NYCBUG’s got a new meeting space to try out, and it’s on September 3rd. Go, if you are near.
I’ve had a surplus of links, so this is almost all stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks, pre-scheduled.
- microm8, an Apple][ emulator that adds new features. (via last week’s theme)
- Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?
- Installing *BSD in 2025 part 5. Wrapping up a series with some non-BSD, too.
- Building A Stirling Engine Bike. I don’t think it’s necessarily practical but I like the concept of a Stirling Engine.
- asncounter and grepcidr, two tools I wish I knew about long ago. (via)
- Mastodon has continued to function and grow for longer than the entire existence of Google+.
- Learning, AI, and John Searle’s Chinese Room.
- If OpenSSL were a GUI. (via)
- The New Dinosaurs, 2025.
- Objects should shut the fuck up. (via)
- The Lethal Trifecta and prompt injection.
- confusable_homoglyphs. (via)
The long-planned next meeting of NYCBUG is tomorrow. If you are going and have a Framework laptop, please bring it for testing HDMI. I assume it’s related to ongoing support work.
Meeting is canceled cause no presenter available.
I hope at least a few of the ideas this week are enjoyably novel to you.
- The original computer mouse. (third link)
- The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning. That first paragraph should be required reading.
- The Hype is the Product. (via)
- Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech. Managing knowledge workers is not a new idea but tech companies want to think it is. (from previous link)
- Curate your own newspaper with RSS. (via)
- Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD. See the CDE wiki for some screenshots; surely you’ve seen it before.
- The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models.
- Vibe code is legacy code. (via)
- TRMNL X. I preordered.
- Projects can’t be divorced from the people involved in them. The “Nazi Bar” idea sort of in reverse.
I preassembled this list of links over time, so some of them have probably changed. For the “I’m sorry…” link, that just means more material.
- Precision Clock Mk IV. Not kidding about the precision part. (via)
- Calibre News. An excellent complement to RSS.
- TMG, or Transmogrifier, a compiler for PDP-7. Not what I first thought. (via)
- Mark V. Shaney, really an early LLM. (via) Plus, this followup.
- Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine. I was in the same regional blizzard mentioned.
- I’m sorry I’ve written a joke.
- tmux cheat sheet. (also via)
- The Webcomic List. This re-acquainted me with some comics I haven’t seen in years. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Why Some Satellites Use NetBSD? (indirectly via)
- can an email go 500 miles in 2025? A nice sequel of sorts to the 500-mile email.
- The A2DVI gives the Apple II DVI and HDMI output.
- Towards a Complete List of Excellent Medieval/Fantasy Combat Scenes.
Some of these links are relevant to my personal history. (dinosaurs, mining)
- forbidden secrets of ancient X11 scaling technology revealed.
- The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. (via)
- Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting.
- The Historical Tech Tree. (via)
- watch(1) utility added to -current. Does what it sounds like.
- XScreenSaver 6.12. More Wayland changes.
- Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD.
- The Wild Wild Web.
- AI-operated vending machines and business process innovation (sorry). A decent analysis, though I feel like too many LLM examples are for avoiding feedback, when you want the opposite.
- Which leads me to Paul Pangaro’s Cybernetics page.
- New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal.
- FreeBSD 14.3 on FrankenPad T25. Linked for the FrankenPad.
- Some notes on X terminals in their heyday.
- Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. Preorders are open.
Your unrelated music of the week: Chali 2na x Cut Chemist – Melt Like Plastic. (via)
I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment.
- The Best Interfaces We Never Built.
- The 80s were shit. (via)
- Memory Banks.
- Malleable Software. (via)
- Lightweight C compilers.
- Exterminate all rational AI scrapers, redux.
- A year of funded FreeBSD.
- Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74. Few people realize how much of the modern software world came right from what he did. (via)
- So you should read Memories of Lisa for the details. (via)
- Unveiling the EndBOX: A NetBSD-based embedded box for EndBASIC.
- BoxyBSD. (via)
- Look for the UNIX license plate.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: What’s the best comic I’ve ever read? Lynda Barry is a master of the form. (via)
Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.
- WebSysctl is Now Live! I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it. (via)
- The GAFA Stack. Read section 3.
- 8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
- Mute when Locked. (via)
- Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students. You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point. (PDF, via)
- At one point, “..” did not exist.
- Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
- The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright. I don’t think people realize the scale of this. It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
- Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
- Make Stupid Things. (via)
- The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
- Dumbware, self-hosted solutions. I like this except for the dockering. (via)
Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.
May 14th, NYCBUG has Charlie Li presenting on the FreeBSD Laptop-Desktop Working Group, and DJ BSD? Anyway, go if you are near (but RSVP so they let you in!), and watch the stream if you are not.
Oddball link collection.
- Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
- Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
- windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
- Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
- GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
- Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
- XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
- The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
- checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
- I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
- Think Twice Dice.
Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.
Peter N. M. Hansteen runs a pf tutorial most years at BSDCan, and this year’s BSDCan is no different. He’s prepping now, so if you ask a good question, you’ll get taught the answer.
Some BSD-specific links mixed in.
- Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos. Scroll right. (via)
- What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video. (via, via)
- RDAP is replacing WHOIS. (via)
- The Flywheel Spin Top.
