Michael W. Lucas is speaking tonight at NYCBUG and it’s streaming, so you can see it too. He also has launched a new 10-days-only Kickstarter for “Networking for System Administrators: The Defenestrated Edition“.
This week, extended commentary on the links.
- Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links. “Even today, thirty years after Jerry and David, I still visit bookmarked webpages that maintain human-curated lists of links.” You can guess my opinion of that.
- Higher Intellect, a huge repository of documents of the sort you’d find squirreled away on the Internet in the late 90’s. There’s a PHRACK section, for instance, or nice copies of US WW2 posters.. (via)
- Defeating Mouse Lint. Mechanical mice only existed for a specific period in time, and probably never will again.
- The Tomb of Horrors. I had heard of this ‘impossible’ D&D module but never actually tried it.
- how-to.computer. This is the 2020s versions of old homesteading guides. Can you self-host too much? I think not. (via)
- LaTeX for Complete Novices. Nobody ever seems excited about LaTeX but people always report “I did a ton of work with it without issue”. (via)
- The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing. There’s some great quotable bits in this but my favorite is “The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. “
- The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder. Even if it was a blunder, the effects would have been limited by the lack of consumer Internet. (via)
- LibreOffice Substitutes. Something here to try for everyone.
- Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the idea of software platforms that doesn’t exist to disintermediate users and extract revenue intriguing.
- Two important things: the longest domain name I’ve seen yet, and the Kickstarter for Run Your Own Mailserver, an important technical book and also because SMTP is becoming hard to do at any scale other than “huge”. (via)
- I signed up for the aforementioned Kickstarter as should you; note there’s a Signed Useless EBook edition. Don’t buy it, just be entertained by the concept.
I made it through the third major ERP transition I’ve done professionally, and it was successful. I hope I never have to do another. Also, I have a lot of open tabs.
- BSDCan has a planning blog.
- ChiBUG meets on the 17th.
- Get yourself on a PDP-11 right now. Or others. (via)
- The origins of the stand directory.
- The classic book ‘AWK Programming Language’ is getting an update.
- x/y/zmodem history, and you can still use it.
- Nine years uptime. (via)
- “We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms“. That would be this site right here. (via)
- Open charter companies and relicensing. (via)
- Why htmx Does Not Have a Build Step.
- XScreenSaver 6.07 out now. Skulloop!
- tentacular, a new Sharecode film.
- HONK, a new Cyriak film.
- Kagi smallweb. Endless amounts of things to look at here.
- Collections: The Gap in the Armor of Baldur’s Gate and 5e.
- Thinking Seriously About Halfling Empires.
Keeping your published fiction and technical book list in SNMP is definitely a new use of a MIB to me.
Note the new-to-me book news in there.
- The NetBSD Foundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022.
- FreeBSD 13.1 beta2 is out.
- Controlling Resource Limits with rctl in FreeBSD.
- OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems.
- Testing parallel forwarding.
- NetBSD is in Google Summer of Code 2022.
- LibreSSL 3.5.1 development branch as well as 3.4.3 (stable) and 3.3.6 released.
iwx(4)gains 11ac 80MHz channel support.- Yet Another New Book: “Letters to ed(1)”. From the FreeBSD Journal Letters Column.
- New Sponsorships Open, and More Crowdfunding. For OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. There’s some interesting notes on Kickstarter in there too.
- EuroBSDCon 2022 CFP is open.
- an open source git server written in Elixir that works on OpenBSD. (via)
- NetBSD Full system backups with FFS snapshots, ZFS and dump(8). (via)
No mini-theme.
- The day the IoT died. “they are future-proofing us as a consumer for them, not the things they sell us”. (via, via)
- More Cyberdecks should have CRTs instead of LCDs.
- DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd edition is out.
- Predicting developments in real world conflict from patterns of failed logins.
- XScreenSaver 6.03 is out.
- Usenet over NNCP. NNCP is new to me. (via)
- Obsolete technologies that will baffle future generations. All of these were present at the same time just 20 years ago. (via)
- Map of Reddit and wilderness.land. (Both via)
- VIM – Minimal Setup Explained. (via)
- Winamp 2 reimplemented for the browser. (via)
- Vmail. Vole mail. (via)
No allusions or puns in this week’s BSD Now title, for sure. It’s all Michael W. Lucas interviewing, so sure to be a good time.
More BUG meetings are happening, which is great.
- Next ChiBUG meeting: in person, July 20th. I’ll post a reminder.
- The slides from the most recent NYCBUG meeting.
- The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 & VAX. The article itself is not about BSD, specifically, but some of the comments at the source link are.
- A Glimpse of the Canon object.station 41. A NeXT iteration I didn’t know about. (via)
- Meet the Summer 2021 [FreeBSD] Foundation Interns.
