Sometimes you get 2 nice tips: I like seeing this NetBSD->FreeBSD->DragonFly cross pollination in this commit, and also now I know I can fsck a FAT volume on BSD.
3rd bonus: that last sentence sounds terribly rude.
ChiBUG meets tomorrow at the usual place. Go, if you are near.
Accidental themes this week: keyboards and game remakes.
- Indieweb; something I plan to explore more.
- Autocomplete as an interface.
- Heroes of Might and Magic 3, as open source game engine. (via)
- Hello World, a comparative exercise. (for one meaning of “better”)
- Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS? (via)
- Benchmarking shell pipelines and the Unix “tools” philosophy.
- Weird Keyboards, Programmable Keyboards. The author sells some bonkers keyboards. (via)
- How to create a handheld Linux terminal (v2). Or BSD! (via)
- The Planck Keyboard, via comments on the previous source. Apparently a “40% keyboard” is the phrase that describes this sort of smaller keyboard.
- tmux-resurrect. Somewhat magical. (via kerma on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Class of 2020: New in the Public Domain today! I linked to a different article before, but this one talks about outside the U.S.
- BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X. (via)
- A Decentralized Web Primer: Dat. “The read/write web”. (via)
- Unciv, an open source Civilization V; probably could run with openjdk8? Haven’t tried. (via)
- A retrospective of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. (via)
- Society for the History Of Technology call for papers is out. (via)
- 2020 IGF nominees: a good mood and 2020 IGF nominees: hit and miss.
- Monoid: open source coding font. (via)
- 2019 Income Sources. Interesting since a chunk of that is BSD books.
- A Compiler Writing Journey. (via)
No theme evolved, but lots more links this week.
- Nextcloud 17 on FreeBSD 12.1.
- BSD user groups in Italy. (via)
- Announcing the pkgsrc-2019Q4 release. (via)
- HEADS UP: Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux. (pkgsrc, via)
- Unlock Your UNIX Laptop with Your Phone. I normally pull vermaden items directly from RSS, but the Lobste.rs comments may also be interesting.
- Valuable News – 2020/01/06.
- The BSDCan 2020 call for papers closes on the 19th; get yours in soon!
- ChiBUG meets on the 14th. I’ll post a reminder.
- Using rsnapshot for easy backups.
- Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge. Someday, you will thank you.
- Firefox pkg for 6.6-stable will not receive latest updates. (OpenBSD)
- FreeBSD end-of-year recap by adridg. FreeBSD, Calamares.
- Hunspell on FreeBSD. (via)
- Bastille Containers on FreeBSD.
- Related: A practical guide to containers on FreeNAS for a depraved psychopath.
- OpenBSD on DigitalOcean. The comments in the source link note you can get any BSD installed that way.
Today’s BSD Now rhymes, but you probably have to say it out loud to tell. They cover the new-at-least-to-me HyperbolaBSD, among other topics.
cpdup(1), a DragonFly copying tool that really should be more used, now uses microseconds for comparison. This is probably related to the sysctl vfs.timestamp_precision also now using microseconds.
This probably won’t affect your usage of cpdup unless you are copying some very actively modified files, but I like to mention it in case someone feels like porting it to OpenBSD/NetBSD – it’s already in FreeBSD, though I assume it’s a slightly older version.
I’ve added Webmentions on the Digest. If you don’t know what that is, let me save you the Google search. It’s a method to connect discussion between blogs, similar to having a conversation on Twitter or whatever, except you aren’t storing your words away on someone else’s platform.
The option to add your Webmention URL is at the end of each post; if you have your own blog and want to comment, this is the time to install Webmentions and use it!
The next NYCBUG meeting is tomorrow, January 8th. It’s not the normal location. Go if you are near.
Thanks to Pierre-Alain Toret, we know 2008 Macbooks and Samsung NP370R5E-A04FR laptop models support Dragonfly. If you have DragonFly running on a model not mentioned, please add it.
I very nearly scheduled this to January 01, 2019. And then fixed it for the right year but not the day, so you may have seen an early draft of this. Oops; it’s here now.
-
- The link that will eat the most of your time: href.cool links of the decade: there is a lot to look at in here. Some highlights: Smash TV (video collage), esp8266.net (ultracheap hardware hacking), Magic Mirror (achievable tech), SPACEPLAN (clicker game), and Line Wobbler (physical roguelike). If I hadn’t linked to some of these things before, I should have.
- ASCII graffiti. Not really ASCII but that’s OK, still fun to see. (via)
- The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland. My current peeve: following a link in a newsletter and getting a popup over the content … to subscribe to the newsletter. This is not hard to fix. (via)
- Public Domain Day 2020.
- multicians.org. Pre-UNIX. (via)
- Time will end in 2038… for Unix. (via)
- Managing my dotfiles as a git repository. Not a new idea, but has a nice host-specific setup.
- Inter-networking.
- Chesterton’s Shell Script. (via)
- Black Hack 2nd Edition and Apocalypse World, 2 RPGs recommended.
- Can We Build Trustable Hardware? Like any headline posted as a question, the answer is “no”, but this is Bunnie Huang, so there’s a much more complex but real solution.
- The Joys of UNIX Keyboards.
