iwm(4) on DragonFly has been updated, mostly with patches from the FreeBSD version of the network driver.
/proc/self/exe now exists on DragonFly. This is probably most useful if you are porting software.
The mini-theme this week is all DragonFly. There’s been some commits lately to well-known tools so I’m going to gather them here.
- A bugfix for FUSE led to it being re-enabled.
- However, FUSE was designed in Linux-specific ways, so it does not translate well to BSD.
- So, Matthew Dillon went to town.
- Also, interfaces now automatically get a loopback route. This means wg(4) (i.e. WireGuard) devices can ping themselves.
- vn(4) devices can now be detached.
- mount_cd9660(8) (ISO mounting) gained a number of features.
- And TeX Live 2024 for DragonFly is out.
- DragonflyBSD on Acer Nitro AN515-51/58-XXX Laptops. (via)
I have been saving up posts from some long threads on the TUHS and COFF mailing lists, so you’re getting some esoteric history today.
- Every OS Sucks. (Youtube, via)
- Aztec C, which I did not know existed. (via)
- “romcc is a C compiler which produces binaries which do not rely on RAM, but
instead only use CPU registers.“ - Ford, first commercial BSD UNIX client. (via)
- Random facts about rand().
- Related: insults as random passphrases, a generator. (via)
- paranoia, test your computer’s floating-point ability. (via)
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know. (via)
- Are We Watching The Internet Die? “Habsburg AI” (via)
- The Coherent operating system. I’ve never heard of this before – a sort of clean-room UNIX. (via)
- XigmaNAS, a horribly-named FreeNAS replacement. (via)
- 20 Years of NYC*BUG and Can We Handle 20 More? April 3rd.
It’s for COBUG, and details are available here.
Command line / history is I guess the mini-theme.
- ELIZA Effect, something important to remember about AI. From a dinosaur blog of all places.
- The Art and History of Lettering Comics. Authoritative work from a master in the field. You have seen his work even if you do not realize it. (via)
- State of the Terminal. (via)
- The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock. Links to interesting sources.
- Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way. (via)
- Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast. (via)
- Related: Structural Regular Expressions (PDF). You may not be surprised to see it’s by the author of sam. (via)
- Followup: video is up for the most recent NYCBUG event, “NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist“.
- Editing long commands in your shell. (via)
No theme arose this week.
- The Voyager Keyboard.
- Important efibootmgr(8) Command.
- Shift Happens is a fantastic set of books. Sold out, but dig around in the companion for gems like this.
- History of the supercomputer, a video. (via)
- Post-Scarcity Web Mapping. (via)
- A history of the tty. In-depth!
- The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal. (via)
- Player vs. Monster, a video game talk. (via)
- nixbsd: An unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel. (via)
- RGBtoHDMI, converts old computer RGB outputs to newer video with a Pi. (via, via)
It took almost 3 decades, but it’s much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with ping now.
The March 6 NYCBUG meeting is coming up, and it sounds like something I’d want to see: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist, working remote using only a $100 Pinebook. Be sure to RSVP if you can go cause this is in-person and they need to know who is coming into the NYU facility.
The Realtek E2600 – “Killer Ethernet Adapter” – is now supported in DragonFly. Or it’s an Intel product? I’m not sure.
I had Covid in February, which made me sit still long enough to find all these links way ahead of time.
- “I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH” Linked for the links within. (via)
- Max Brückner’s Polyhedra (1900). I’d enjoy constructing these.
- Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets). (via)
- Download the whole IF Archive.
- Gathering Structures. ‘Lightning talks’ can be fun.
- Okay, Color Spaces. CIE XYZ is new to me. That rhymes! (via)
- Images are just videos with a single frame. A Sora quote that is intensely wrong, and I have a decades-old argument against it, The rest of that article is spot-on, too.
- Huffman Codes – How Do They Work? (via)
- Ahab’s Leg Dilemma: Part 1. (via)
- A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us. Does this mean the Hail Mary Cloud finally petered out?
- British Cryptids: The Ramflaggie Of Argyll. The point is not the story it tells but the style it uses; this is a modern video. (via)
- Create for Yourself. Own your work, and own where it is located, or else it will eventually be lost.
You get to see a rabbit hole I went down just by following the links in order.
- Today in “Daylight Savings Chaos Monkey”.
