Category: BSD

There’s a certain amount of aspirational ideas this week.

• Aspire Zine.  An e-book that is a poster or vice versa.
• Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008?  A chunk of Internet history that passed me by.  (via)
• Why I prefer human-readable file formats.  You should not be surprised by any of these reasons.  (via)
• EU CRA: It’s Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up!  An indirect explainer of what the CRA requires.
• Shamogu: a roguelike developed on OpenBSD!
• Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin’s ideas at home.  What might have been.  (via)
• Qavg po fnoppy.
• The broad state of ZFS on Illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD (as I understand it)  Describing the branches and status.
• Spending time with the material.
• Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs.  So much chatter.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Lessons in Questioning.

I have a good mix today.

• Open hardware model rocketry.
• vimrc: settings based on terminal background.
• Choose Your Own Adventure, a history.
• MacPaint 1-bit patterns.  (via)
• HTTP headers that tell syndication feed fetchers how soon to come back.
• Voynich Manuscript Structural Analysis.  (via)
• Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD by Jeff Frasca.  Video.
• KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD.  Includes install instructions.
• How I felt in love with calendar.txt.  (via)
• Quality-of-life on Tetris games.
• Underworld Amusements.  A niche literary interest.
• Playing the Open Source Game.  (via)
• ++080925.

Your unrelated music video of the week: Return of the Phantom by VOID.  2025 or 1985?  Can’t easily tell.

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)

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.

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.