DragonFly BSD Digest

Lazy Reading for 2026/10/18

2026-10-14T00:27:14Z

Set up early cause I am/were traveling.

The RetroTINK.
Become worthless (to tech companies). Good steps, not difficult ones. (via)
Experiencing a Victorian London street in 3D. (via)
“One printed IP/ICMP “ping” packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149″. (via)
Bastardica. (via)
A note on content restrictions and One possible future for websites is pervasive gatekeepers, two articles that I think are more significant when read together.
Display mood board.
A trick to render all 1.1M Unicode characters in your browser.
The Invention of the MMO. (via)
How a combination lock works. I’ve linked to that site before; something to dive into. (also via)

Unrelated music links: The best metal, electronic, and jazz on Bandcamp for September.

Lazy Reading for 2026/10/10

2026-10-08T00:29:28Z

No theme.

Inflight Simulator. Flight sim where you aren’t the pilot. Seems obvious but I can understand if nobody wants to play. (via)
Turning a $40 Surface Go into an always-on camera monitor. Neat but also you can buy the same result off the shelf.
Vim’s Ctrl-w. Vi command muscle memory is built one action at a time.
Small Web 101.
Oglaf Book 5, a Kickstarter. Read the comic or perhaps their Patreon if you aren’t familiar with the humor.
Design Fiction Mood Board.
Book Corners, a library finder. (via)
tmp.out, which I linked to in 2021, has continued to publish nearly-yearly. (reminded via)
Technology work at the Metropolitan Museum. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/10/04

2026-09-22T21:12:48Z

I remain upbeat!

NYCBUG social meeting (i.e. no presentation) on October 7th.
A ‘clamp’ power strip. I like the design. (via)
GIMP, The Movie. (not really)
An in-depth explainer of SSH certificates, which are much nicer than… every other security certificate system I’ve ever used, now that I think about it. (via)
Risk in 3D – as in a physical globe. (via)
folk.computer. Computing without keyboard or monitory or touchscreen or whatever. It looks fun! Read this nice story from someone seeing it for the first time. (also via)
The 1981 Framebuffer Show. (via)
What playing games can teach us about simulating the future. Prussian wargaming to D&D.
Two Slice, a two pixel high font. “somewhat readable!” Use this in your terminal of choice and see what sort of weird aspect ratio you get. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/09/27

2026-09-21T19:14:14Z

At least one of these links is going to eat some of your day, in a fun way.

That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler. (via)
They had no concept of a duty of care to their users. Neovim vs. Vim.
Similar: s/Neovim/Helix/g. I’m not picking on Neovim on purpose, rather this is just the particular rabbit hole I fell into.
The Jef Raskin “3 Laws” quote in the previous link led me to find his book.
New Cyriak: Sea Life.
Rethinking space opera, by Charlie Stross. The article itself is good, but it also led me to some other interesting links, like the next two:
The Theory of Interstellar Trade by Paul Krugman. Relativistic time vs trade in goods and services. Sci-fi-adjacent.
Starship Stormtroopers: Michael Moorcock. Fun for what he says about science fiction, useful for the new (to me) authors and books mentioned at the end, despite being written in 1977.
And from the comments: all three seasons of Connections are on the Internet Archive. If you have not watched, you should.

Your unrelated video/animation of the week: CAPAREZZA – A COMIC BOOK SAVED MY LIFE. My first encounter with Italian hip-hop. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/09/20

2026-09-16T00:42:42Z

I had a lot of open tabs, enough that Chrome was having memory issues, so this sort of link dump was necessary.

Notes on Software Quality. (via)
What’s new with robots, 2026 edition. Linked for the consumer hardware.
Tesserae: Self-hosted dashboards for e-ink displays. (via)
Vim’s UserGettingBored autocmd.
The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer. Linked for describing the Gridfinity standard.
Public Domain Art Resources. (via)
ekkoBSD 2.1 released, 20 years after the last release. (via)
XScreenSaver 6.16 is out with 4 new hacks.
LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects. (via)
Hyperuplink, a new bit of forum software that sounds… maintainable?
A review of the Flipper BUSY Bar.
hc2html, convert Hypercard stacks to web pages. (via)
The RAM shortage takes a dark turn.

Your unrelated music suggestion of the week: SETI by Joker.

Lazy Reading for 2026/09/13

2026-09-12T19:47:04Z

A specific request, passed from a reader: Do you have HP equipment, specifically HPE, and are running FreeBSD on it? Dean Hamstead created kernel modules for the HP iLO management processor, without requiring Linux compatibility or non-MIT licensing, and he needs testers.

mdbase, a specification for Markdown files. Linked because it’s a good idea, and because the swarm animation is neat. (found via)
Open Source Ecology. (via)
Hosting a Bulletin Board Service on My Casio VX-4. (via)
Hearing Things, a new music blog. (via)
Those who don’t know pipes are doomed to reinvent them.
A Tale of Two Greps, related. (via)
Afterglow, original After Dark screensavers using a built-in 68K emulator.
Roguelike Celebration 2026: Preview Event Speakers!
Carla Speed McNeil comics for sale. There’s sample pages. One of my favorite creators.
UNIX Reference Cards. I wish I had one of these early on. (via)
How to turn anything into a router. Of course it’s easier with BSD. (via)

Also: the Roguelike Celebration Preview Event is happening right after I post this, so it may be happening as you read this. Tickets are free and it’s online. Of the three talks, “Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games” sounds most interesting to me but of course it would. I’ll be working but don’t let that stop you.

