatic switch wifi/ethernet on OpenBSD.
- Highly Available DHCP Server on FreeBSD. This is the first I’ve heard of Kea, though the article itself is about isc-dhcp.
- OpenBSD on an iBook G4. (via)
- NetBSD: kASan support officially added. kASan == Kernel Address Sanitizer. (via)
- FreeBSD 11.1 EOL.
- Color vt on FreeBSD.
- Syncthing on FreeBSD.
- Need help getting eMac G4 graphics to work.
BSDNow manages to hit a majority of the BSDs this week, talking about Free/Open/Net in various ways. No interview, but lots to hear about.
DragonFly’s root account defaults to tcsh, and that now defaults to autorehash being set on. Useful to remember if you reflexively type ‘rehash’ like I do, and also useful if you come from a shell where ‘rehash’ isn’t needed.
Michael Neumann wrote up his first contribution to Ravenports, some time ago, but I just noticed it now. If you find it inspiring, your next step is Chapter 14: Port Creation Walk-though.
There’s several new mirrors for DragonFly, all listed on the mirrors page thanks to Matthias Schmidt: Checkdomain GmbH, Philipps-University Marburg (both in Germany), and KoDDos (Japan).
I did finally clean out my “to post” email folder, at least.
- History of Gopher. (via)
- Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983. (via)
- textbeat, write music in Vim or other text source. (via)
- 2048 in the terminal. (via)
- Can you use the terminal for everything? A video, and relevant to the previous two links. (via)
- The 30 Best Web Games. I link it to show a sort of technology snapshot from 10-15 years ago. (via)
- Good books for deep hacks. Very In-depth reading.
- The origins of clip art.
- MIT-licensed vector clip art, related. (via)
- The Ethical OS Playbook. It’s “only” a PDF of questions, but definitely good questions to ask. (via)
- Best RSS feed reader apps. Well, services, but not everyone can run Tiny Tiny RSS. Anyway, you should be taking full advantage of RSS. (via)
- You can now pre-order the Edible Games Cookbook even if you weren’t in the Kickstarter.
- Stripping tabs in ‘here’ documents. I wish I had known this years ago.
- The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software.
- Markov chains, explained visually. (via)
- Hidden gems of xterm. (via)
Your unrelated item of the week: Please enjoy this masterclass in comedy timing from a pizza. (via)
I am having trouble keeping up with BSD news items. This is a good problem to have.
- The History of a Security Hole. Cross-BSD. (via)
- hard state soft state confusion. A followup on the previous link.
- NetBSD 7.2 is out. More than one branch is supported, if you find yourself saying “didn’t 8 just release?”
- 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD. Useful; probably can extrapolate out. (via)
- OpenBSD Gaming Resource (2018.08 update). I didn’t realize this was getting regular updates; that’s a good thing. (via)
- HumbleBundle sale. Runs for another 5 days.
- OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go. I appreciate the in-depth hardware listing.
- A look beyond the BSD teacup: OmniOS installation. Try to ignore the meme image linked in that article; it’s an example of BSD culture trying to destroy itself. The article is good for examining OmniOS.
- OPNSense 18.7.1 released.
- OpenBSD-current changes as an RSS feed.
- Valuable News – 2018/08/25 and 2018/09/02.
- New ZFS Boot Environments Tool.
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 15 – Configuration – Fonts & Frameworks.
- arm64 gains RETGUARD. OpenBSD architecture.
- Theo on the latest Intel issues. “currently public artifacts”, should give you pause.
- OpenBSD Foundation gets first 2018 Iridium donation! I had not heard of Handshake before.
- Native Encryption for ZFS on FreeBSD CFT. (via)
- OpenSSH 7.8 is out. (via)
I’ve been linking to other parts of this, but now it’s on one page: “Zenripper“, talking about how to overclock/underclock a Threadripper system on DragonFly.
This week’s BSDNow covers a few things I haven’t seen yet – a news update from the FreeBSD Foundation, and a status report on Project Trident.
DragonFly’s default compiler is now gcc-8. This will help with some amount of dports builds.
Reminder: the next KnoxBUG meeting is tomorrow, September 5th, with a demo of TridentOS.
There’s a social meeting for NYCBUG tomorrow, September 5th, at Suspenders. As far as I can tell, the only difference between “technical meeting” and “social meeting” is if there’s a presentation. Go, if you are near.
If you are near Stockholm, there’s a BSD User Group meeting tomorrow night. Go, if you are near.
It turns out Threadripper (well, a Ryzen CPU) delivers good performance at relatively low power usage. As I sit in a room made too warm by a single desktop machine running, this lower wattage sounds pretty good to me.
Unofficial accidental “time” theme this week. Also charts!
- “GlitchPEG is perhaps the first screen saver that’s excellent at detecting buffer overflow exploits.” XScreenSaver 5.4 is out.
- Arguably the same topic: A Brief History of Generative Art. (via)
- “Update: After 87 hours, I stopped waiting.“
- On the Virtues of Terseness.
- The Emperor’s New Tools?: pragmatism and the idolatry of the web. (via many places)
- wideNES – Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games. Nice technical explanation. (via)
- PaperTTY, an e-ink terminal emulator. Note that it’s running on solar power in some of the pictures. (via)
- Time is crazy, part 1: Working with Timezones. With graphs! (via)
- Time makes us crazy, part 2: Higgins Time.
- Time is poorly defined even now, part 3: [tz] Mozambique officially uses LMT?
- Takeaways from SIGGRAPH 2018. (via)
- Related: Technical Papers Preview: SIGGRAPH 2018.
- Metasploit+Amazon SES, or debugging Sendmail’s SMTP Authentication. Debugging SMTP when it’s encrypted. (via)
- Dogbot.
- The Curta Calculator, which I’ve mentioned before.
- The Pudding, where I’ve linked before, but I didn’t realize how much data research/visualization there was on the site. (via)