Michael W. Lucas is speaking at NYCBUG’s next meeting, April 1st, a week from now. “What’s Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way – a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS.” Go, if you are near, and watch the livestream if you are not.
Accidentally pre-published early, so you might have briefly seen these already. I write links into a post as I see them, so it builds over the course of the week. Or weeks, if I have enough items to post ahead.
- Every layer of review makes you 10x slower. Network effects run both directions!
- Vibe coding toward the incident horizon. Always up for a Mickens-style column.
- Speaking of which: I did not expect this from a tenured Harvard professor.
- Or this.
- Similar: The Shaw Brothers Youtube channel. Lots of violence. Surely you know about the 36th Chamber? (via)
- How to Stop Jumping Ship. (via)
- d20 Gameable Ideas from a 12th-Century Travelogue. (also via)
- Simple sabotage of agents.
- The Web is bearable with RSS. Also some links to start with, with some excellent tips. (via)
- If you aren’t using an RSS reader, you should; it’s great.
- Eddie, email as scaffolding. (via)
- Timeframe, a very sophisticated signboard. (via)
My backlog is close to clear.
- An Oral History of UNIX. (via)
- How old are README files? Probably the 1970s, possibly earlier. Found in a thread that ends with this.
- The scariest bootloader code. (via)
- Self-Hosted Software Names You’re Probably Mispronouncing.
- Build your own Obsolescence Guaranteed PiDP-11/70.
- Does it hurt to go to space?
- The E-Typer.
- Lightning on demand is back. Anything involving SRL is great.
- Modifying the already-modifiable Framework computer keys.
- Artefact, a single player TTRPG that will look great to you if you remember the old Special Artifacts table III.E listing in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide. (via)
- Composting Mobile Phones. Linked both for the subject and for the thorough setup. (via)
- OverTheWire: Wargames. Security exercises / games via SSH. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Class of ’86: Unsung Classics From The Year Thrash Broke.
Every few years, something happens and Hammer’s snapshotting saves me. Last week, this host had a power outage and MySQL managed to mangle the WordPress database for this site. Fixing it needed only:
- cd /var/hammer
- cd var/[date of last good snapshot]/db/mysql
- cpdup -VV -v . /var/db/mysql
I am writing this down in part because I am sure I’ll need it again in a few years.
whee
- BSDCan registration is open. 5 tutorial sessions this year!
- Print and fold your own mini-comic. (via)
- Actually Existing Solarpunk. (via)
- finally we have created the silver bullet. Brooks’ Law rules.
- bsd.rd breakdown. I always like looking at emergency repair tools in non-emergency situations.
- A.I. Isn’t People and Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions? Two essays on LLMs, not in opposition to each other.
- Diomidis Spinellis’ video talk about integrating the newly rediscovered V4 UNIX into his UNIX history repo. Note the first commit in that repo is 57 years ago.
- How much it costs to run OpenBenches. Extrapolate to any other independent website that isn’t a store. (via)
- No leap second needed this year.
- Physical Phones. (via)
No theme!
- Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now. Go, if you are near.
- On pressing the space bar for the cabinet.
- The state of Linux music players in 2026. A subset of that is BSD music players of course. (via)
- ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering. (via)
- The Dunking Decree. (via)
- Bending ePaper To Our Will with Custom LUTs. E-paper ‘pixels’ are not binary on/off.
- This is magic. Good comments from Youtube, a rarity.
- The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed) and Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess. The important thing to me is the note that vi exists as a specification, not just different software variations.
- Sorta related: Design Deconstruction, Vim as video editor.
- Things that are not backup solutions.
- All Your Base, slight remaster.
Clearing as many open tabs as possible.
- The Day the telnet Died. (via)
- Reports of Telnet’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated. (via)
- Offpunk 3.0 (via)
- How I Scrobble.
- Ultima IX. Falling out of where I was familiar with the games.
- Penrose, diagram creation with text. (via)
- Related: Penrose Tiling, in case you weren’t familiar with it.
- Freakpages, sorta like what I do here. (via)
- The Squarp Hapax, linked because of the name. (via, via)
- The Decision Before the Work.
- The consoles of UEFI, serial and otherwise, and their discontents.
- Exploring Docker containers on FreeBSD.
- Windows 11 Update. (via)
One link is very modern, the others are not.
