The March 6 NYCBUG meeting is coming up, and it sounds like something I’d want to see: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist, working remote using only a $100 Pinebook. Be sure to RSVP if you can go cause this is in-person and they need to know who is coming into the NYU facility.
The Realtek E2600 – “Killer Ethernet Adapter” – is now supported in DragonFly. Or it’s an Intel product? I’m not sure.
I had Covid in February, which made me sit still long enough to find all these links way ahead of time.
- “I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH” Linked for the links within. (via)
- Max Brückner’s Polyhedra (1900). I’d enjoy constructing these.
- Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets). (via)
- Download the whole IF Archive.
- Gathering Structures. ‘Lightning talks’ can be fun.
- Okay, Color Spaces. CIE XYZ is new to me. That rhymes! (via)
- Images are just videos with a single frame. A Sora quote that is intensely wrong, and I have a decades-old argument against it, The rest of that article is spot-on, too.
- Huffman Codes – How Do They Work? (via)
- Ahab’s Leg Dilemma: Part 1. (via)
- A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us. Does this mean the Hail Mary Cloud finally petered out?
- British Cryptids: The Ramflaggie Of Argyll. The point is not the story it tells but the style it uses; this is a modern video. (via)
- Create for Yourself. Own your work, and own where it is located, or else it will eventually be lost.
You get to see a rabbit hole I went down just by following the links in order.
- Today in “Daylight Savings Chaos Monkey”.
- A description/history of Centrex phone systems.
- How SSH port became 22. Surprisingly simple. (via)
- Folk search engines. You’re sorta reading one now.
- The Berkeley Software Distribution. (via)
- Box109: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. An excellent transcript of a talk about design and what it means.
- Death, Lonely Death. 15 billion miles away and we’re still talking to Voyager 1. (via)
- Say We Do, a broadsheet about game design. $1 to subscribe. Much more satisfying delivered like this than via Twitter or SubStack. (via)
- This led me to some other treats like Social Generation of D&D Stats In the Time of Pandemic, and The Classroom Game of Cool Swords.
- That then led me to MOSAIC Strict, a way of defining modular, minimal games.
- Undying Dusk, a game inside a PDF. (via)
Aaron LI’s written up a nice summary of what’s been added to support WireGuard on DragonFly and how to get started. You need to be on -master to use it, but if you want to read about it there’s always the man page.
Mini-theme: collections of media.
- Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023.
- ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. (via)
- NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available! There’s now a Wii port, which is neat. (via)
- The Salmar Construction, a 1970s “large music synthesis engine”. (via)
- The miracle of the commons. Principles that apply to open source projects. (via)
- Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist.
- An RNG that runs in your brain.
- Lost infosec battles.
- The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive. (via)
- This message does not exist.
- Computational Poems. (via)
- At long last: the MWL Title Index.
- A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Omni: Souvenir.
No theme this week.
- BSDCan papers submissions close tomorrow – get yours in.
- Next NYCBUG meeting, March 6: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist. Traveling and working with only a Pinebook.
- Anatomy of a Hollerith Card.
- More stories about the famously idiosyncratic author of that previous link, David Mills. (via)
- Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents. (via)
- What is a terminal-based game you’ve played that’s worth mentioning?
- Understanding phonetic symbols. Written for IBM but talks about a standard.
- D100 sheets. I enjoy just reading these. (via)
- Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. (via)
There’s a huge amount of commits for this, but I’ll point at the first with FreeBSD code; one of several incorporating OpenBSD changes, and of course it rolls out to tools.
Deep dives week. I was on the road almost all week for my main job so a bit sparse.
- Dave Mills, the guy who created NTP (and possibly FTP or at least one of the earliest versions) died recently. Here’s some history / anecdotes. (via)
- Single-service sites are getting very specific. (via)
- Origin story of the Digital logo, which is not Helvetica. (via)
- Tom Harned wrote up DragonFly on a Thinkpad 480.
- web-adventures.org. (via)
- The “Cheap” Web. (also via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Send my former coworker to baking school. He thinks more intensely about bread and how to make it, than anyone you’ve ever met. I’m not exaggerating. Help him out; it’ll make his day.
I have been on the road so it’s a short week. The links are more cheery, though.
- Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens.
- The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
- The Dobbstown Mirror. I subscribe; it’s a treat in the mail
- Ship of Theseus on Wikipedia is a Ship of Theseus. (via)
- Crusty, the Indestructible Mac. (via)
- Reboi, I suppose the 2020s version of a MAME Cabinet.
