DragonFly BSD Digest – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2025/10/192025/10/12

Lazy Reading for 2025/10/19

Doing my best to clean out old to-post items, so some of these sources are weeks old – but I hope new to you.

Overview of alic and Differences from C. (via)
Introducing TCP-in-UDP solution. That seems weird. (via)
How 100MB Ethernet came to exist.
Project MadHat, building a CPU from the ground up. (via)
Paper Apps Labyrinth. Single player notebook game. (via)
Same place, Pencil Dice.
A Retrospective Survey of 2024/2025 Open Source Supply Chain Compromises. (via)
Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case.
A coffee chat in links.
OpenSSH and Post-Quantum Cryptography. Now a default warning.

2025/10/122025/09/30

Lazy Reading for 2025/10/12

Entertainingly odd trivia.

Cal Newport on the case for quitting social media – second video.
Tea Brewing Guides.
Our Ancestors Murdered Their Mother Tongue, Thankfully. If you don’t know what Proto-Indo-European is, this will help.
“you’re not talking to a helpful sci-fi robot – you’re roleplaying a story about a human talking to a helpful sci-fi robot“
le nticular potato chip.
YouTube… Over Dial Up. Multilink PPP, which I have never seen in the wild.
The 100 MHz 6502. (via)
UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A. (via multiple)
Roguelike Celebration 2025 event list. Happening in less than a month.
[COFF] TECO variants. I had heard TECO was arcane but I had no idea.

2025/10/092025/10/07

gpt show shows more

The show option to the gpt(8) command now has nicer output, with a summary line and ‘humanized’ units.

2025/10/082025/10/07

Keyboard recognition

This is from a while ago, but: your Framework Laptop keyboard should be recognized now on DragonFly.

2025/10/052025/09/26

Lazy Reading for 2025/10/05

There’s a certain amount of aspirational ideas this week.

Aspire Zine. An e-book that is a poster or vice versa.
Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? A chunk of Internet history that passed me by. (via)
Why I prefer human-readable file formats. You should not be surprised by any of these reasons. (via)
EU CRA: It’s Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up! An indirect explainer of what the CRA requires.
Shamogu: a roguelike developed on OpenBSD!
Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin’s ideas at home. What might have been. (via)
Qavg po fnoppy.
The broad state of ZFS on Illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD (as I understand it) Describing the branches and status.
Spending time with the material.
Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs. So much chatter.

Your unrelated video link of the week: Lessons in Questioning.

2025/10/01

NYCBUG social event tonight

NYCBUG’s trying out a new location tonight – go, if you are near.

2025/09/282025/09/19

Lazy Reading for 2025/09/28

Done while traveling.

The $69 Billion Domino Effect. Another reason for open source. (via)
pf reconsolidation. I’d hope for One True pf.
curl is in your car. (via)
How Social Media shortens your life.
Before UNIX there was MULTICS. Before MULTICS there was GECOS, and there’s still people hacking on it. (via)
Incidentally, there’s a “GECOS field” in /etc/passwd that comes from that, I think.
No leap second this year. (via)
humanely dealing with humungus crawlers.
Boombox City. Linked for the design styles; ignore the text. (via)
Magical Systems Thinking. 20 years ago this was called “skunkworks”. (also via)
SDF Plan 9 Boot Camp Registration. (via)

Your unrelated video link of the week: new Cyriak video. (via)

2025/09/212025/09/08

Lazy Reading for 2025/09/21

I have a good mix today.

Open hardware model rocketry.
vimrc: settings based on terminal background.
Choose Your Own Adventure, a history.
MacPaint 1-bit patterns. (via)
HTTP headers that tell syndication feed fetchers how soon to come back.
Voynich Manuscript Structural Analysis. (via)
Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD by Jeff Frasca. Video.
KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD. Includes install instructions.
How I felt in love with calendar.txt. (via)
Quality-of-life on Tetris games.
Underworld Amusements. A niche literary interest.
Playing the Open Source Game. (via)
++080925.

Your unrelated music video of the week: Return of the Phantom by VOID. 2025 or 1985? Can’t easily tell.

2025/09/142025/09/02

Lazy Reading for 2025/09/14

I think I find these link collections most satisfying when I have can point at history, opinion, and “oddity” links all at the same time.

PalaeoGames. “Scientifically accurate content for your palaeontology-themed tabletop role playing game”. Dungeons and ~~Dragons~~ Dinosaurs. (via)
The power we use and the power we give. (via)
Related: Meta’s Cyber Necrocide. (via)
Open Source is one person. (via) Insert XKCD cartoon here; you know which one.
Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa, YouTube. (via)
Aseprite, a pixel art / sprite animation tool. (via)
16 Pixel Dungeon, a game. (via)
Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS. (via)
Discuss.systems: Discussion of computer systems research & practice.
Previous link comes from Rob Ricci’s Are We Decentralized Yet?
ded, a variant on ed(1). (via)
Which means I have to bring up Ed Mastery, the book.
The Fortean Times is still running! It is crazy. (via)

2025/09/072025/08/26

Lazy Reading for 2025/09/07

A little bit of a thread here on the current crawling plague.

The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services.
Why I prefer rST to markdown. Nobody remembers SGML, but everyone reinvents it. (via)
gpart on FreeBSD to partition and format a USB key.
stylish bugs.
The Magic Switch. Surely I’ve mentioned this story before? This is the actual hardware.
Box131: You’re a National Security Project, Harry. Read the first point, about accuracy and how it can be counterproductive.
Yet Another Roguelike Tutorial, Parts 0 and 1. (via)
The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web.
Related to the previous: “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don’t like me!”
And more followup: A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet.
VIC-20 Ultima I. (via)
My other email client is a daemon. (via)

2025/09/02

vkbd(4), cuse(4) added to DragonFly

DragonFly now has vkbd(4) (virtual keyboard) and cuse(3) “character device in user space” added in.

2025/09/012025/08/28

Next NYCBUG meeting: Sept 3

NYCBUG’s got a new meeting space to try out, and it’s on September 3rd. Go, if you are near.

2025/09/012025/09/08

The next 3 NYCBUGs

NYCBUG’s next meeting is in a new location on October 1st. Go if you are near. It sounds like November 5th and December 3rd events are lined up too.

2025/08/312025/08/29

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/31

Done early!

The Anti-Subscription Catalogue. Listings of software that doesn’t require perpetual payment. You will find useful tools there. (via)
The Interim Computer Museum current exhibits. I wish I was closer.
The Origins of Dwarf Fortress, A 4-part Youtube series. (via)
Non-AI images for your website. Possibly more than you’ll ever need, really.
GLOG Class: Lackey.
Related: apparently there’s a whole “bespoke single-level Cloak-and-Sword class” trend? And other made-up classes, for a fun read.
I Am An AI Hater. (via many places)
Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises. Or, reinventing problems. (via)
Speaking of network issues: NFS is 40 years old – see events at MSST (the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology). (via)
Speaking of NFS: it worked best on Sun, but NFS Must Die!, but it’s not the different animal that was RFS.
Fictional Git manpage generator. (via)

Your unrelated video (from my childhood) of the week: Jazz #2. (via)

2025/08/242025/08/10

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/24

A couple of these links are from previous weeks, saved because I already had more time-dependent links to post. Still good!

Filtered for bottom-up global monitoring.
I mentioned Bill Atkinson’s death a while back – he also invented a superior dithering method, which I only found out by accident, and I suspect it may find new use locations.
A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptop. Classic MacOS inside a PA-RISC / CDE? machine is a combo I have never seen before.
Those Titles the AI Bot Thought I Had Written.
ChatGPT agent’s user-agent. Bing and Yandex both indexing your work, with no opt-out.
11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Quay Brothers. (via)
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The 30 Year Late Review. I almost don’t believe this exists.
Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl.
Pimping my Casio: Part Deux. (via)
Bag of words, have mercy on us.
Simone’s webdesktops. Fun just to fiddle with. (via)

2025/08/182025/08/09

Disable console bell globally

DragonFly now has a sysctl that will disable the console beep everywhere, not just in a particular shell. This is either unimportant to you or a massive relief.

2025/08/172025/08/14

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/17

I’ve had a surplus of links, so this is almost all stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks, pre-scheduled.

microm8, an Apple][ emulator that adds new features. (via last week’s theme)
Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?
Installing *BSD in 2025 part 5. Wrapping up a series with some non-BSD, too.
Building A Stirling Engine Bike. I don’t think it’s necessarily practical but I like the concept of a Stirling Engine.
asncounter and grepcidr, two tools I wish I knew about long ago. (via)
Mastodon has continued to function and grow for longer than the entire existence of Google+.
Learning, AI, and John Searle’s Chinese Room.
If OpenSSL were a GUI. (via)
The New Dinosaurs, 2025.
Objects should shut the fuck up. (via)
The Lethal Trifecta and prompt injection.
confusable_homoglyphs. (via)

2025/08/132025/08/09

Camera support via uvc in DragonFly

Michael Neumann has completed an initial port of uvc, for webcam support, to DragonFly. His commit message lists both how he did it and how to use it.

2025/08/112025/08/09

Do you need crypto/opencrypto?

Not tokens of agreed value, but specifically, crypto(4) and crypto(9). Michael Neumann doesn’t see a use for them any more, so speak up if you need them.

2025/08/102025/08/08

Lazy Reading for 2025/08/10

Apple ][ mini-theme.

Math finds.
Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards.
REXPaint – ASCII art editor. (via)
Baman Piderman returns. (via)
The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. As a former industrial design student that went on to do nothing directly with my education, I agree.
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. I linked to this 8 years ago and it’s time for a reminder link; a gem of a puzzle collection.
Floor796. You will lose some time searching around. (via)
INIT HELLO, a new Apple ][ convention that just happened, at The Computer Museum. (via)
FujiNet, networking for older computers. (via previous link)
Also, Applesauce.
Silo, from an interesting design company.