DragonFly BSD Digest

After the initial notes, this is a week to dedicate some time to reading; these are more intense than usual.

• Sept 4 NYC*BUG: GEFS: The Long road to Production Use, Ori Bernstein.  Go if you are near, and there are plans to stream if you are not near.
• Speaking of streaming, the NYCBUG group has done a significant amount of work on streaming open-source meetings; now you can contribute (tax-advantaged) to it.
• OK, now for the reading bits.
• The Tic-Tac-Toe Mysteries of Xerloc O’Xolmes.
• In Which Graphic Novels Are Optimized for Portability.
• Dinosaur’s Pen, old tech media images.  (via)
• No apps no masters.
• Fight On! Returns.
• The rich history of ham radio culture.
• Steampunk strandbeest.
• SSH has become our universal (Unix) external access protocol.
• Generating Mazes.  (via)
• The Dying Computer Museum.  A good reason to pay attention to the Computer History Museum, SDF’s Interim Computer Museum, or the not-enough-people-know-it iCHEG.
• Vibing With Some Tunes and a Retro Wave Slideshow on the Apple IIe.  Synthwave already has early Apple visual associations; this seems like a perfect match.

Odd hardware week.

• Repository Statistics.  That’s way more package repos than I expected.  (via)
• The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins.  (via)
• A short history of the 909 in 16 songs.  (via)
• DMARC Vendors.  (via)
• Sign up to support the Interim Computer Museum.
• … because you can actually use the exhibits.
• Technical Marvels, Part 5: Chess Automatons.
• asciiker, a game that is vaguely roguelike but also 3D – right-click and rotate.  (via)
• When does The Phantom Tollbooth take place?
• minuteman missile communications.
• Sensorwatch, put a tiny computer in your Casio wristwatch.  (via)
• Michael W. Lucas’s next book might be It’s Always DNS.
• Indirectly related, Full-featured email server running OpenBSD
• E-ink digit clock.
• Replacing postfix with dma + auth, easy.
• Betrayal is the Internet’s business model.
• New Brothers Quay film on the way.  No trailer, darnit.  (via)
• “Weird Al” Yankovic – Polkamania!  I am pretty sure it starts with a Cyriak animation.  (via)

I am attempting to clear my link backlog but not succeeding.

• Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game.  (via)
• From boiling lead and black art.  Veers into UNIX history at the end.  (via)
• A Look Back at StripWare.
• Escaping the software tar pit: model clashes and how to avoid them.  (via)
• The Programmer Productivity Myth.
• Plan 9 ported to SPARC over a few days.
• More engineering case studies to dive into.
• You can see when Great Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar by typing ‘cal 9 1752’.  Just cause time is messy, it’s different for other countries.
• Also, time goes faster on the moon.  That’s not a figure of speech.
• Video of Michael W. Lucas’s recent presentation on Run Your Own Mail Server at NYCBUG.
• State of Text Rendering 2024.  (via)
• Esquire’s 75 best sci-fi books of all time.  Feels clickbaity, but a good list for finding books you may not have read yet.  (via)

I wanted to clear all the newsletters items I’ve saved, so you are getting links until my inbox no longer paginates.

• Just Use Postgres for Everything.  (via)
• When web search failed me for Postgres.
• The Future of MySQL is Postgres. (target from previous link)
• From Cloud Chaos to FreeBSD Efficiency.  Or any BSD.   (via)
• Layers and Gateways, a historical view.  Railways vs networks.
• The workstation you wanted in 1990, in your pocket.
• Paul Ceruzzi has a Substack.
• pkgsrc-2024Q2 is out.
• X Window System at 40.  (via)
• Some TENEX history.
• Why shitty robots are the antidote of perfectionism, a video.  Her store has neat stuff.
• Scifiinterfaces.com.  I linked to this in 2013 but it’s still going.  (reminded via)
• Largest old computer I’ve seen a person keep yet.  (via)
• Tiny TV 2.  (via)
• UNLICENSED: Bootlegging As Creative Practice, a book.  (via)
• One Page Dungeon Reviews.  (via)

I was not able to get this done early like the last few posts, but there’s still a good range here.

• Can You Make It Bigger? – A Journey In Building Arcade Cabinets.  (via)
• Via previous story, the Picade.
• The 84 Series.  On point for current topics and period stylings.  (via)
• Bat Hauntings on Apple VR.  This, then, is the future.  (via)
• 3D Printing My Teeth.  (via)
• valve.computer.  Hardcore analog.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Schotter – Georg Nees – Part 1.  (via)
• The Old Computer Challenge v4 (Olympics edition)
• Try out a NetBSD system in 20 seconds (amd64 & amr64).
• Things to Make and Do.

I have a weird schedule this week but I think I came up with sufficient links.

• Artifacting.  Understanding JPEG encoding will incidentally help understanding MPEG.
• Technical Marvels, the start, plus the Lebombo and Ishango Bones.  An ongoing series, so I’m interested on what they do with the Antikythera Device.  (via)
• diff turns 50.  (via)
• Micropolis, Simcity recreated in-browser and in-progress by one of the original developers.  (via)
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator.  (via)
• MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5.  (via I lost it, sorry)
• Spreadsheet Assassins.  Almost my entire IT expense budget at my main job is “Monthly fees”.  (via)
• Mathematical Art by Henry Segerman.
• Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the Hard Way).

No mini-theme this week.

• Soft Electronics.  Linked for the physical designs.  (via)
• Magic Numbers.  What shaped the 1500 byte Ethernet MTU.
• Languages as Symbols.  (via)
• Odie Directory.  Found Google Docs turned into HTML.  (also via)
• NON-OBJECTIVE.  All sorts of neat clock faces. (also also via)
• Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History.  I worry that there will be so many knockoffs you can’t find originals.
• Another example of knockoffs overwhelming the originals.
• Emoji history: the missing years.  Thanks, Ben Collver.
• “using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture”  (via)
• Thumb Nation: How We Learned to Play With Our Fingers.  (via)
• Reversing Choplifter.  (via)