- Good times create weak men. (via)
- fingers.today, like wandering through someone’s $HOME. (via)
- A brief history of liquid computers. “Billiard-ball computing”. (via)
- Rhasspy: a completely offline voice assistant. That’s what I want. (via)
- X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach. Requires no new technology.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Cankor. (click on preview button) I saw Cankor pages years ago; it’s disturbing in a good way.
It was an abnormally quiet week – probably because of the Christmas holiday, or maybe because I cleared my BSD link backlog last week.
- perl updated to 5.30.1. (OpenBSD)
- a glimpse into 2020.
- Do you see what I see?
- Theo De Raadt Interview between Ottawa 2019 Hackathon and BSDCAN 2019.
- How job control made the
SIGCHLDsignal useful for (BSD) Unix. - How To: Contributing Language Translations to FreeNAS.
- The Year 2019 in Review: This Was, Once Again, Weirder Than the Last One. The ongoing spamtrap saga.
- Found this while going through my cd box, brings back memories!
- Valuable News – 2019/12/30.
There’s a refresh of the iwm(4) driver in DragonFly, which will apparently help most for iwm-9000 and iwm-9260 owners.
I don’t know which product names correspond with those chipsets, but you may be able to tell who you are. Interesting note: original driver via OpenBSD, then synced from FreeBSD version. Cross-pollination!
This week’s BSD Now leads with two articles about how UNIX-ish machines and philosophy can make things better.
I did a rough count – 360 posts on the Digest for 2019. I haven’t been tracking per-year averages, but that’s good – I’m a daily digest, even without meaning to be!
mrouted(8) is removed from DragonFly – but it’s available as a port if you need it.
i915 DRM has been updated to match the Linux 4.8.17 version, in DragonFly. It includes some OpenBSD work too, interestingly.
CCC 36 is over, but the videos are on Relive and will eventually be collected. CCC is one of the few remaining big not-a-corporate-event events; always worth viewing. (posting now so it doesn’t get lost in the new year.)
There’s several accidental themes fighting it out this week.
- Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog. Seriously.
- Blogging Less in the 2020s. Social media demands your complete attention to “succeed”.
- Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore. The problem of depending on external services that can be turned off or changed.
- This Page is Designed to Last. I have this worry about the Digest. (via)
- Working on our Thoughts, a publish-in-multiple-formats (website, book, etc) method. (via)
- Back In Time For Xmas. Linked for the picture of fiber wrapped around a large auger; the stuff of nightmares for anyone responsible for network infrastructure.
- Public Sans, a typeface from the U.S. Government. (via)
- PinePhone review.
- Plasma Mobile as Daily Driver on PinePhone. (via)
- Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative. That is kinda linkbaity but what the heck. (via)
- Inkplate 6, crowdfunded, via comments on the previous source.
- reMarkable: the perfect tablet for academics. (via)
- 2019 Retrospective. Interactive Fiction. (via)
- Miller, a command line tool for tabular data. (via)
- The tyranny of ideas. (via I lost it, sorry)
- The Blue Tape List. When I do this at a new job, I call it the Crazy List. You have only the first 6 months at a new job before everything that struck you as crazy becomes accepted, and you won’t be able to see the problem any more. (via)
- In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle. He created the 6502, which powered it seems like almost every home computer. (via)
- Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feed. I use Tiny Tiny RSS and had no idea how nice the Readability plugin is. (via)
- Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings. Ugh but convincing argument.
- Separate or merge audio and video using ffmpeg and Crop a video using ffmpeg. Linked cause you’ll need it sooner or later.
- The man who made Wolfenstein. One of the few commercially purchased Apple ][ games I ever had – and still have. (via)
Your unrelated music link of the week: Cosey Fanni Tutti ?– Tutti. Found via Ted Gioia’s Best 100 Albums of 2019, which was discovered via Conversations with Tyler. There, now you definitely have enough to listen to until 2020.
Quiet week, so catch up on your reading here.
- putting stuff in a proliant dl325. Not that BSD-specific but still.
- WireGuard OpenBSD Router. (via)
- Elasticsearch on MidnightBSD.
- How Unix Works: Become a Better Software Engineer. Valid, though the writing may annoy you, not just because it misses BSD history completely. (via)
- OpenBSD system-call-origin verification. (via)
- usb(4) and uhid(4) changes.
- unwind(8) no longer uses http to detect captive portals.
- OPNsense 19.7.8 released.
- “New” laptop. Thinkpad X250 + NetBSD 9.0 RC1 + velox (tiling wayland compositor). Linked cause velox is new to me.
- Hyperbola – News: Announcing HyperbolaBSD Roadmap. (via)
- Visual Studio Code port for FreeBSD. (via)
- Noting it late because of the holiday: BSD Now 330: Happy Holidays, All(an).
- Happy Holidays From HardenedBSD.
- Valuable News – 2019/12/23.
- OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn’t duplicate it with Linux. “… the OpenBSD developers are clearly willing to remove support for something if they feel strongly enough about it”.
- The followup, The BSD and Linux approaches to development put coherence in different places. Finally a non-license argument.
- Installing A/UX on the Quadra 610. Odd, and I think had some BSD parts. Lots of other neat hardware on that site. (via)
It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.
In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general. The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc. Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN. Nowadays, applications have their own plugins. For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries. WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation. You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm. Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.
How many levels could this go? Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve? There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.