Justin Sherrill – DragonFly BSD Digest

2025/11/092025/11/03

Lazy Reading for 2025/11/09

Mini games theme this week.

Abstract Board Games. Check the source discussion for similar game links.
Related: abstractgames.org. Read the online magazine articles.
Building a UI Framework.
I Am Out Of Data Hell.
Directory of Open Access Books. Not old books out of copyright, but modern books not behind a paywall. (via)
Filtered for wobbly tables and other facts. #4 is funnier out loud.
Thinkycon 2025. (via)
Forbidden Psalm: tabletop miniature MÖRK BORG-compatible. I would not have understood those words a few years ago. (via)
The Morl Society presentation signups. “No topic too niche”. Put together by this fellow. (via)

Your unrelated music of the week: the ‘lost album’ Stereotype from Squarepusher.

2025/11/032025/11/06

Wednesday NYC*BUG: The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden

That’s two days from now, on 11/5: James Lowden will be talking about COBOL and the gcobol in GCC, which is in part his fault. This should be good. RSVP and go, if you are near. Stream if you are not.

Update: here’s the video:

Peertube: https://toobnix.org/w/gHacaw1TMx7HqrUiZbHYjQ

Youtube: https://youtube.com/live/ldLIyticlNU

2025/11/022025/10/24

Lazy Reading for 2025/11/02

Hey, I made my averaging-once-yearly commit!

The Questing Beast Appendix N. I like the idea of “personal” Appendix Ns.
Phrack is still publishing. (via)
PagedOut, tech articles with a one-page max. (also via)
Winners of the 2025 IFComp. (via)
One of Pascal’s original calculating machines from 1642 is up for sale. (via)
AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System. Seeing the inside of Brian Kernighan’s office is sorta neat. (video, via)
Drawing an ASCII TIE fighter for post?quantum cryptography.
Robot Phone Home…Or Else.
Cursed Knowledge. (via)

2025/10/282025/10/24

vi improvements

nvi2, which is what you get in DragonFly when you type “vi”, has been updated to version 2.2.2. The nvi2 README gives a little history of how many years this has been around. Close to 50? A family tree would be interesting.

Related: turning on vim mode in Obsidian gets you this entertaining dialog:

Vi mode confirmation dialog, where you are asked to show you know how to quit out of it before you start it.

Shouldn’t it be “vi mode”? Oh hey, look, an esoteric definition argument, just what you came to the Internet for.

2025/10/262025/10/21

Lazy Reading for 2025/10/26

It’s short link title week!

Networking for System Administrators (2nd Edition) is definitely happening.
Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web. (via)
Replacing Music Streaming Services with a Self-hosted Stack. (via)
ELIZA turns 60. Check the bibliographic links at the end. (via)
BSD-USER 4 LINUX or the BSDULATOR. (via)
Selling Lemons.
Abagious Tactics, a sort of sequel to Oblique Strategies. (via)
PIRACYKILLS, a clever method to turn pirates into customers. (via)
A dumb use of AI.
A clever use of AI.
MUNG origin.
Other tech trees.
Special admin tools. (via)
Simple X11 configuration. Saved for my own benefit. (also via)

Current event: Roguelike Celebration 2025 is happening right now if you read this soon enough. If you missed it, there’s a related Steam sale filled with roguelike games.

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)