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.
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.
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.
Oddities this week.
- Join the Interim Computer Museum. (via)
- containerization moves the learning period from “before deployment” to “during outages” I’m quoting a quote of a quote there.
- public.work, visually search public domain images. (via)
- And if you like that, read The mining of the public domain, an excellent analysis of public.work.
- A (Very) Brief Pictorial History of Beholders. Avery D&D-specific monster.
- defrag98.com. Never a good screen to see. (via)
- EuroBSDCon 2024 will be September 19-22 in Dublin.
- Leap smears, a proposal. “My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this scheme would work for about half a millennium”
- Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
- Visualizing Sound and Graphic Traces, both are.na channels. (via)
- What the Microsoft Outage Reveals. Read it for the software engineering joke. (via)
- Back to BASIC. (also via)
- The Adler Archive of Underground Comix. (via)
- Putting your phone to sleep with a pillow. (via)
Your unrelated music videos for the day: DRASS – Reaperman. Taking advantage of AI image generation’s inaccuracy, though you bet is more disturbing. (via)
Almost all links from saved emails instead of RSS, for once.
- The history of Alt+number sequences, and why Alt+9731 sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman.
- Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm. (via)
- Entering text in the terminal is complicated. (via)
- PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights. (via)
- A Mini Monitor for a Pi. (via)
- July 19th: Will Wright interviews Chaim Gingold, author of “Building
SimCity”. Note the reversal. - It’s Easy. But Is It Easy Enough? Not necessarily advocating this.
- What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days. (via)
- Culinary Bibliographic Metadata. The standards for library info look to me like a good example of a standard that evolved based on users, not commercial influence. (via)
- Related: Working with ACSM Files on Linux.
- BSDCan 2024 on video. Set aside time for watching these. (via)
No theme this week, but some neat history items.
- Modern cactus.
- Winamp goes open source. (via)
- Non-Euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159. (via)
- Next NYCBUG meeting: June 5th. It’ll be a post-BSDCan recap.
- “udm=14” is now useful for Google searches much like you had to turn on literal search to avoid ‘helpful’ spelling fixes.
- The Nature of Shareware. Mentioned: Ambrosia Software, a former local company. Not mentioned: the 1-2% pay rate for shareware, if you’re lucky.
- When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim.
- A history of Spelljammer. (via)
- Archie, rediscovered. (via)
- Retro tech in anime supercut. (via)
- sshd(8) is getting split.
Only a BSD conference announcement would include a note about changing your SSH listening port. Also, BSDCan in 2 weeks!
What’s the history of Cinco de Mayo? (updated since last linked in 2016.)
- SNOBOL, ICEBOL, SPITBOL, et al.
- What is Computer Science? (via)
- Live performance of Blur’s Song 2 on a modular synth.
- A history / greatest hits of dedications and footnotes. (via)
- How I search in 2024. Saved for the links. (via)
- Some nice UOttowa rooms are available for BSDCan.
- A Thousand Suns. Original sci-fi shorts. (via)
- Announcing the long-awaited Links relaunch. Good links, from where I grew up.
- Type-in. I am assuming you know the text being parodied.
- Practical Vim command workflow. Complex but useful steps. (via)
- pcrowDoodle, my “desirable difficulty” laptop. (via)
- Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so… I plan to be out of the computing field by the end of 2037 no matter what.
Your unrelated music of the week: you bet from Drass, an artist previously linked here as Shardcore. (via)
No theme this week.
- BSDCan papers submissions close tomorrow – get yours in.
- Next NYCBUG meeting, March 6: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist. Traveling and working with only a Pinebook.
- Anatomy of a Hollerith Card.
- More stories about the famously idiosyncratic author of that previous link, David Mills. (via)
- Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents. (via)
- What is a terminal-based game you’ve played that’s worth mentioning?
- Understanding phonetic symbols. Written for IBM but talks about a standard.
- D100 sheets. I enjoy just reading these. (via)
- Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. (via)
Happy new year! More BSD content in this week’s summary than usual.
- The Infinite 8-Bit Computer Game Character Archive. (via)
- OSR Rules Families. (via)
- How about not having platforms so large that their policy decisions carry this much weight? Having an alternative platform makes these problems go away.