Lazy Reading for 2026/09/06

2026-09-02T00:38:30Z

Clearing old but evergreen links. Speaking of old links, earlier this week I discovered that the Internet Archive saved memepool.com – and my contributions are still there, two years before this Digest even started. You may notice an influence.

OpenAI’s Rogue Agents Are a Normal Accident. Linked for the Morris Worm history.
The Kleptones are on Bandcamp.
The first machine to run rogue(6).
UNIX News / ;login:, the earliest issues. (via)
Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?
ESPectre Human Detector for Feather.
bsd.cafe. (via)
“WARP, then ZOOM, FLY, RUN, WALK, TENEX, and the slowest being MULTIX“.
UNIX was originally UNICS.
How to dig for music without Spotify. (via)
Writerdeck resources. (via)

NYCBug Sept 2nd “Conference Coms Check”

2026-08-31T21:29:16Z

NYCBUG will be testing IRC / Discord / streaming tech on September 2, this Wednesday, at Brass Monkey. What works there will work for future BSD conferences. Go, especially if you are interested in being able to attend conventions without leaving the house.

Lazy Reading for 2026/08/30

2026-08-14T23:03:32Z

I’m only a little reactionary with this batch.

City Builders. The SimCity genre has kept going.
“It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.” I remember playing this at least once.
BeepAlive – keeping my soundbar from going to sleep.
How I use Home Assistant to help with my cats. Far more ambitious than I expected.
Found via the recent DinoCon: multiple high–quality small–company dinosaur reproductions.
Tim Hunkin’s History Of Arcade Machines.
Introducing Avogadro: A parametric waffle recipe generator.
I love reading lists of people’s favorite books, especially when I’ve never seen any of them.
WebZFS. (via)
Michaelsoft Binbows. This is fun but the link has only worked intermittently for me. (via)
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/08/23

2026-08-05T00:00:26Z

Cleaning out some old links.

“Gravity is worth asking about.” Linked for describing the “zero-one-infinity” rule, but applied to things you don’t want.
reTerminal Sticky, a new reader in the now-popular ‘Xteink’ form factor.
A Network Filesystem for 2.11BSD. (via)
Visiting the History of Computing and Play. Look for “abbreviated history of floppy disks in a single photo”.
Curly braces: An evolution of UNIX and C. 1963 ASCII didn’t have } or {, and neither did the hardware. (via)
“non-Unix stories about important Unix people“.
BoxyBSD, virtual BSD systems for people to try out different flavors of BSD. The base machine is free. (via)
UNIX in a Hostile Environment, or Mouse Watching by a Cat – go to page 13. (via)
Where UNIX Runs Today. An interesting article, and a built-in shooter game at the same time? (via)
Telehamster. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/08/16

2026-08-03T14:04:30Z

No theme, all eclectic.

The Bad Apple video, ASCII version, playing without CSS or JS. (via)
Sounds of the 60s: The IBM 1401. I’ve heard this before as sound effects and never realized it. (via)
The Map of Metal. Similar to longtime favorite Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. (also via)
The BBC Tetris Companion. Hardware I’ve never seen before.
ICEBP Finally Documented. The article is 8 years old, but it took 30 years to be documented. (via Nick)
“Kinky Latex Giraffe“, among others.
This plant will die if I’m on my phone too much. (video, via)
PGSimCity. Exactly what it sounds like. (via)
Syl’s Indie [game] Recs, vol. 4.
endoflife.date. (via)

Lazy Reading for 2026/08/09

2026-07-27T14:30:00Z

“Interesting personal tech feats” is the mini-theme.

How you wind up with switches above your office’s false ceiling. Every office job I ever had, now that I think about it.
How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks. Calibre is an astonishingly useful program.
Entering accented characters in Linux. Which should be “in X11”, so it should apply to BSD.
“Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”. Esoteric languages alert.
The KEXP breakdown of Paul’s Boutique.
BSD Make extravaganza. Mandelbrot in bmake. (via)
Most Googlebots are fake. It used to just be “Mozilla” was fake.
“That was then, this is now“.

VIDAR at NYCBUG, tomorrow

2026-08-04T02:39:52Z

Tomorrow’s presentation at NYCBUG is VIDAR, a FreeBSD-based automatic firewall program. Read the event description for details. Go, if you are near. The announcement doesn’t mention streaming so you may need to be in-person.

