Remember: there’s a separate document about porting FreeBSD drivers to DragonFly. I note it cause it’s useful and because Rimvydas Jasinskas just updated it.
The links this week aren’t necessarily long, but they are definitely “make-you-think” material.
- The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing. Paul Ford. The story abounds with good quotes, and good summaries of the strangeness that was LISP, or Plan 9, or etc. (via)
- That led me to the Squeak website, cause I always had a vague desire to learn Smalltalk, someday.
- Best Practices for Cache Management.
- Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch.
- WinAmp, recreated in Javascript. Feature-filled. (via)
- Paradise OS. (also via)
- Linux’izing your Windows PC into a dev machine. I don’t like this trend of running Windows and pretending it’s not. (via)
- Tough love, or stultifying ossification? I don’t know.
- The Bandcamp 2017 Year in Review. Bandcamp is a good idea even if all it does is avoid streaming audio monoculture.
- Spectre Mitigations in Microsoft’s C/C++ Compiler. I link to this to show that the mitigation methods users rely on are secret, cause it’s not open source. So this researcher has to rely on evaluating the output rather than the code itself.
- Edible Games. Exactly what the name implies. (via)
- Can’t get UNIX v7/x86 to work in virtual machine.
- How to redesign a tech logo. Monoculture, like I said.
Reached overflow again! That secretly makes me happy.
- Discord channels for BSD’s?
- SemiBUG’s speaker schedule for the next few months is published. Note next meeting is on the 20th.
- SVS to mitigate meltdown. (NetBSD)
- Unix Architecture Evolution from the 1970 PDP-7 to the 2018 FreeBSD. Another FOSDEM video, which I note because it shows code history imported back for multiple decades.
- Show HN: OpenBSD Email Service – A free-email alternative. (via)
- FreeBSD/EC2 history.
- Under which circumstances is NetBSD a better option than the other BSDs?
- Citrix ICA Receiver Support in BSDs.
- SSH Mastery 2/e out. Technically not a BSD-specific book, but you know the author was using BSD as the base, and includes it in the material.
- Which BSD distro is suitable as a Linux QEMU host if someone is curious about BSD?
- Trying iocage to get an old version of FreeBSD.
- Google Summer of Code and FreeBSD, NetBSD.
This week’s BSDNow has a ZFS explainer about what the theoretical maximums on storage could be, plus a whole lotta DTrace. (Needed a Sun reference in their title this week.)
This isn’t really a dramatic event, but Rimvydas Jasinskas has added support for DWARF-4 line number tables in binutils 2.27. I am linking it to remind everyone that a little bit of Tolkien, in the form of elves (elfs?) and dwarfs (dwarves?) lives in your computer. We need a ORC standard. Oh. Hobbit? Hobbit.
Tomohiro Kusumi has brought in exFAT support to DragonFly from FreeBSD. Useful for cross-platform drives when FAT32 isn’t enough, and NTFS brings its own problems.
Some really fun things this week.
- A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files. A fun, crazy read. (via)
- Miniature Macintosh Plus. Also crazy. (via)
- Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest, going on now.
- Centralise Your Bash History. (via)
- Computer Role-Playing Games Book released. (via multiple)
- The Case for Automatic Updates. (via)
- X’s network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure . (via)
- How Facebook Is Killing Comedy. And why I keep this all on my own blog. (via)
- OpenSC2K – An Open Source Remake of SimCity 2000. (via)
- From the same source, openra.net, a Red Alert remake.
- Backblaze 2017 Q4 and 2017 yearly report. (via)
- spectre and the end of langsec. (via)
- Plan 9 Public Grid. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the day: Verse.
Very much last-minute; compiled 20 minutes before bed Friday night.
- a2k18 Hackathon preview: Syncookies coming to PF. (via)
- An Empirical Study on the Reliability of UNIX Utilities (1989). Some of it is early BSD. How much still applies? (via)
- The Origin of the word Daemon. (via)
- “SSH Mastery 2/e” copyedits back. BSD-based.
- Sponsoring a Scam. New BSD book on the way, I think, and you can sponsor it.
- OPNsense 18.1.1 released. No, wait, 18.1.2.
- Overriding pkgrsc’s default Framework path (on macOS).
- BSD from scratch – from source to OS with ease on NetBSD. Also as video. (via)
- AT&T copyrighting 3 blank lines. Sorta relevant to the BSD split. (via)
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/02/05.