- The Book 8088. I almost think it’s a prank?
- Inside .git. (via)
I’ve got some real gems this week.
- MULTIPLY – A BOOK ABOUT CALCULATORS. Discussion of the open source tools used to process it. (via)
- diagram.website, or An Internet Map. Lots of links there. (via)
- Googling symptoms of the flu.
- Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request. AI, a customizable spam tool. (via)
- What was ISDN? Analog lines completely going away makes me nervous.
- The biggest problem with selling print books is the software. A nice Print on Demand summary in there.
- ou sont les blogs d’antan? Lots of links to other esoteric blogs in there. (via)
- Fast NetBSD booting, which led me to smolBSD.
- DSA removal from SSH. Matters most if you are running an very outdated system.
- Modern Commodore 64 motherboards.
- Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics. Applies to DragonFly too.
- Hardening an OpenBSD Workstation.
Your unrelated extended music of the week: Bill Laswell featuring DJ Rob Swift – Reanimation. Which of course reminds me that Rob Gets Busy. If you like that, here’s a crazy amount of beat juggling, at its best when it creates new music and rhythms. (via)
The DragonFly release process now includes an automatic build of supporting packages.
Aaron Li has committed different crypto implementations for support.
Mini-theme is about building the Internet without platforms, or at least without ones designed to extract revenue from you.
- Please, Own Your RSS Links.
- “I’m ChatGPT.”
- Vintage Calculator Designs, 1968-1983.
- Why do I know shell, and how can you?
- Banner Depot 2000. (via)
- Damaged Earth Catalog. More links. (also via)
- Multiplayer Mandelbrot.
- Barely Minimum.
- TeX == blech.
- Standard Ebooks and classic web tech. (via)
- Floppy Disk Fever.
Your difficult music link of the week: There Will Never Be Another Harry Partch.
Assuming the weather hasn’t interfered (I am preposting this), NYCBUG meets tonight.
ChiBUG meets tomorrow, in I assume the normal place.
Update: postponed due to weather.
Of course the first thing I did was type the wrong year into the title of this post.
- OpenBSD printing and Avery labels.
- pkgsrc-2023Q4 out.
- Next NYC*BUG: Jan 10th.
- DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s.
- There’s a thread about disklabel on the TUHS list that went from interesting history to OpenFirmware discussion and then into the problem of bootstrapping/hardware monitors. Lots more I didn’t link. (iPhone-related)
- ‘Merchants of Complexity’: Why 37Signals Abandoned the Cloud. Recurring monthly payments for static goods are a goldmine – for the seller. (via)
- Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone. (via)
- Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD. I don’t agree with it but it is interesting.
- 2024 FreeBSD community survey. Closes tomorrow.
- Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate. I don’t know the products well enough to say this is the only analysis.
- Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store. Counterintuitively, he’s charging less money but making more money.
- The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again. Read the article for the links inside it.
Happy new year! More BSD content in this week’s summary than usual.
- The Infinite 8-Bit Computer Game Character Archive. (via)
- OSR Rules Families. (via)
- How about not having platforms so large that their policy decisions carry this much weight? Having an alternative platform makes these problems go away.
- Battle for Libraries. Seeing some of the authors signed up to support this made me decide “yes, this is good”.
- A Murder at the End of the World: Are you Vi or Emacs? (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 28 – Configuration – Corner Actions.
- Making my own Bed Sensor. (via)
- My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter. Always check voltages / don’t trust written voltages. (via)
- First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD. (via)
- Default mail transport in FreeBSD 14.0 is DragonFly Mail Agent, neat.
- The BSDCan 2024 Call For Papers is out.
Your unrelated music of the week: Don Leisure, Halal Cool J. Music’s good, title’s hilarious. (via)
Yao Ge has created a new DragonFly mirror in Nanjing, China. It’s on the mirrors page too.
Merry almost Christmas!
- Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read. (via)
- An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. The birth of fuzzing. (PDF, via via)
- Copyright law is living in the past. A good explanation of music copyright oddities.
- ARCC opens for login tomorrow. Buy a ticket as a present to yourself.
- The UX of delivering parcels. Reminds me of the long-ago Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research. (via)
- Val Town. (via)
- Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet. I endorse this. (via)
- The sound of Wikipedia. Bells for additions, string plucks for removals, pitch to indicate size of edit. (via)
- Early Computer Art by Barbara Nessim. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon is happening in Dublin in September 2024. (via)
- A vt100 compatibility question that led to talk about termcap hacking and printer shenanigans. (follow all those links)