- Status of Online Conference Software on FreeBSD.
- Valuable News – 2021/07/05 and 2021/07/12.
- Using youtube-dl on FreeBSD. Or any BSD, probably.
- Repairing Akonadi on FreeBSD.
- Filtering spam using Rspamd and OpenSMTPD on OpenBSD.
- NetBSD/Desktop: Scalable Workstation Systems. Old but interesting. (via)
- [Semibug] RAID 0 or 1 for OpenBSD. Follow the thread for more info.
- Total Mastery, the bundle. Includes multiple FreeBSD Mastery books.
Some looks backward to prior links, but in a good way.
- Beatportal’s Definitive Guide to Techno. (via)
- Which reminds me of eternal favorite Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.
- Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong. There’s a whole chapter about this in the most in-depth regex book I ever read.
- ifconfig.co. Fetch that site for your plain text IP, plus other features. (via)
- How does Go know time.Now? (via)
- When Hackers Were Heroes. A worthwhile history read / book review. (via)
- Map ruler overlays in Cogmind. Linked for the quality demonstration animations.
- AFFINITIES, public domain images bound.
- Gossamer Network, an exploration of very specific data visualizations through a website. (via)
- Generative Unfoldings, computer art. (also via)
- 50 Years of Text Games: 1983: Suspended and 1984: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
- Even the footnotes have footnotes.
- research!rsc: Unix Viruses. Linked for the history. (via)
- Picking an operating based on feel.
Michael W. Lucas’s ebook sponsorships and print sponsorships for “TLS Mastery” will close in the next 24-48 hours; get in there if you want to participate.
I haven’t had many posts this past week because of a mix of work then holidays. but there’s always Lazy Reading.
- My favorite essays of life advice.
- Lode Runner.
- “just don’t use any non-essential cookies“
- Cemetery of Soviet computers. Gotta reinstall STALKER. (via)
- “Tell me you work in tech without telling me you work in tech.” (via)
- Social shell games.
- Web Conversation From the Other Side. Followup from last week.
- A Book Like Foo: Powerful Book Recommendations. (via)
- Smalltalk Zoo: Stories and simulations around the evolution of Smalltalk. (via)
- Christmas Demos.
- Repairing and bootstrapping an IBM 5170 PC/AT, part 1 and part 2.
- New Montague Portal novel: “Drinking Heavy Water”.
This week’s BSD Now is a special treat: an interview with author Michael W. Lucas, author of a bunch of BSD and non-BSD books. If you’re looking for presents, he’s selling extra books originally intended for convention sales…
I have nothing to post about, for the first time in a while, so here is a treat I have been saving: Request for biographies. (follow the whole thread) It’s a long thread from the SIGCIS mailing list for biographies of various people important to computing/mathematics, and there are some real gems in there. Your local bookstore or library should have many of these.
Completed Tuesday, in an effort to reduce tab count in my browser.
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- A few tips about the command cd.
- FOSS laptops and subpar displays. Battery life is I think the hidden reason for this.
- How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History. “A century ago, nobody, not even a science fiction writer, predicted that someone would take a photo of a parking lot to remember where they’d left their car.” (via)
- Ideas Embodied in Metal: Babbage’s Engines Dismembered and Remembered. Chunks of the Babbage Differential Engine still exist, from 120+ years ago. So does Babbage’s brain, apparently. (via)
- DOOM via pregnancy test screen. (via)
- Vim as an IDE (VimConf 2020 Talk) (via)
- Starship, the cross-shell prompt. (via)
- “Damn your blood”: Swearing in early modern English. (via)
- Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW? A comic about public domain, of course free to download. (via)
- The Door Problem, or explaining what a game designer does. (via)
- moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young. (via)
- Internet Ascendant, Part 1: Exponential Growth. Everything in this series is pleasant to read.
- Winamp Skin Museum. (via)
- Bullfrog after Populous. Mentions underappreciated game Syndicate.
- Walk Cycles. (via)
- The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday. (via)
I went esoteric this week, and it was fun!
- 7 habits of effective text editing. (video, via)
- My divergence from ‘proper’ Vim by not using and exploring features.
- 7 versatile Vim commands that are easy to memorize. (via)
- Arwes: Futuristic Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk Graphical User Interface Framework for Web Apps. It really is that. (via)
- Asciimatics – create full-screen text UIs on any platform. (via)
- How not to name variables.
- “Imperial is lit, but Metric is liter”… Linked for the measurement graph.
- An archive of a different type. I did not know this existed, but I hoped it existed, if that makes sense.(via)
- Kernel Mode Linux : Execute user processes in kernel mode. Hey, remember Windows NT and how a video error could bring it all down? (via)
- Model and Prototype of VMS Using the Mach 3.0 Kernel. 2 dead ends make a new dead end. (PDF, via)
- High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure. Free book. (via)
No theme, but plenty of variety.
