This week’s BSDNow talks about a lot of OpenBSD news, gets into UNIX history, and interviews Kris Moore about FreeNAS/TrueNAS/TrueOS/etc.
A little heavy on the history this week. And no tea!
- Commodore 64: For the Love of a Machine. (via)
- Fun at the UNIX Terminal Part 1.
- Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment. More places named in the source link comments.
- A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017. (via)
- A link at the same place brought me to the Telnet BBS Guide.
- Hottest Editors.
- Upgrading a Vectrex to 32 Bits. (via)
- Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM.
- The secrets of password aging on Unix systems.
- on the title of “git commit murder”
- Dungeonfs: A FUSE filesystem and dungeon crawling adventure game engine
Your unrelated food link of the week: Eating In Translation. This person seeks out new places, eats there, and makes notes, and has been doing it for more than a decade. The result is the most in-depth informal food guide I’ve ever seen. It’s NYC focused, but not exclusively.
I’m very UNIXy this week.
- Have You Played… Event[0]? Sounds like a simulation of IRC.
- TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO GOOD, REALLY BAD HEAVY METAL ALBUM COVERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. (via)
- The Best Metal on Bandcamp: March 2017. A palate cleanser from the last link.
- Google Open Source Docs. Everyone releases their code, but not their methodology, which is arguably as important. (via)
- Windows disk-loading/code-swapping. I remember this from Apple ][ days; there is no modern equivalent that I can think of.
- The creator of Dwarf Fortress doesn’t really like to play games like Dwarf Fortress. (via)
- Research UNIX V8, V9 and V10 made public by Alcatel-Lucent. (via)
- Related: What’s the earliest UNIX (or unix-like) OS that is both easily available and can run on x86?
- How to learn Unix/Linux and Lesser known but still handy Linux commands. Essentially command line tool education.
- Zero Terminal. Another item for my teeny computer fetish. (via)
Your useful tip of the week: Setting the root login’s ‘full name’ to identify the machine that sent email. This makes so much sense. (via)
More thinking topics than version changes this week, which is interesting.
- Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It’s the PDF transcript from the FOSDEM 2017 “My BSD sucks less than yours” presentation, linked previously. (via)
- OPNsense 17.1.3 released.
- Ask HN: Why is BSD becoming more popular in embedded devices? Lots of half-informed theorizing there.
- The BSD family tree. Not new, but the discussion at the source link is more to look at, along with other links.
- Upgrading notes for pfSense 2.3.x users, where 2.3.x < 2.3.3.
- tech@openbsd.org: regarding OpenSSL Licence change. Nothing goes well with OpenSSL. Hey, it rhymes! (via)
- golang now has native support for OpenBSD’s pledge(2).
- “And then the murders began.” – applied to tech BSD books.
- TrueNAS and ZFS terms and explanations.
Technical details week for Lazy Reading.
- Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
- mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencastis a shell wrapper forffmpegthat allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)- 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
- CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
- How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
- Today in OBEY.
- Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
- A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
- Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
- Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
- Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.
Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)
I had overflow from last week, so I have a good list for you, despite being offline for days.
- Your Code is Junky. I haven’t thought about FrontPage in years, and that’s on purpose. It was a trainwreck.
- Raiders of the Lost OS: Reclaiming a piece of Polish IT history. I have never heard of CROOK. (via)
- meaningful short names.
- missing features as features
- The Collapse of the UNIX Philosophy. Drinking game: drink every time the author or commenters at the source link conflate bash and UNIX, or Linux and UNIX, or assume a quirk solved in 1985 is a relevant worry today, etc. You’ll be drunk very soon.
- Adobe Illustrator is 30 years old. Linking mostly for the side-by-side image of the tool palettes over the years.
- USG is a firewall for your USB ports. firmware firewall – you can still have malicious software in the data portion of the USB drive. (via)
- Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2. gettimeofday() – about as simple as it gets, and used constantly. (via)
- selfie – compiler, emulator, and hypervisor (C and MIPS) all bundled together. (via)
- Computers and art meet face-to-face.
- (related comics link)
Your unrelated tea link of the day: defining what it means when you read “mug of tea” vs “cup of tea”. You’d think it was interchangeable, but the meanings diverge. (PDF, via)
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.
Another diverse link week, hooray!
- Stupid Hackathon 2017 – results under Project. (via)
- using yubikeys everywhere
- Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself. I have seen all of these happen. (via)
- Getting started with vim. (via)
- The many faces of grep. grep, egrep, fgrep.
- Finding the Lost Vikings – Reversing a Virtual Machine. (via)
- Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2. (via)
- SHAttered. Every vulnerability has to have a cool name and website now. (via)
- I found the best anagram in English, Moore’s law beats a better algorithm, and Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring, a series on anagrams that goes into glorious depth.
- Puzzle Zapper Blog, from the previous link.
- PuTTY 0.68 has been released, useful everywhere. (via and via)
Your unrelated item of the week: How Wegmans inspired the most rabid fanbase in the grocery world. I live in the town where Wegmans started. “Grocery fanbase” is a relative thing, but: yes, they are that good.
