• The BSDCan 2026 Schedule is up, plus some other event details.
• pcc lives again, with details.
• Silvio Lorusso: Serif Populism, Hyperpolitics and the Diminishing Returns of Graphic Design Culture.  (via)
• A dictionary of demons.  Not daemons.  (also via)
• Roguelike Conference 2026 is in October.
• SSH escape sequences.  Social media posts are the worst way to archive information, of course.   (via)
• Charcuterie: A visual explorer for Unicode.  (via)
• The Western Electric 500 phone.  I have one of these phones; it is … iconic?  I don’t have the right word.
• I Connected a Desktop Phone to a FreeBSD Server, so Now I Can Call It.  Related to the previous link; I’ve set up a Model 500 via an ATA in a similar fashion, though it needed some voltage fiddling to get the mechanical ringer to ring.  (via)
• 2026 Hugo Award finalists.  Use as a “to-read/view” list.
• Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now.  I like the idea that there’s an incentive to debug / secure more open source projects, though that can cut both ways.   (via)
• A love letter to cassette futurism.  (via)

• BSDCan registration is open.  5 tutorial sessions this year!
• Print and fold your own mini-comic.  (via)
• Actually Existing Solarpunk.  (via)
• finally we have created the silver bullet.   Brooks’ Law rules.
• bsd.rd breakdown.  I always like looking at emergency repair tools in non-emergency situations.
• A.I. Isn’t People and Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions?  Two essays on LLMs, not in opposition to each other.
• Diomidis Spinellis’ video talk about integrating the newly rediscovered V4 UNIX into his UNIX history repo.  Note the first commit in that repo is 57 years ago.
• How much it costs to run OpenBenches.  Extrapolate to any other independent website that isn’t a store.  (via)
• No leap second needed this year.
• Physical Phones.  (via)

• 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 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.

• 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)

• 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)

• 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.

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.