About This Site – DragonFly BSD Digest

Another backup story

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:34:03 +0000

Every few years, something happens and Hammer’s snapshotting saves me. Last week, this host had a power outage and MySQL managed to mangle the WordPress database for this site. Fixing it needed only: cd /var/hammer cd var/[date of last good snapshot]/db/mysql cpdup -VV -v . /var/db/mysql I am writing this down in part because I …

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Link drip or weekend summary?

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:46:32 +0000

I’ve been posting in this new pattern for a while now. The content is mostly the same – DragonFly updates, BSD user meetings, oddball mostly history links – but I’m posting as I see them instead of doing a weekend summary. Which do you prefer? The summary or the drip?

Layout fiddling

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 02:29:37 +0000

I’m working in my limited spare time to change the site to enable more frequent, smaller posts – which means the layout is going to get fiddled with too. It won’t all finish in one night; please be patient with me.

(yes, I’d like to do another personal memepool.)

Link creation tools

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:16:32 +0000

I’ve been looking for a way to make the posting process quicker for the Digest. My existing process has been to collect open tabs and categorize emails, then go through them later, turning them into links and source links. I’d like to be able to post them as I read them – a link per post, even. The closest tools I’ve found for this are Press This! / Press This Extended, but both appear to be abandoned and no longer compatible. Suggestions welcomed.

Me, talking now

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 23:04:07 +0000

I’m on at SEMIBUG’s meeting right now.

~~I hope to have a recording to post later.~~ Nnnnope! A lesson for you and me both; test recording before an actual event starts.

Patreon followup

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 15:21:47 +0000

If you enjoy reading my posts, whether the DragonFly-specific material during the week or the weekend rollups, I have a Patreon account where you can effectively tip me.

I’m not trying to turn this into real income, so I haven’t been plugging it – but a number of people have been contributing and I really appreciate it. I have my own reoccurring Patreon pledges, and this is a good time to point you at Linda Medley (cause I have a number of her books), ABBADON (for Kill Six Billion Demons), and Cooking Issues (cause their podcast is fun). None of that is BSD or even computer related.

HTTPS default

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 02:40:40 +0000

I thought I had done this before, but apparently not: the site is switched to https by default. Tell me if you notice problems from that.

Webmentions on the Digest

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 15:58:53 +0000

I’ve added Webmentions on the Digest. If you don’t know what that is, let me save you the Google search. It’s a method to connect discussion between blogs, similar to having a conversation on Twitter or whatever, except you aren’t storing your words away on someone else’s platform. The option to add your Webmention URL …

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Misc trivia

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 21:03:07 +0000

I did a rough count – 360 posts on the Digest for 2019. I haven’t been tracking per-year averages, but that’s good – I’m a daily digest, even without meaning to be!

No In Other BSDs, Lazy Reading this weekend

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 23:25:28 +0000

I didn’t get them put together early, and I won’t have time – sorry! It’s the first time I’ve missed it in a long time.

The Digest and TeleVideo

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 15:45:27 +0000

Thanks to Erik Blomberg and the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, I now know the Digest has reached a whole new operating system: CP/M. This entertains me.

(It’s the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can’t see the screen well enough.)

Cached cash reminder

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 26 May 2019 13:15:22 +0000

If you have been enjoying the Digest for many years, and you’d like to buy me a nice sandwich, you most certainly can.

Text mode cleanup

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 14:24:33 +0000

I suppose if the Digest is going to be looked at with a text-mode browser, I had better make sure it’s readable. I’ll work on that.

A quiet week, so thank you

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 04:44:02 +0000

It’s been a quiet week and I’ve finally caught up on my backlog of things to post, so I’ll take this moment to say: thank you, for reading. Especially, thank you to the Patreon supporters who have thrown in a few dollars; it’s actually paid forward to others I support on Patreon and bought me a nice coffee drink.

A holiday sandwich note

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 16:37:18 +0000

If you enjoy the Digest and want to get me to my goal of a free sandwich, I have a Patreon account. Merry Christmas/happy holidays! Normal article posting resumes tomorrow, of course.

Excuse Digest downtime

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 04:29:33 +0000

I have stuff to post, but moving DragonFly to 5.4, php to 7.2, postgres to 9.5, WordPress to 5.0, etc. Regular Digest transmissions should resume tomorrow.

Patreon and the Digest

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:21:26 +0000

I realized I’ve been working on the Digest for almost a decade and a half now, and I have readers outside of just DragonFly. I’ve always been grateful for the attention people pay to my aggressive trips down the rabbit hole.

I’m also always hungry. Hungry for more information, sure, but also for a sandwich. If you want to send me a link, that’s great, but until now you couldn’t really send me a sandwich. I’ve set up a Patreon page, so now you can.

The Digest, now on Mastodon @bsd.network

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 16:45:00 +0000

This is way overdue: I’m now posting Digest notes to bsd.network/@dragonflydigest, a BSD-specific Mastodon server.

It’s bothered me for a while that I’m autoposting Digest headlines to Twitter, which is useful for Twitter users but still supporting a walled garden. Mastodon is a better implementation of a similar idea, and bsd.network nicely groups all sorts of BSD people in one place. Right now I’m just posting the Digest headlines here into the Mastodon account there, but there’s added value from the additional BSD-specific conversation around it.

I haven’t (yet) found a way to translate the local timeline on bsd.network into a RSS feed, which would be super-handy…

Outage today for DragonFly Digest

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 15:09:48 +0000

dragonflydigest.com is changing providers today, so the site may go missing for a while as DNS updates, and as I scramble my config.

Fixed up archives

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 17:20:40 +0000

A minor bit of housekeeping: the archives page has been fixed up to correctly list all categories, and list posts grouped by month. So if you want to see what I posted under the roguelike category, or see what I posted in February 2011, you can. Post counts provided, too.