I’m posting this late cause I was traveling when it went up: BSD Now 310 is a nice cross-BSD roundup this week. I might miss the next BSD Now too, so don’t wait for me to link to it.
The monthly ChiBUG meeting is tomorrow, at the usual place. RSVP to the mailing list if you are going. And you should go, just to find out what hardware Joshua Stein is working on right now.
Because of the recent tcp keepalive change and some other updates, DragonFly 5.6 has been updated to 5.6.2. See my release email, and update the normal way. You will need to update your installed dports.
I have some neat history items mixed in this week.
- ASCII table and history (or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?) (via)
- As Flash dies a little more.
- Beginner Problems With TCP & The socket Module in Python. Linked cause it shows why MTU size matters. (via)
- My Top 20 Interactive Fiction, 2019 Edition. With links to play.
- Monsters and Manuals’ 1500th Anniversary: Half Time After the Time? Linked for the best-of links in the article; that’ll give you some reading.
- ‘A Humument’ is a completely novel project. A meaningless book, extrapolated into 300+ works of art. (via)
- Scanimate News. This was TV/computer graphics in the early 80s. (via)
- Deep dive into uber-obscure video game research. Linking to the summary; continue on if the thread is interesting.
- The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online. One of the reasons I don’t use Cloudflare.
- Level Design Patterns in 2D Games.
- disquiet.com. Lots and lots to listen to. (via)
- Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses.
- ASCII art RPG Stone Story launches into early access. I’m stretching it with the ‘roguelike’ tag here.
- Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Blarf: Cease and Desist. (via)
A reminder: if you have a BSD user group and I’m not posting about your meetings, please make sure I know about it.
- The OpenBSD Ada Library. (via)
- BSD Link Roundup 7.29.
- Project Trident 19.07-U1 now available. No, wait, 12-U1 now available.
- Valuable News – 2019/07/29.
- Nvidia optimus drivers for FreeBSD. (via)
- OpenBGPD 6.5p1 released.
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019).
- Installing Owntracks recorder on FreeBSD.
- Mod-able voxel engine written in common lisp. (via)
- Thief-like FOSS stealth game “The Dark Mod” running on OpenBSD. (via)
- Obviously related: Let’s Try on OpenBSD: The Dark Mod (Thief-inspired stealth game).
- Upcoming changes to LISA and SREcon.
When you encrypt your DragonFly boot drive, initrd(7) is run to get your system online and able to accept a password to decrypt the drive. So far, so good. The initrd program is a minimal userland designed to be small, and it generally works. However, it assumes a QWERTY keyboard. If you’re Pierre-Alain TORET and normally use an AZERTY (in this case French) keyboard, that makes it difficult to type the decryption phrase.
It’s possible to patch a different keyboard layout into initrd, and he has documented just how to do that.
Remember my post about a new upgrade script? tse, the author, has happily added in a bunch of suggestions. I’m intermittently traveling and can’t do anything to test it for days yet – but I’d love to see others try it out.
The bugs issue tracking versions is here: #3197. Can you, dear reader, try it out? Do an in-place upgrade on your version, or even a test install with a VM? I want to see what happens in the wild.
DragonFly has a utility called kcollect(8), for gathering about the last day’s worth of kernel statistics. It recently gained some extra flags and details, and should work well if you want to collect stats in a low-impact way.
Andre Buskvekster is presenting at NYCBUG about video on OpenBSD, tomorrow. Go, if you are near.
It’s supported, and given how well DragonFly supports SMP and the number of processors Zen 2 supports, it’s a no-brainer if you’re in the market for a new server.
This week’s material filled up fast. It’s vacation season in the northern hemisphere, so let’s see what next week brings…
- “Anyway my point here is that all of crypto should be run entirely by tweens.” Look for the Utility Token section, though it’s all fun.
- How to calculate leap second variation for the year 3000. (via)
- Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now. (via)
- Text size control in st.
- DLX400 typewriter as a Keyboard. Neat but it must be annoying; those aren’t great keyboards.
- Fast Software, the Best Software.
- “Don’t put it on GitHub“, something we all should know. (scroll down to last third)
- Creepy pumpkin. It doesn’t have to be a pumpkin; this could apply to all sorts of things!