- A description/history of Centrex phone systems.
- How SSH port became 22. Surprisingly simple. (via)
- Folk search engines. You’re sorta reading one now.
- The Berkeley Software Distribution. (via)
- Box109: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. An excellent transcript of a talk about design and what it means.
- Death, Lonely Death. 15 billion miles away and we’re still talking to Voyager 1. (via)
- Say We Do, a broadsheet about game design. $1 to subscribe. Much more satisfying delivered like this than via Twitter or SubStack. (via)
- This led me to some other treats like Social Generation of D&D Stats In the Time of Pandemic, and The Classroom Game of Cool Swords.
- That then led me to MOSAIC Strict, a way of defining modular, minimal games.
- Undying Dusk, a game inside a PDF. (via)
Aaron LI’s written up a nice summary of what’s been added to support WireGuard on DragonFly and how to get started. You need to be on -master to use it, but if you want to read about it there’s always the man page.
Mini-theme: collections of media.
- Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023.
- ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. (via)
- NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available! There’s now a Wii port, which is neat. (via)
- The Salmar Construction, a 1970s “large music synthesis engine”. (via)
- The miracle of the commons. Principles that apply to open source projects. (via)
- Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist.
- An RNG that runs in your brain.
- Lost infosec battles.
- The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive. (via)
- This message does not exist.
- Computational Poems. (via)
- At long last: the MWL Title Index.
- A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Omni: Souvenir.
No theme this week.
- BSDCan papers submissions close tomorrow – get yours in.
- Next NYCBUG meeting, March 6: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist. Traveling and working with only a Pinebook.
- Anatomy of a Hollerith Card.
- More stories about the famously idiosyncratic author of that previous link, David Mills. (via)
- Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents. (via)
- What is a terminal-based game you’ve played that’s worth mentioning?
- Understanding phonetic symbols. Written for IBM but talks about a standard.
- D100 sheets. I enjoy just reading these. (via)
- Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. (via)
There’s a huge amount of commits for this, but I’ll point at the first with FreeBSD code; one of several incorporating OpenBSD changes, and of course it rolls out to tools.
Deep dives week. I was on the road almost all week for my main job so a bit sparse.
- Dave Mills, the guy who created NTP (and possibly FTP or at least one of the earliest versions) died recently. Here’s some history / anecdotes. (via)
- Single-service sites are getting very specific. (via)
- Origin story of the Digital logo, which is not Helvetica. (via)
- Tom Harned wrote up DragonFly on a Thinkpad 480.
- web-adventures.org. (via)
- The “Cheap” Web. (also via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Send my former coworker to baking school. He thinks more intensely about bread and how to make it, than anyone you’ve ever met. I’m not exaggerating. Help him out; it’ll make his day.
I have been on the road so it’s a short week. The links are more cheery, though.
- Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens.
- The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
- The Dobbstown Mirror. I subscribe; it’s a treat in the mail
- Ship of Theseus on Wikipedia is a Ship of Theseus. (via)
- Crusty, the Indestructible Mac. (via)
- Reboi, I suppose the 2020s version of a MAME Cabinet.
- The Book 8088. I almost think it’s a prank?
- Inside .git. (via)
I’ve got some real gems this week.
- MULTIPLY – A BOOK ABOUT CALCULATORS. Discussion of the open source tools used to process it. (via)
- diagram.website, or An Internet Map. Lots of links there. (via)
- Googling symptoms of the flu.
- Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request. AI, a customizable spam tool. (via)
- What was ISDN? Analog lines completely going away makes me nervous.
- The biggest problem with selling print books is the software. A nice Print on Demand summary in there.
- ou sont les blogs d’antan? Lots of links to other esoteric blogs in there. (via)
- Fast NetBSD booting, which led me to smolBSD.
- DSA removal from SSH. Matters most if you are running an very outdated system.
- Modern Commodore 64 motherboards.
- Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics. Applies to DragonFly too.
- Hardening an OpenBSD Workstation.
Your unrelated extended music of the week: Bill Laswell featuring DJ Rob Swift – Reanimation. Which of course reminds me that Rob Gets Busy. If you like that, here’s a crazy amount of beat juggling, at its best when it creates new music and rhythms. (via)
The DragonFly release process now includes an automatic build of supporting packages.