- Places to Telnet. This should keep you busy for a bit. (via)
- The Visible Zorker Project (and Patreon).
- Meshtastic and Meshcore, which I am seeing more often.
- Tcl: The Most Underrated, But The Most Productive Programming Language. (via)
- A short list of good games.
- The Home Computer Hybrids: Atari, TI, and the FCC.
- Top 20 Newsgroups. USENET is still active. (via)
- Entries in the 2026 Public Domain Day Film Contest, using 1930 material that just became available.
- Running and administrating a 2.11 BSD system.
- TOPS-10 Survival Guide, to get an idea of what it’s like without having to run it.
I’m only complainy with some of these links.
- Your Search Button Powers my Smart Home.
- Typeframe PS-85, which I’ve linked before, but now you can get the plans. (via)
- Good Web Search. Google searches and even searching within my own Gmail account have become unreliable.
- What should I use to make a website?
- Clicks Power Keyboard. And Clicks Communicator. (via) ReTreo, I’d call it.
- Odd SYN attack, parts one and two.
- Favourite well-made apps and sites summary from the person behind Shift Happens. Too many good links to pick out.
- The two subtypes of one sort of package managers, the “program manager”. People always want to merge them.
- Time Machine inside a FreeBSD jail. Layers inside layers. (via)
- I’m back to building my own digital music collection.
This Lazy Reading is a little bit stuck at the turn of the century.
Time dependent: NYCBUG’s having a get-together on February 4th, Tuesday. Go if you are near. There will be stickers?
- Web Archiving at the Library After 25 Years. Library of Congress, that is.
- CODEPUNS.
- DJ Q-Bert’s DOOM BOX.
- Hypermind, The High-Availability Solution to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist. (via)
- Tone Glow 200: Negativland. If ever there was a group that could talk about copyright… (via)
- The UNIX Magic poster annotation. (via)
- USB Bus, not what you think, a video. (via)
- XScreenSaver 6.14 with 18 new savers.
- Jam Like It’s The 1980s With A Mini-IBM PC. This is the boringest mini-recreation.
- C.A.F.E., visual Home Automation editor. (via)
- How I’m still not using GUIs: A guide to the terminal. (via)
- 200 MB RAM FreeBSD Desktop. Seeing other people’s loader.conf is always interesting.
Your unrelated music link of the week: PLAGUE MUSIC by KAVARI. I like the music; I don’t enjoy the video.
A couple off-the-beaten-track items.
- The Rise of Computer Games, Part II: Digitizing Nerddom. (see previous in series)
- Narrascope, happening in June in Albany, NY. It sounds like there will be games and experiences to try, not just discussion. (via)
- I sell onions on the Internet. I thought for sure I had linked this before. (via)
- The Caligra C100. (also via)
- “Do something productive with your 10,000 hours people.” I am only qualified to run around a restricted area and be worried, going by my gameplay hours.
- Discord IPO, again. Notes on self-hosting chat, as a transition and fallback for the inevitable enshittification of Discord.
- Thinking About Thinking.
- SystemSix.
- How the past models the future. Linked for the page x-ray comparison images.
- Eat This Newsletter. His podcast is soothing.
- Jan Švankmajer Day. Lots of animated gifs if you aren’t familar with his work. (via)
- The original BSD proposal. (via)
Your unrelated comics art link of the week: Jack Kirby Heroes & Humanity exhibition.
I am linking to the Public Domain stuff “late”, seeing as how we’re 3 weeks into the new year. It’s good forever though.
- The Dream of the Universal Library.
- Related to the previous link: Public Domain Day 2026.
- Also related: ImageS Magazine. The man who put them together died a few years ago; pick up any you can find now because a collection like this won’t happen again.
- Dead Archivist Society. A worry I have too.
- Corporate Breakfast, a Kickstarter.
- The Market for Lemons, about web frameworks. (via)
- Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (via)
- How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner. (via)
- @YouAreCarrying, an Infocom inventory bot. (via)
More BSD content than usual.
- Home Assistant as Personal Device Tracker.
- BSD PF versus Linux nftables for firewalls for us.
- The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure. “The tale grew in the telling”
- Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution.
- ASP level generation autoplay.
- The story of Propolice, the OpenBSD stack protector.
- Modern Commodore 64 cartridge loaders.
- Trying Navidrome on FreeBSD.
