DragonFly BSD Digest

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.

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.

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.

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)

No theme though a bit dark.

• The only existing copy of UNIX v4.  (via)
• readtape, for Magnetic tape data recovery in software.  Related.
• The Internet of Things That Don’t Work.  Surely I’ve linked to this before?
• The Baby and the Black Box, about ‘Steve’ Shirley, who died earlier this year.  (via)
• User Specific Runit Supervisor.  Not BSD-specific but interesting detail.  (via)
• Always check that your bug report wasn’t solved a hundred-plus years ago.
• What was the Dark Age of Comic Books?
• Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative.
• Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology.  (via)
• how to use the internet again: a curriculum.  (via)