- Battle for Libraries. Seeing some of the authors signed up to support this made me decide “yes, this is good”.
- A Murder at the End of the World: Are you Vi or Emacs? (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 28 – Configuration – Corner Actions.
- Making my own Bed Sensor. (via)
- My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter. Always check voltages / don’t trust written voltages. (via)
- First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD. (via)
- Default mail transport in FreeBSD 14.0 is DragonFly Mail Agent, neat.
- The BSDCan 2024 Call For Papers is out.
Your unrelated music of the week: Don Leisure, Halal Cool J. Music’s good, title’s hilarious. (via)
Old hardware – really old – minitheme.
- ARCC tickets 30% off with code CH3AP.
- Fun with DNS TXT Records. Password storage, bizarre but hilarious. (via)
- The BSDCan 2024 page is up.
- The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard. (via)
- Decker, Hypercard clone that builds web pages. (via)
- User Manual for Babbage’s Difference Engine #2. Which exists. And you can build it. Or 3D print it. (via)
- Saturn V Apollo Flight Configuration. Poster to print. (via)
- Fake mainframe, real lights and switches.
- The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer. Linked cause I remember seeing “PC-98” in I think the FreeBSD installer. (via)
No natural theme at all this week. Which is OK!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data. I would like to see this on a larger scale. (via)
- An adorably small Connection Machine. The real thing, if you are unfamiliar.
- Also cute: networked tiny TRS-80 model.
- Naming things needn’t be hard. (via)
- Confusing git terminology. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon 2023 report, part 1 and part 2.
- “The ports system exists to not only share misery, but to reliably replicate it“
- My MNT Reform – almost a year on.
- FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization.
- OctOpenBSD. I am a bit late linking that.
- Talk about the Basics.
- Reading your RSS feed on FreeBSD.
- Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk. An underappreciated program.
- Presenting Syncthing, discovery server, relay server on OpenBSD.
- A small warning about UDP based protocols.
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.
Half a year til Christmas!
- Software written in B. C’s predecessor, revived – follow the whole thread for tools.
- History that I didn’t know: at one point the U.S. Department of Defense had its own Unix, supported by Ford, the car company.
- BSDNow at BSDCan.
- writefreesoftware.org. (via)
- Three Challenges to Contribute Back to Open Source. The not-code-but-essential parts. (via)
- Netnews, the origin story. (PDF, via)
- I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec, 2023-06-07 version. “if Skynet ever came into existence for real it would be unreachable”
- Operating Systems, Transit and Cultural Influences.
- 50 Years of Text Games: the games. This is a treat.
- You can still buy hardware upgrades for your Mac Portable.
- A comparison of text-based browsers. (via)
- Related: text-only websites.
- When Zeppelins Ruled the Earth.
Take a look even if you aren’t going, to see what people are researching. (via)
If you want to present a paper, or were thinking about presenting at EuroBSDCon, today’s the deadline for getting it in.
BSDCan 2023 has a call for talks out.
No theme this week for the BSD section.
- Fiber + Static IP = Self-Hosting Glory! Sounds suspiciously like my ISP.
- OpenBSD: Manage DNS, DNSSEC (to automate TLSA records). (via)
- Red Hat OpenShift versus FreeBSD Jails. (via)
- Netlink Added to FreeBSD – Unmodified Linux ip(8) Correctly Works. (via)
- Fun with FreeBSD: Your First Linux Guest. (via)
- OpenBSD.app – quick full-text searching of OpenBSD packages for -stable and -current. (via)
- bsddialog 0.4 and LGPL-Free bsdinstall.
- Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Koichi Imai, Christos Margiolis, and Jake Freeland.
- SCALE19X Conference Report.
- HardenedBSD September 2022 Status Report.
- Building Your Own FreeBSD-based NAS with ZFS Part 3.
- Valuable News – 2022/10/03.
BSD Now this week is titled ‘EuroBSDCon’, but as far as I know they weren’t there – haven’t listened to the episode yet. Any readers here go?
There’s an unofficial NYCBUG meetup, tomorrow at 6:45PM. Go, if you are near New York City.