- Flock and Urban Surveillance. See also 404 Media’s Flock coverage.
- Tangible Media. (via)
- How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Webtoons revisited. Many links to follow.
The end of year holiday gave me a chance to pick out some more esoteric links.
- The Texas Instruments CC-40 invades Gopherspace.
- Long Dog (and other elongated animals).
- “domestic livestock“.
- The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News. (via)
- The one-click Navidrome bandcamp purchase sync.
- 5 social media platforms that are actually social.
- how to repurpose your old phone into a web server. (via)
- Archiving with Are.na.
- Dinosaurs Were Weirder Than We Ever Imagined.
- NASA supplies free science e-books. (via)
- Open Source Power. A good contrast on license types and what they do as a result. (via)
- An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape. Firsthand account, not a news summary.
- On self-managing Postgres. Not wrong, though I still pick self-hosting.
- RuBee, the protocol.
- Ultima IV for Apple II, Remastered. (via)
Upcoming event(s): NYCBUG’s got events on the 7th and the 10th, within the next few days. Attend if you can.
Happy almost 2026! Some end-of-year lists linked here.
- The annoyances of the traditional Unix ‘logger’ program.
- Grow slowly, stay small. Anti-enshittification, if you will. Related.
- MidnightBSD 4.0 is out. (via)
- The original Mozilla “Dinosaur” logo artwork.
- The Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System. But what’s this PS-85?(via)
- The Best Metal Albums and the Best Electronic Music of 2025.
- What are your favorite Shadertoys?
- “Greatest Comics of All Time” meta-list. A statistical answer. I would change the relative positions of some of them, but read anything listed that you haven’t already. (via)
- The best comics of 2025, as chosen by our contributors. Perhaps better, to follow up on.
- pkgsrc-2025Q4 released.
Merry almost Christmas!
- Releasebot!
- Red Alert 2 in the browser, so playable on BSD? Haven’t tried yet.
- The local-first rebellion. If you run Home Assistant, how do you like it? (via)
- CSS Named Colors poster. (via)
- Secure Communications with the One Time Pad Cipher. With paper and pencil. (PDF, via)
- The Exploding Whale has a dedicated site now. (also via)
- Actually Existing Solarpunk. (via)
- Presentation Club.
- CHATGPT MAGIC-8 BALL. (via)
- How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants. (also via)
Oddities week!
- Doctype Magazine. (via)
- An Infinity of Ships. Video review. (via)
- Mapping the [TTRPG] Blogosphere. Linked for the data processing. (also via)
- Typing with your Thumbs.
- Tooth and Bone, a dinosaur blog.
- Twilight Imperium rulebook. (via)
- Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system?
- Library of Time. (via)
- Boing. (also via)
- Los Campesinos on streaming:. Use Bandcamp or Quobuz instead of Spotify. Better service for less money. (via)
Happy birthday me!
- Another Type 30 Display Reproduction At 36% Scale.
- Corners of the Internet Database. Set some time aside for this. (via)
- Obsidian merchandise is surprisingly nice. (via)
- Reflections from TPAC 2025.
- AI contributes code on GitHub. Time, not code generation, is the scarcest resource for open source. AI patching does not help.
- Framing and World of Warcraft’s Rest System. (via)
- XSscreensaver 6.13 is out, a minor update.
- The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition.
- Inside the Great Firewall Part 3: Geopolitical and Societal Ramifications. (via)
- The best tape dispenser I’ve ever seen.
NYCBUG’s holiday party / lightning talks event is tonight. If you can’t make it, it’ll be streamed on the website and available on IRC.
Note that the recorded stream from the last event, The Once and Future COBOL, is available on YouTube and PeerTube. I heard the speaker, James K. Lowden, talk about FreeTDS years ago and enjoyed it too.
Some good long reads.
- Claude is listening. Linked to note there’s no standard in how long a company keeps your data.
- Strandbeest evolution 2025. I am glad this has kept happening.
- Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again. (lost the source, sorry)
- Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices.
- The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah.
- Running a PDP-8 from 1965. (video, via)
- Colossus: The Missing Manual. (via)
- ACM has gone open access. This is a significant leap from a major publisher.
- Related: the most comprehensive technical journal bibliography I’ve ever seen. (both via)
- Apple 2 Black Friday sales. (via)