A bit short this week – I am in the final parts of a large software transition at work.
SemiBUG is having a meeting tonight with a presentation from iXSystems on TrueNAS. There’s a video link in the posting.
Comfortably all over the map this week.
- Recreating a Cyberpunk 2077 game prop.
- Backblaze drive stats for 2023Q2. I just found out how cheap b2 storage can be.
- Awesome Inferno. (via)
- “Why would you do that?” The management review of yacc.
- What’s special about this number? (via)
- Dobbstown Mirror, $1. You should subscribe; I’ve enjoyed 3 issues so far.
- I did not know: vim exists via Atari/Amiga vi ports.
- Futurism Restated, an electronic music blog. I mean Substack. The lines blur. (via)
- v8 /etc/motd.
- Tiny life hack: paint your mouse dongles. I wish I had read this years ago.
- Inflation in 1983 must have been horrible. Linked just because 9 year old me thought the Elephant Memory Systems logo was cool.
- STIRred AND SHAKEN. Boring, but quietly important.
- The first color e-ink monitor I’ve seen.
- On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions. A certain amount of open source work is built on the tailings from venture capital, and from corporate waste.
ChiBUG’s monthly meeting is today – go if you are near.
NYCBUG is meeting on the 9th – go if you are near.
The mini-theme this week is that some of these links go to lists of more links, so I’m sure there’s a rabbit hole in here for you somewhere.
- Paypal security story. (via)
- LETTER BOMB TRANSFER PROTOCOL. (via)
- textual-paint. (via)
- Plain-text journaling. Not necessarily recommending this. (via)
- Why is DNS hard to learn? (via)
- Warren Ellis’s UbuWeb Top Ten.
- The only remaining pre-1950 valve computer.
- Free and open source software projects are in transition.
- tildeverse.org.
- Wrench button to root.
- Forthcoming books. (scroll down for the list of suggestions)
- CRT Rejuvenators. (via previous)
- The Garden of Computational Delights.
This is one of the more eclectic groups of links I’ve published.
- 50 Years of Text Games as downloadable book; it will be available as a print on demand book eventually. I got my high-quality copy from the Kickstarter and it is a weighty tome. I was going to link to some of the posters but those are gone now too, geez. Here’s something not in the book.
- August 15th: TrueNAS presented at SEMIBUG‘s monthly.
- 2023Q2 FreeBSD Status Report.
- Tales of Type. Truetype is one of those all-nerds-should-be-passingly-familiar bits of history.
- Space Colony Art from the 1970s. Surely you’ve seen these before?
- Same source, Hokusai’s warriors series. You know the artist from the Great Wave, but probably never saw these.
- Weird 80s audio sampler history. (via)
- HTTP has become the default, universal communication protocol. Though people don’t always pay attention to the result codes.
- Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements. (via)
- Yubikey All the Things. Linked for the OpenBSD section.
- Between ISA and PCI, PCs had EISA and VLB. And it sucked.
- ARM Thinkpad. I might finally upgrade from my x220. (via)
- Installing Research UNIX on a PDP 11/70, emulated.
No theme this week.
- All the Nerds Are Dead. “But maybe the most characteristic feature of nerd culture is its total lack of irony.” (via)
- Hidden BeOS installs.
- A bit of Unix history on ‘su -‘.
- Letters to ed(1) is on sale.
- And the source, the FreeBSD Journal, has a new issue out.
- pkg_*: the road forward. OpenBSD pkg.
- Lessons Learned from Sendmail. (via)
- Using FreeBSD’s daemon(8)? Consider -r.
- How to install Kanboard on OpenBSD.
- Fake Nixie tubes with a bootup screen.
- Wayland on OpenBSD. (via)
Saturday meetup in Colorado for CoBUG. Go, if you are near.
SemiBUG is having John ‘maddog’ Hall talk about LPI for their meeting tomorrow evening. It’s on Jitsi if you want to see.
The ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow. RSVP if you are able to show up.
Mini-theme: things that haven’t existed for decades, recreated.
- Making a Studio Ghibli Wallpaper Carousel. Linked for the script.
- Resurrecting a Thinkpad 701c and its butterfly keyboard.
- The day my ping took countermeasures. (via)
- HAKMEM, the PDF. (via)
- Z1, a mechanical computer from the 1930s. You can see bits flip. (via)
- Unix support 50 years ago: “your only source of information is a 2-man operation an ocean away” Similar to much open source today. (via)
- B Compiler restored.
- Next NYCBUG: August 9th.
The Colorado BSD Users Group (CoBUG) is planning to meet on the 22nd of this month.
If you are near Chicago on July 18th, go to the ChiBUG meeting.
NYCBUG’s next meeting is Wednesday night, 7/12, 6:45. Go, if you are near.
History mini-theme.
- The Secret History of Mac Gaming, a book. Found in a picture of someone’s workspace, linked to by Naive Weekly,
- Andrex x Eno. The base of the joke.
- An Adventure walkthrough.
- Forced email triage. (via)
- Pull in satellite images, right from the satellites. (via)
- “CRT Inspired“.
- The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird. (via)
- AppleII-VGA: VGA card for Apple II+/IIe computer. (via)
- how (not) to write a pipeline. “I don’t see a lot of error handling.” (via)
- OpenBSD pfsync(4) is rewritten and softdeps are out.
- Limited Audience Jokes. (via)
A little short today but still good links.
- The Blit was also the Jerq, thanks to LucasArts, and chunks of it still exist in Plan 9. That sentence may be confusing but follow the links.
- Control, Escape, and Meta Tricks. (via)
- Also, yay, 200 issues of Nixers!
- pkgsrc-2023Q2 is out. The 79th!
- HUDs and GUIs. (via)
- CoBUG (Colorado BSD user group) is starting the mailing list back up.
- Naked Domains. If you like large scale stats, today is your lucky day.
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.
Tomohiro Kusumi’s offline HAMMER2 support continues, with ‘setcheck’ (check code) and ‘setcomp’ (compression type) support. See the hammer2(8) man page for what those options do.