Toots back for the Digest

2026-08-02T21:50:29Z

Alert reader Nick pointed out that Mastodon posts to bsd.network for the Digest weren’t happening automatically. The plugin was disabled and I don’t have a reason as to why. I just turned it back on and we’ll see if this post comes through.

Lazy Reading for 2026/08/02

2026-07-26T21:24:49Z

It’s a fun links week!

Decker, a modern tool enough like Hypercard to make me notice. (via)
Dinos That Drive, a new book illustrated by the guy who brought you Behold! The Dinosaurs!
Be More Party Cannon.
Hardcore IndieWeb. (via)
Describing the early Internet was surprisingly easy.
The Cybernetics Digital Library. (via)
I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to draw (with 9front). Sometimes the tutorial is the point, not the skill being taught. (via)
email encryption. I have worked at least a little with every protocol mentioned and it was always, always painful.

Lazy Reading for 2026/07/26

2026-07-14T02:40:11Z

Tiny computer mini-theme.

A Minimal Syntax For Quantum Text, the methods used to generate the different-every-printing novel Subcutanean. The book itself has been linked here before. (via)
Li’l Factory AB, a tiny fiction publisher. (via)
Asterism Books, another oddities publisher. (via)
The Virtual OS Museum, emulated computer setups, pre-prepared as Linux VM images. (via)
Declassified Space Invaders. (via)
The Book Handling Agency.
Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader. I am finding all these Xteink links through Bubbles.
Sneakerweb. (via)
Don’t Panic Cyberdeck. A full BOM is included. (via)
LisaFPGA: the Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA. (via)
VapourDeck, DOS games in a handheld.

Your music links of the week: Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch which led me to this 1950 film showing some of Partch’s huge instruments, and here they still are. Related: The Warped, Wondrous World of Microtonal Jazz on Bandcamp.

Lazy Reading for 2026/07/19

2026-07-19T20:44:24Z

There’s some rabbit holes here.

Next NYCBUG meeting: it’s a social meeting (no guest speaker), August 5th.
The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything. Everyone’s played at least one Sim game in their lifetime, correct?
Weird Side Projects. (via)
Diane Lindo, stop motion animations. (also via)
A terminal version of Obsidian. Different from the official CLI.
MNT June 2026 Update. Notes that OpenBSD runs on the Pocket Reform.
Fish Shell.
A pocket computer history museum.
Ditch your Alexa.
Cutting the cord to the cloud.
LibriVox, free public domain audiobooks.
“If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?” Linked for the animation showing an IBM 1401 console in action.

Lazy Reading for 2026/07/12

2026-07-05T23:52:35Z

Some of these will keep you busy a long time.

Why I Like Small Keyboards. Linked for the keyboard picture; smallest split I’ve ever seen.
Erwin Wurm: One Minute Artworks. Found via this post – read to the end for the connection, and watch the video while you are at it.
Difficult, Important, Succeeding?
OpenRA. I thought I had linked to this before, and I had, but it was 8 years ago. (reminded it exists via)
Bringing Swift To The Apple II.
Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD.
Garbage for humans. This is one of the incentives for gopher if you think about it. (via)
IIgs The Future. Linked cause it reminded me about the old Apple game The Bilestoad.
It Always Amazes Us. Animation Obsessive’s current list of things they like.

Lazy Reading for 2026/07/05

2026-06-29T18:11:29Z

This is entirely overflow links from last week, pre-posted.

Cyberdeck Meetup Notes. (via) I wish Iffy Books was closer; those are some fun events on the calendar.
Painting with Light.
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows. I was finding wholesale copies of this Digest back in I think 2008 or so.
Using Claude Code to Personalise the Xteink X4. Adding to some previous links about this device. (via)
And also this: The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader.
Also probably related: I don’t need it (and neither do you).
Gmail Thinks I’m Stupid, So I Left. (also via)
Please, Just Stop Ruining “10 PRINT”. Seriously.
Connect FreeBSD to OpenBSD using WireGuard.
The Starlog 50.

Lazy Reading for 2026/06/28

2026-06-27T21:47:14Z

I should maybe create a Thinkpad category.

NYCBUG’s having a social meetup on July 1st; stories about BSDCan will be told, I’m sure.
When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars. This seems like a named aesthetic. (via)
Building a serial and VGA “everything console”. Linked cause the author is using one of the IBM keyboards I always wanted.
Key, In Sight. The keyboard in the center of this also looks like one of those same keyboards. Marcin says it’s a Shinobi, which I’ve wanted to get before.
‘Vim’ has many faces.
Aeonic Nebular Character Generator, for a game jam for games that do not exist.
Powering up a module from the IBM 604. Linked for the computer styling that says “forties”.
That new Commodore phone is running Sailfish.
pkgsrc-2026Q2 is out.
The freebsd-update(8) Screensaver.
FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop. Linked for the Thinkpad-specific parts.
The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy.