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.
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)
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)
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)
“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“.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of these links are more… mainstream?
- I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. (via)
- Taken. (also via)
- Feynman’s formula on trying new restaurant foods.
- The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. Yeah, clickbait, but accurate. (via)
- How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer. (via)
- 21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations. Movies to watch, mostly stopmotion. (via)
- Detecting and removing dangerous secrets on dev workstations before Shai-Hulud does.
- Kentucky’s Bourbon problem. Read to the end.
- SCIFICORRIDORARCHIVE. (via)
- The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History. (via)
- I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline. I am doing something similar but not as drastic. (via)
I found a stash of saved emails/links that I don’t think I ever posted, so they’re mixed in here.
- FreeBSD sh for MacOS.
- Biggest DynaTAC ever.
- 3D.City. (via)
- Dice Soup. (via The Glatisant. Lots of other links in that source.)
- The best secondary prompt string possible.
- A hat on your calculator. (via)
- Related: modern versions of HP calculators. (via)
- Video for NYC*BUG Nov 2025: The Once and Future COBOL, by James Lowden.
- Games for Freaks, a game magazine.
- the totalisator.
- Daniel Temkin – FORTY-FOUR ESOLANGS, The Art of Esoteric Code, a book review.
- Some games that happen to be all about music.
- I don’t know how to describe this. (via)
I’m posting this now cause it’s timely: there’s a remote-only FreeBSD presentation at SLUUG so everyone can watch.
I get to break out the Apple ][ category again!
- Vibe Coding a $20k /year Enterprise Logistics Platform. We are returning to the era of custom internal software. This I sort of like?
- my favorite independent stop-motion movies. I saw Blood Tea and Red String years ago; it was a wonderful if strange experience.
- Those old modem upgrades. I had a similar experience; starting at perhaps 2400 baud? 9600? and working up.
- Key, in sight. (via)
- AI errno(2) values.
- How and why I jailbroke my Kindle. I am curious about calibre integration. (via)
- An Apple ][+ compatible laptop. I would really love to have this, despite it being a complete folly. (via)
- It’s time to talk about my writerdeck. But then again, maybe a command line is all you need? (via)
- Planescape: Torment, Part 1: From the Tabletop…
- “Why pay for an orchestra when your computer can do it all?”
- “the moat will keep getting filled“.
- Microcosm Industries, simulation toys. (via)
Because of Circumstances, I didn’t post earlier about this – but there is a stream to watch right now at the NYCBUG website for tonight’s “OpenBSD Security Mitigations” presentation with Brian Callahan.
No theme, just links.
- Let’s find out how to get predictable IPv6 addresses assigned to OpenBSD VMs. Linked in part just for the IPv6 details.
- Fractions in HTML. Linked to remember it for next time I need to write a fraction, though not here. WordPress will eat the HTML entities when saving.
- DinoCon 2026 schedule. I won’t make it, but it sounds fun.
- The vi Family. (via)
- rsstrogen/CLAUDE.md. (via)
- Your Dinner Got Worse on Purpose. (via)
- Actually, just go look at the most recent Things entry. Too many good links to cherry-pick.
- Obsidian Ecosystem Overhaul Announced.
- OpenSMTPd instead of exim.
- Orion PDA. I can think of remote locations where this would be useful.
- Three Things about Data. “Gather less of it” is a surprisingly practical rule.
Is anyone reading this a Home Assistant user and if so, how do you like it?
- Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC. (via)
- Monitor your devices with LibreNMS on FreeBSD.
- Adventures in Code. (via)
- Related: Russ Cox on regex. (via)
- Vibing a wardriving visualizer. Linked for the wifi mapping.
- The 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159`. I wish I had thought of this, cause I am entertained by the same coincidences. (via)
- Very manual bootstrapping.
- Markdown Ate The World. A useful document history. (via)
- curl to /dev/sda. A fun idea, not a good idea. (also via)
- LibreOffice and the art of overreacting. Remember: pay, always pay, for what you like using, even if it’s not required. It makes a huge difference. (via)
- INIT HELLO: A New Apple II Conference.