I measure the success of In Other BSDs by how many different BSD flavors I can reference. This is a good week.
- Was thinking of switching to a BSD on my Thinkpad 11e, do you think this is a good idea?
- Adblock on Pfsense
- pfSense 2.3.3 RELEASE Now Available!
- Review of RaspBSD (FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi computers)
- NetBSD fully reproducible builds (via)
- mandoc-1.14.1 released.
- OpenBSD kernel lock removal for IPv4 forwarding. (via #dragonflybsd)
- OPNsense 17.1.2 released.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising.
- What happened to my vlan? (OpenBSD network performance, via)
- GhostBSD version 11 Alpha 1.
- NetBSD at the upcoming AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- Now available: video recording of the recent “OS : The underlying overhead of computation” presentation at NYCBUG. (via)
- Options to rid ourselves of MS Windows “servers”.
- Easy pkgsrc on macOS with pkg_comp 2.0.
- NetBSD 7.1_RC2 available.
- The Heirloom Project. Chunks of that code are probably still present in all the BSDs. (via)
- features are faults redux. Pseudo-transcript of a tedu speech not exactly about OpenBSD, but has plenty of funny one-liners.
- “Hi, I’m jkh and I’m a d**k” I don’t 100% agree with the idea, but it’s still a good plan.
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.
You weren’t planning to do anything else today, right? Find some headphones.
- The future of iOS is 64-bit only: Apple to stop support of 32-bit apps. Following a trend. (via)
- Four Column ASCII. (via)
- From the previous link source’s comments: “The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968“, a PDF from this repo.
- A Quick Look at the SoftIron OverDrive 1000. Multiprocessor ARM is starting to show up in non-Pi shapes.
- How computer terms came from physical parts of the Mark I. Neat pictures, too! I know I’ve seen the moth one before. (via)
- How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros. Someone do this with BSD flavors. (via)
- Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Molecular Tschunk Spheres. Sounds mathematical, but actually related to Chaos Communication Congress and food. Read the ‘small scale hack’ at the end. (also via)
- Printer Security. (via)
- Electrocuted CERN weasel joins McFlurry hedgehog at dead animal exhibit. (via)
- From free software to liberal software.
- Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures. (via)
- CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim. (via)
- The Enviable Pedigree of UNIX® and POSIX®. (via)
- Dial-A-Grue
- Level Up Your Game: The Untapped Potential of Roguelikes. (thanks, Brandon Gooch)
Your unrelated link of the week: Bandcamp Daily. Curated daily presentations about a band or type of music, where the enthusiasm for any given esoteric sonic whatsit oozes through the writing and samples are there to back it up. Of course I would like it. Recent highlights from just the past few days: a history of doom metal; Kid Koala’s new album, and whatever this is.
Merry Christmas! I piled up as many links as I could in the theory that many readers have the spare time for it today/tomorrow/next few days.
- “So somebody is throwing HTML at your sshd. What to do?“
- Because of weird traffic, I found this reference to an early occurrence of the Internet of Crap Things. The weird traffic is possibly another Mirai variant. Or Snapchat.
- Punched Cards: A Brief Tutorial (2002) (via)
- The Hi-Bit Era. (via)
- Working on ENIAC: Rethinking Innovation Myths with Author Thomas Haigh. Video. (via)
- Talk extract: Submarine cable systems 101 for AWS partners. Video. (via)
- 3D-printed Curta Calculator. One of the best mechanical calculators. (via)
- Taking Back the DNS. “Most new domain names are malicious.” From 2010, but unfortunately still relevant. (via)
- Anecdote generator: Dwarf Fortress’s agents already sparking fun tales
- Terminal Madness (A 1980 Documentary About Personal Computers). Video. (via)
- Gitlabs going post-cloud with Metal
- Colossal Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing (via)
- v7x86 UNIX. (via)
- exfiltration via request timing, exfiltration via receive timing
- An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways (via)
- 17 Unix tricks for a happy 2017. Assumes bash but don’t hold that against it.
- Superintelligence (via)
Your unrelated game link of the week: Lode Runner. The whole thing in HTML5 as far as I can tell. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: AAAAAAAAAAAA
Well, now there’s a song stuck in your head if you are me. Anyway, BSDNow 173 has no interview but the usual news, plus some older UNIX history anecdotes I wish I had found first.
Dig up more on James Burke (linked below) if you can, and if you have the time. His Connections show was a delight.
- “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design” This clickbaity title is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley journalism… but I digress. (via)
- QoS when there is no congestion. (via)
- “Blame is apportioned appropriately.”
- James Burke and Connections kickstarted app. (via)
- “Weird, fun, wonderful, or useful automated phone numbers to call?” 1-800-444-4444 I use often at work, with a recorded message from a company that ceased to exist years ago. (via)
- Monads: Programmer’s Definition (via I think)
- The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers
- Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
- A vi-centric family tree of editors (2000) (via)
- Making umask work for you
- No more Solaris 12. A rumor. (via)
A lot of this I picked up in previous weeks, knowing that the U.S Thanksgiving holiday was going to either dry up all links or give me a crapload.