- Roguelike Level Design Addendum: Static or Procedural? You’ve played both, I’m sure.
- An xargs lesson. (via)
- The Legacy of the Unix Wars is still around us. (also via)
- What I want out of my window manager.
- Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors. (via)
- Slacking on security. I don’t think Slack is a healthy product to use.
- Dwarf Fortress will let dwarves pet animals and I’m sure that won’t backfire.
- Astronauts Falling on the Moon. No achievement so amazing you can’t trip and fall in the middle of it. (via)
- LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance. I think the computer in The Story of Mel, mentioned here before. (via)
A bumper crop this week!
- Video on OpenBSD, a presentation at NYCBUG by Andre Buskvekster, happening on the 7th. I’ll post a reminder on the 6th.
- OpenBSD ttyplot examples.
- Something blogged (on pkgsrcCon 2019).
- NetBSD 9.0 release process has started. Aarch64 support sounds good.
- TrueNAS 11.2 out.
- PHP and OpenBSD talk by Mario Campos on August 12th at ChiPHPUG lightning talks.
- OpenBGPD: The OpenBSD BGP internet routing daemon. The link source comments are the useful part.
- FreeBSD-SA-19:12.telnet: Were these claims even properly investigated, or did Juniper bully an advisory through? This is a spectator sport item, really, if you can’t tell from the title.
- Exploiting a No-Name FreeBSD Kernel Vulnerability. (via)
- Porting wine to amd64 on NetBSD, second evaluation report.
- Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD, Part 2.
- Enchancing Syzkaller Support for NetBSD, Part 2. Enhancing, I think it should be.
- Work-in-progress threading support in LLDB.
- Touchpad, Interrupted.
This week’s BSD Now talks about some recent security discussions with telnet and (unrelateD) OpenSSH history, and points to a recent discussion on DragonFly I haven’t even gotten to link yet, cause it’s ongoing.
(telnet is awful but it makes me feel nostalgic, cause of all the times I typed ‘GET HTTP/1.0 /’ into it.)
Nan Xiao needed a taskset tool on DragonFly, so he made one. It’s apparently similar to usched(8).
This slipped in just before the 5.6 release, and I thought I had already noted it: DragonFly now defaults to HAMMER2 for disks during install, instead of HAMMER1.
If you want to see all running threads on your system, grouped by process, with who ran it and how much memory it’s taking, it’s easy: ps -alxRH.
I mention this because it’s easier to remember ‘alxRH’ than it is to find all the right options in the ps man page.
I get indirectly cranky, this week.
- Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1. Roguelike! (via)
- Pressing Forward. “The grassroots mechanical keyboard scene”. I did not know about the Hall Effect, or the X1 keyboard, both of which are interesting.
- sc-im, a terminal spreadsheet. Like Visicalc all over again!
- Design tools are holding us back. I like the note on how toolschains are becoming too ultra-specific. (via)
- The Internet and My 53 Years Online.
- Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.
- Secretly Public Domain. This means there’s now a huge amount of books, free to read, that couldn’t be reliably identified before.
- The Builder’s Remorse. “once it was handed over to the corporation, everyone lost control”. Collectively no-one’s fault.
- Size and the Inert Sandbox. About Frontier: Elite.
- Tabletop Whale. “An original science illustration blog”. (via)
- The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction and Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat. Video games, in an experience I bet we all share.
All over the map this week.
- Broken ports? (OpenBSD games)
- Realtime bandwidth terminal graph visualization.
- What’s the point of the Single UNIX Specification?
- Resuming ZFS send.
- A Chapter from the FBI’s History with OpenBSD and an OpenSSH Vuln. (via).
- OpenBSD and NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2019 Nagoya. (via)
- Valuable News – 2019/07/22.
- NetBSD audio – an application perspective. (via)
- Project Trident STABLE-12 Now Available. (via)
- A week of pkgsrc #13.
- OPNsense 19.7.1 released.
- New FreeNAS Mini Entry-Level & High-End Models Unveiled by iXsystems.
- Bill Joy interview, 1984. I once heard him described as a flat-food person. (PDF, via)
Francois Tigeot has updated the radeon driver in DragonFly to match what’s in Linux kernel 3.19.8. No, wait, I took too long to post this cause there’s been so many things, so now it’s up to 4.4.180.