- Netnews: The Origin Story. USENET, or nntp, if you prefer. (PDF, via)
- The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
- A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
- Hacker Laws. (via)
- TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
- diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff. (Thanks, Paul)
- NumFOCUS concerns. “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title. (also thanks, Paul)
- The History of Solaris. “UNIX is plural.” (PDF, via)
- The modern OpenBSD home router. (via)
- tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod. (via)
Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point. Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful. (via)
Mini bot/brute force attacks theme.
- The New Control Society. A very long essay. (via)
- Do Not Comply With the Terms of Service. I don’t necessarily agree with the arguments but the links at the end are useful. (via)
- Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers.
- A different approach to blocking bad webbots by IP address
- and A deeper dive into mapping web requests via ASN, not by IP address
- and then Notes on blocking spam by filtering on ASN.
- Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others).
- A summary of my bot defence systems.
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face.
- And that leads to: iocane. (via)
- Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025. (via)
- KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD on Framework 13.
- FediMeteo.
- Designing A Portable Mac Mini. A fatmac is what it looks like to me.
No overriding theme this week, though several trends did start to crystallize.
- FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands. I like the low-resources aspect. (via)
- The HTML Review issue 3 and The HTML Review issue 4. Linked for the rotating table of contents / doorways table of contents; it’s neat. (via)
- this page is under construction. Read to the end for more links. (via)
- The Graphing Calculator Story, (via)
- “A calculator app? Anyone could make that.” (via)
- Manage UPS on FreeBSD. Linked cause it mentions how to turn off the beep.
- BSDCan 2025 registration is open.
- NarraScope registration is open too.
- The cleanest VAX you’ll ever see,
- Bolt Action, WWII minature gaming I’ve not seen before.
- A USB interface to the “Mother of All Demos” keyset. Borrowing one of Englebart’s original chorded keysets is the startling thing here.
A lessons learned week.
- Computer Science the Fun Way, a Humble Bundle. (via)
- Fight On! issue 16 is out. (via)
- FreeBSD and KDE Plasma generations. I think the right answer on versioning there.
- Patrick Collision’s bookshelf. (via)
- Framework 13 AMD Setup with FreeBSD. I could use a new laptop; this x220 is getting long in the tooth.
- Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men, a followup on the previous source.
- Owning your own space and content is important.
- Make yourself less valuable to tech companies. The sheer number of things you can turn off that are just extractive data about you is a sort of wake-up call. (via)
- BBC Micro emulation directly in the browser. (via)
- If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling. And leave extra cable length when you pull; everyone gets to learn this the hard way.
Done early!
- Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. For pre-order, and excerpts are available. I think this is a unique book; catch the limited print while you can. (via)
- Vim Spellcheck Cheat Sheet.
- NetBSD on Raspberry Pi!
- State of virtualizing the BSDs on Apple Silicon.
- From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer.
- Walter Bright’s Classic Empire, Empire Deluxe, and original author Walter Bright. (incidentally, original available as a port/pkg/port)
- Standalone Digital Scratch Instrument.
- Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD]. For reference.
- Free MWL excerpts/books. (via)
- If you’re going to GDC, there’s a Roguelike Celebration meetup on the 18th.
- UNIX advertisements. (via) From that page:
This Wednesday, Jim Brown presents on QEMU at NYCBUG’s monthly meeting. Go, if you are near, but RSVP first so you can get in. It should be streamed too.
Happy new year! I have some history gems in here – not archival material but people that made history, speaking again, now.
- A TI-99 programmer resurfaces. (via Paul Ivanov, thanks)
- Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit – The History of the BSD Daemon. The original artist, Phil Foglio, is still making excellent comics. (video, via)
- Technical Marvels, Part 9: Program-Controlled Musical Picture Clocks. Novel to me. (via)
- Developing a public-interest training commons of books. (via)
- Not BSDTalk, but talk(1) on BSD. Follow the thread.
- Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository. I remember reading this but not linking this. (via this long thread)
- An oral history of AutoDesk. (via)
- What an Atari workstation might have looked like.
- Apropos for the new year: BSDCan 2025 call for papers.
- MNT laptops are neat, but they also do… earrings? (via)
- Research of RAM data remanence times. (via)
- Public Domain Day at the Internet Archive.
- And at the Public Domain Review.
- QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, in 3 days. RSVP needed if you are going, which I recommend.
I could use a recommendation for a good, cheap registrar to use for domain names; I use gandi and the price has been creeping up. Any suggestions?
- Next NYCBUG: QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, 2025-01-08. QEMU is far more influential than I expected.
- For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. (via)
- The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023).
- A physical save button.
- Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (1978) vs Spanner (2012). (via)
- SCCS roach motel. A pretty exhaustive description of SCCS and the weave format.
- Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer.
- Public domain works done for NASA. (via previous)
- The Biggest Shell Programs in the World. You want to look and also look away. (via)
Links are from a wide range of sources this week; it’s often a good idea to follow the (via) tags to find even more.
- NYCBUG meets 12/4 at the usual time, for lightning talks.
- Maximizing Time For Reading. (via)
- Half-Life 2 20th anniversary. Documentaries like this are sort of about the game but also an inside track on software development case studies. (See also Psychodyssey)
- Asterogue. (via)
- Procedural text and tabletop roleplaying. Speaking of roguelikes…
- The missing text focused programming environment. Makes me think of Smalltalk.
- IMG_0416. (via)
- MyNoise. (via)
- CW&T, a design studio. (via)
- Keep It Simple Tools. (via)
This week’s music: Thank You, Dream Girl. (via)