- Junkbot competition results. (via)
- It Came From Bell Labs – Story of the Plan 9 operating system. (via)
- Modelling data structures as files and directories on disk.
- Compromising a Linux desktop using… 6502 processor opcodes on the NES?! (via)
- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? Starts describing awful things I knew about and then charges to a new level of awful, like this. (via)
- Jason Scott on porting VLC to the browser. (via)
- The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile. (via)
- Comments on the previous link led me to the fun-looking Pyra handheld.
- The end of the general purpose operating system. Or the start of a new application development category? I think this is a view that changes depending on what technology you are invested in.
- Hold down RET for 70 seconds to get a root shell.
- 30 days in a terminal: Day 0 — The adventure begins. Spoiler: it doesn’t work out. (via)
- Were your grandparents hacking in 1963? (via)
- IFComp crowns its first non-parser game.
- The current Humble Book Bundle is a lot of classic/useful Unix books. DRM-free, pay very little. Worth it for any two of the books involved. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: The Secret World of Stuff. (via)
Some of this is overflow from last week.
- “I don’t like computers.” Same reasons here, too. (via)
- Cheap IOT Threatens The Internet. ‘Cheap’ is almost the entire idea behind the Internet of Things.
- IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction. A light worm. (via)
- 54 years old, COBOL gets Wheelchair, a web framework. (via)
- inks. From Ted Unangst, an OpenBSD developer, though not necessarily BSD-specific. (via)
- Coloring your world with LS_COLORS.
- The Possibly Russian Fingerprints on the Shadow Brokers’ Trick or Treat Package. Peter N. M. Hansteen, but not BSD-related.
- Aztec for the Apple ][ was my first desktop video game.
- Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down.
- The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems.
- TERM=aaa60 Mk.2.
- When Your Screen Breaks (In The Himalayas) (via)
- production ready
- LiveCode, a modern version of Hypercard. It is available as open source, though I haven’t seen if it runs on any BSD. (via)
There’s got to be something surprising and/or useful for you in this week’s links; they are gloriously eclectic.
- This list is for discussions related to managing voice networks, both traditional and IP. (via)
- “These videos are not real; they are hallucinated by a generative video model.” (via)
- Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal? It bugs me that people sometimes don’t care about what’s under their shell. Microsoft is counting on that.
- A Quick Look at the Attack on Dyn. RIPE is a good authority for something like this, I daresay. (via)
- Stuff a recurrent neural network full of old sci-fi stories, attach it to a text editor, start sentences, and let the neural network finish them for you. It is a real thing. (via)
- Early History of Unix: Unix Is Born and the Introduction of Pipes. (via)
- Lawrence Public Library Modular Synthesizer, a performance. (via).
- They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo.
- CFP: SIGCIS meeting @ CHM, March 18-19, 2017.
- How to find all of an ISP’s ASNs. (via)
- History of Mechanical Keyboards. (via)
- C64-808.
Your unrelated browser game of the week: Epitaph. (via)
I finished this waaaay early.
- Things About Vim I Wish I Knew Earlier. (via)
- What is the oldest (retro) machine that you still use in production?
- Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System. (via)
- The Ruins of Dead Social Networks. (also via)
- GUIdebook. (via)
- Today in Applied Demonology.
- Warren Ellis sums up the Internet of Things – appropriate given what happened to Dyn.
- Interactive fiction from Adam Cadre and Emily Short. (via)
- Awesome Falsehoods. (via)
- Ten Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes. (also via)
- Found this license plate in Dortmund (Germany) yesterday. (via)
- The Soviet InterNyet. How Not to Network a Nation excerpts. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Take On Me, shittyfluted. Similar to sweding, and I’m so sorry.
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)
Every third link is about old technology, and I swear it’s not on purpose.
- The creators of rogue talk about permadeath. (via)
- IRCv3. (via)
- Cyberdeck64. (via)
- The oldest U.S. government computers. (via)
- The Silmarillion Seminar. (via)
- The MIT License, Line by Line. (via)
- Network mapping.
- Unix tips: Saving time by repeating history.
- How to Capture Network Traffic using Tcpdump.
- Wander (1974) — a lost mainframe game is found! (via)
- The Ice Cream eBook. A comprehensive resource, free.
- Advanced Compilers Weeks 3-5.
- Debugging PostgreSQL performance the hard way. (via)
- How Hollywood Gets Its Old-School Tech. (via)
- Wot I think: Hackmud.
- What’s up with Windows developer tools being written in perl? “Perl is a socially-acceptable form of Visual Basic.”
- Searching for “finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it” yields excellent results.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: DHARBIN. I briefly met the artist at TCAF a few years ago; he looks exactly like how he draws himself. Here’s an affecting strip about pets and loss.