- Remi Locherer’s EuroBSDcon 2017 Talk.
- NetBSD – A modern operating system for your retro battlestation. Video. In fact, all the FOSDEM 2018 videos are up, I think.
BSDNow 232 this week covers FOSDEM 2018, cause both hosts were there. There’s other news items, too.
Another BSD User Group event tomorrow, the 7th: HELBUG, a brand new BUG starting in Helsinki, Finland. The announcement has details on where to find it and what they’ll be doing. Go, if you are near.
This Wednesday, NYCBUG has Christos Zoulas speaking on “Reproducible Builds on NetBSD“. See the announcement for details. Go, if you are near New York City.
I finally worked through my Lazy Reading link backlog.
- Computer-generated books, a list.
- Every Icon, eventually drawing every 32×32 monochrome image possible. I remember a 8×8 physical hardware version of this called All Possible Images, some years ago. Google doesn’t remember it, though, or chooses to give me links to API docs instead.
- Frankenbook, Shelley’s Frankenstein with additional essays and annotations worked directly into the original text. This is something web pages were built for. (via)
- MacTote, for lugging your FatMac around. (via)
- Grandma’s Zelda map. (also via)
- Actual screenshot.
- Towards LaTeX in the Browser. (via)
- Unix influence in history. (via)
- The UNIX Operating System: A Model for Software Design. Via this page. The target is behind a paywall. The mention of Kernighan as an author, though, made me wonder if he had published it separately. He hasn’t, but I did find his books page at Princeton.
- My Delorean runs Perl. (via)
- The revival of blogging. English translated version.
- The vi input model. (via)
- Mycroft II, an open source voice assistant. Are there more like this?
- How’s your soldering technique?
- Welcome to Armageddon! An excellent roguelike history from an excellent magazine.
- Why create a new Unix shell? (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: see the last paragraph of this Don Hertzfeldt interview; it’s important. “Every time you pay to watch something you’re casting a vote. You’re saying, ‘Hey go make more of this, please.’ Audiences have all of the power to shape what gets made and what doesn’t.”
Whee!
- The history of NetBSD/atari and support for ATARI compatible Milan. Not in English, but it’s a slide deck so lots of pictures. (via)
- The OpenBSD Foundation 2018 Fundraising Campaign. “If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.” (via)
- Any good Unix options available for X86?
- The LLVM Sanitizers stage accomplished. (via)
- ZFS vs. OpenZFS.
- TrueNAS makes the cut for Avid editing.
- DiscoverBSD for 2018/01/29.
- Install OpenBSD on dedibox with full-disk encryption. (via)
- OPNSense 18.1 released.
BSDNow has made it so far that I have to double-check the episode number! In 231, they cover some history and some upcoming software work.
dragonflydigest.com is changing providers today, so the site may go missing for a while as DNS updates, and as I scramble my config.
If you don’t have an Intel CPU, but still want to perform microcode updates, cpucontrol(8) now supports more recent AMD CPUs.
The default kernel config for DragonFly has changed: Sascha Wildner has added the acpi, gpio_acpi, gpio_intel, smbus and smbacp devices. If you are using a custom kernel, you’ll probably want to add these. If you aren’t using a custom kernel – you should have no negative effect.
I’m already filling in next week’s Lazy Reading links, there’s so much.
- An Open Letter to the Perl Community. Getting from Perl 5 to Perl 6. (via)
- chart.business. (via)
- Teaching an Almost 40-year Old UNIX about Backspace. (via)
- khal, a terminal calendar. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- 10 PRINT, a book about a single-line Commodore 64 program. (via swildner)
- Wireguard, a possible IPSec/OpenVPN replacement. (via)
- ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation. “decentralized social network protocol”, and a first step out of the walled garden. A very pleasant-to-read specification, too! (via)
- My favorite games of 2017. This will eat some hours of your time.
- This week in references: echoes, breakbeats, the new sound of music. The “Breakbeat Deconstruction” video is pleasant auditory history.
- Drummer From Another Mother, a Moog Music product. Listen, it’s the sound of analog! (via)
- USB Killer, now with pyrotechnic payload.
- The Screenless Office. (via)
- System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware. (via)
- Meanwhile is now available on Steam! Plus extra DLC comic! Meanwhile is a physical comic built as a maze, or perhaps nonlinear book, and here it is in software.