- A reimplementation of NetBSD based on a microkernel.
- Valuable News – 2020/08/24.
- “TLS Mastery” Covers Reveal, with T-shirts and Posters.
- TrueNAS 12.0 beta out.
- MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out.
- pkgdb belongs in libdata, not var. Them’s fightin’ words!
- rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc. Them too!
- GhostBSD financial reports. I like seeing this out in the open. (via)
- What is the oldest BSD? Not as short an answer as you may think. (via)
- Tarsnap podcast episode with FreeBSD ex security officer Colin Percival. (via)
- From 8′ to 4″: massive pkgsrc performance gain by replacing a shell script with awk.
It’s rare, but I was able to collect most of these links more than 24 hours before you are reading them.
- Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC.
- The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists. Minitel!
- The Internet’s Many Branches.
- Roguelike Celebration is going to happen! (virtually) Plus there’s a call for papers.
- PRINTING PRESSES ARE GIANT GPUS. (via)
- New book: “Cash Flow for Creators”. If you are working anything but a corporate job ever, this will have value for you.
- The Deprecated *nix API. (via)
- When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery. (via)
- Announcing the Second Edition of Learning Markdown.
- Dungeons & Dragons at a Distance: Early Play-by-Mail D&D. (via)
- Hagoromo chalks, progress & Vim. (via I lost it, sorry)
- Desperate Pleas for Nothing. I get at least one of these every week.
- C&C open sourced. (via)
Emacs and Vim content; I feel like I should always have one with the other.
- Tiny arcade stuffed in an NES controller.
- Text Radio: Realtime written interviews hosted in Google Docs. (via)
- Making Emacs popular again. (via)
- Termshark: a terminal UI for tshark, inspired by Wireshark. (via)
- An emotional trip to the 80’s: Developing Games for the Speccy. (via)
- The story behind Cryo and Westwood’s 16-bit Dune games. There’s a lot of period-specific imagery in that link that’s fun to look at. (via)
- Vim as a Markdown Editor. (via)
- Film restored from 1888. (via)
- Synth links at things magazine.
- I Turned a 1920’s Typewriter into an EDM Drum Machine. (via)
- Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks. (via)
- 90 Days With The Pinebook Pro. (via)
- SSH Tunnel – Local, Remote and Dynamic Port Forwarding. (via)
- We are complicit in our employer’s deeds.
- Text Adventures. (via)
- Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases. (via)
- Bug Stories. (via)
- The case of the mysterious –help directory.
- Library JSON – A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads and
- Related: TRACKING READING.
I could not come up with a good roguelike link this week, but I am hitting many of my other usual targets.
- Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal. Right up my alley. (via)
- Clocking a 6502 to 15GHz (!). Lode Runner would go too fast!
- Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim. (via)
- John Conway died. Known for Game of Life, but responsible for much, much more – read his published work. (via)
- Related: Hackaday Game of Life projects.
- Smalltalk-80 on VAX/VMS. (via)
- 3mux, terminal multiplexer inspired by i3. I like the animated image; better than a thousand-word README. (via)
- “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open. MWL nonfiction, worth it.
- “git sync murder” status. MWL fiction, also worth it.
- Tree diagrams in computer science and other fields. Links for you to read, or to find books to read.
- The Hinman Collator, a mechanical version of diff(1). (via)
- THE SECRET LIFE OF MACHINES: The Videos. Cartoons! (also via)
- Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, the paper version of Roam Research. That is the sort of link pairing I love to do for Lazy Reading.
- In weird coincidence, here’s that word again: creating and linking zettelkasten notes in vim.
- Gnomes. “Most everyone hates gnomes.”
- CommunityRule. There’s a mapping here onto open source projects.
BUG meetings are canceled, but this can’t be surprising at this point.
- Installing FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi 1/2/3. (via)
- Tale of two hypervisor bugs – Escaping from FreeBSD bhyve. (via)
- SNMP Mastery is out. (related: The Print Book Trade, and Money)
- NYCBUG meetings are suspended for obvious meetings, but there’s online chat.
- BSDCan 2020 will be online-only.
- No April ChiBUG meeting.
- FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merging.
- OpenBSD andIPv6.
- WireGuard Gives Linux a Faster, More Secure VPN. Linked cause there’s BSD support too. (via)
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2020Q1 release.
- BSD Link Roundup 4.8.
- Wifi renewal restarted.
- LLDB work concluded.
- Valuable News – 2020/04/06.
- WRATH: Aeon of Ruin on OpenBSD!
- Testing AGS games on OpenBSD! That’s Adventure Game Studios.
- OPNsense 20.1.4 released.