Matthew Dillon noted some OpenVPN problems, requiring him to disable compression. I don’t think this is a DragonFly problem, or even necessarily a BSD problem, but it’s worth mentioning in case you run it.
Lazy Reading for 2017/06/04
A lot of this was picked up during the previous long U.S. holiday weekend.
- A Brief History of the ATM and As cash becomes quaint, are ATMs on path to obsolescence? (via)
- The evolution of the laptop computer. Clickbaity and not comprehensive, but fun to look at the pictures. (also via)
- A tip for catching process state changes.
- The Pacification of the Nerd.
- The forgotten joys of the screen saver. (via, of course)
- Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers. (via)
- Decalogue, by Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer’s movie “Lunacy” is the most disturbing? distressing? film I’ve ever watched. (via)
- Speaking of which, Svankmajer was an influence on the Quay Brothers, whom I was talking about with someone else recently. Surely you’ve seen Street of Crocodiles?
- userland xnr jit.
- open-adventure, the original, ported. (via)
- Writing a Unix Shell. (via)
- Compiler Optimizations are Awesome.
- Tron B-Roll. Most evocative to those who remember computer graphics pre-texture-mapping.
Trying UEFI and DragonFly
Andrew MacIntyre manually installed DragonFly onto a UEFI system, and conveniently he posted his notes. It includes a GRUB menu entry, which will come in handy for someone
Polling and how to try it
If your DragonFly system’s Intel network device doesn’t seem to pick up on DHCP, try turning on polling. This may already be a nonissue, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it.
Update: fixed.
Bad network vs. pkg
A tip that might be useful for some readers: Mohammad BadieZadegan posted that he had a poor network connection, and so was having a hard time installing packages. If that bites you too, there are some pkg.conf options – starting with FETCH_TIMEOUT and FETCH_RETRY – that may help.
Lazy Reading for 2017/03/05
A little meta, this week.
- Why Nothing Works Anymore. Occam’s Razor applies; most people undervalue design vs. cost. (via)
- I miss Delphi
- There’s more than one way to kill a Unix process
- Sniffing out Unix processes using pgrep
- cloudbleed hero graphics. You know what Cloudbleed is, correct? It’s hard to illustrate, is what it is.
- 1000 links later. The Digest is generally a links site, and my experience matches what he’s saying.
- The PDP-10 group on GitHub. (via, via)
- Doing Presentations. I have an employee who can’t stop reading text verbatim off his slides, facing the screen… which means I can’t stop falling asleep at about slide 20 or so. (via)
- An annotated digest of the top “Hacker” “News” posts. Accurate. (via)
- ./code –poetry. (via)
- Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces. (via)
- comment free codex. Comment quantity is starting to matter even more than quality.
- There’s no IPv4 ranges left to allocate, but there’s some ranges that aren’t being used by their owners, and are given back. Here’s where the remaining scraps of recovered IPv4 space are tracked. It at least delays the inevitable. (via)
- Eli5: What is POSIX?
- A time-proven zsh prompt.
- About the Newton MessagePad 2xxx ROM card. (via)
Your unrelated tea link of the week: In Sri Lanka’s Tea Paradise, A Social Enterprise Is Brewing. I actually heard about the quality of the tea (very good) before I heard about the way the company was formed. Consider where your next tea purchase comes from, in light of this.
DIY RSS feed reads
Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
Vkernels: when to use them
The question of using vkernels(7) in a manner similar to jails pops up time and again, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, “it depends“. It looks like when you want to isolate greedy programs, vkernels are the way to go.
syscons screensaver tip
I mention this because people don’t realize there’s a console screensaver: ‘vidcontrol -t XX’ will blank the console after XX seconds of inactivity. This way you aren’t lighting up your server closet with a terminal screen, forever.
Odd options: console color
Did you know you can set the border color for the system console? I didn’t. syscons(4) lists a number of options, including scrollback length and some other features I never thought about changing.
net.inet.carp.setroute and what it does
If your DragonFly machine is using CARP, and you don’t want CARP messing with your default routes, the sysctl net.inet.carp.setrou
em(4), re(4), and network issues
Lazy Reading for 2016/10/09
This week’s Lazy Reading came together in perhaps 10 minutes.
- Mouse cursor disappears when my refrigerator turns off. (via)
- Roll20.net. Role-playing game tools. (via)
- choose boring bugs.
- tilted abstractions. I feel this way about many web frameworks.
- You can register your child’s name in any language providing you use any Unicode character.
- Unix as IDE. (via)
- Cisco config -> HTML converter.
- Mapping colors. This could be very useful. (via)
- gruvbox. (also via)
- vim.sensible. (via)
- History of Xenix – Microsoft’s Forgotten Unix-Based Operating System. (via)
- Internet Security Exposure 2016. I like the map, of course.
Your unrelated music video of the week: Danny Brown – When It Rain. The music may not be what you are used to, but I like how “damaged VHS tape” is being used as a visual design choice. (via)
Lazy Reading for 2016/09/25
I manage to avoid a topic this week, really. That’s good!
- #! /usr/bin/env considered harmful
- The
#!magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours. (via) - The Future of Procedural Generation. For games.
- So many cow jokes. (via)
- Munchausen Numbers and How to Find Them. (via)
- Showing The Weather In Tmux. (via)
- The Festival Floppies. Anything named “Dinosorceror” must be good. (via)
- A Very Long Post On How to Become a Creator. The last paragraph in Advice #1 is the important bit.
- Dither me this.
- Oh shit, git! (via)
Who wants FUSE on DragonFly?
Tomohiro Kusumi is thinking about porting it. Follow the whole thread for details.
Restarting pf
I may have mentioned this in part before, but Matthew Dillon has a brief script to reload pf when an interface IP changes. I’m linking it here in case it’s useful in the future.
For VPS users, an ISO
Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.
Lazy Reading for 2016/07/24
Off-the-beaten-path links this week. Strap in!
- The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99. (via)
- Magnetic core memory reborn. (via)
- Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Bunnie Huang.
- Why I’m Suing the US Government – also Bunnie Huang.
- Old, special phone numbers. I’ve used 800-444-4444 a lot when tracing lines.
- The Wanton Role-Playing (WaRP) and Mini-Six game systems. (via)
- Brief interviews with very small publishers. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. (via)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers. (via previous and here)
- A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute. A PDF, and infinitely useful. (via)
- I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But I Miss My CDs. (via I lost it, sorry)
- This used to be Ethernet. (via)
- turn up the hope (report from the HOPE convention from Ted Unangst)
- VimGIFs. (via)
- HyperTerm, an open-source in-browser terminal emulator. (via)
Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: Permanent Wink.
Reminder: move your Hammer cleanup
A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.
UEFI booting and manual installation
karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?