Michael W. Lucas is speaking tonight at NYCBUG and it’s streaming, so you can see it too. He also has launched a new 10-days-only Kickstarter for “Networking for System Administrators: The Defenestrated Edition“.
Michael W. Lucas is speaking at NYCBUG’s next meeting, April 1st, a week from now. “What’s Changed Since The Last Time I Came this Way – a talk that was supposed to be about OpenZFS.” Go, if you are near, and watch the livestream if you are not.
whee
- BSDCan registration is open. 5 tutorial sessions this year!
- Print and fold your own mini-comic. (via)
- Actually Existing Solarpunk. (via)
- finally we have created the silver bullet. Brooks’ Law rules.
- bsd.rd breakdown. I always like looking at emergency repair tools in non-emergency situations.
- A.I. Isn’t People and Can AI Prompt Us to Ask New Questions? Two essays on LLMs, not in opposition to each other.
- Diomidis Spinellis’ video talk about integrating the newly rediscovered V4 UNIX into his UNIX history repo. Note the first commit in that repo is 57 years ago.
- How much it costs to run OpenBenches. Extrapolate to any other independent website that isn’t a store. (via)
- No leap second needed this year.
- Physical Phones. (via)
No theme!
- Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now. Go, if you are near.
- On pressing the space bar for the cabinet.
- The state of Linux music players in 2026. A subset of that is BSD music players of course. (via)
- ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering. (via)
- The Dunking Decree. (via)
- Bending ePaper To Our Will with Custom LUTs. E-paper ‘pixels’ are not binary on/off.
- This is magic. Good comments from Youtube, a rarity.
- The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed) and Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess. The important thing to me is the note that vi exists as a specification, not just different software variations.
- Sorta related: Design Deconstruction, Vim as video editor.
- Things that are not backup solutions.
- All Your Base, slight remaster.
NYCBUG’s holiday party / lightning talks event is tonight. If you can’t make it, it’ll be streamed on the website and available on IRC.
Note that the recorded stream from the last event, The Once and Future COBOL, is available on YouTube and PeerTube. I heard the speaker, James K. Lowden, talk about FreeTDS years ago and enjoyed it too.
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:
Youtube: https://youtube.com/
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.
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.
NYCBUG’s trying out a new location tonight – go, if you are near.
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)
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.
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)
NYCBUG’s got a new meeting space to try out, and it’s on September 3rd. Go, if you are near.
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.
I’ve had a surplus of links, so this is almost all stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks, pre-scheduled.
- microm8, an Apple][ emulator that adds new features. (via last week’s theme)
- Why are you (still) using OpenBSD?
- Installing *BSD in 2025 part 5. Wrapping up a series with some non-BSD, too.
- Building A Stirling Engine Bike. I don’t think it’s necessarily practical but I like the concept of a Stirling Engine.
- asncounter and grepcidr, two tools I wish I knew about long ago. (via)
- Mastodon has continued to function and grow for longer than the entire existence of Google+.
- Learning, AI, and John Searle’s Chinese Room.
- If OpenSSL were a GUI. (via)
- The New Dinosaurs, 2025.
- Objects should shut the fuck up. (via)
- The Lethal Trifecta and prompt injection.
- confusable_homoglyphs. (via)
The long-planned next meeting of NYCBUG is tomorrow. If you are going and have a Framework laptop, please bring it for testing HDMI. I assume it’s related to ongoing support work.
Meeting is canceled cause no presenter available.
I hope at least a few of the ideas this week are enjoyably novel to you.
- The original computer mouse. (third link)
- The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: Systems lie about their proper functioning. That first paragraph should be required reading.
- The Hype is the Product. (via)
- Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech. Managing knowledge workers is not a new idea but tech companies want to think it is. (from previous link)
- Curate your own newspaper with RSS. (via)
- Classic CDE (Common Desktop Environment) coming to OpenBSD. See the CDE wiki for some screenshots; surely you’ve seen it before.
- The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models.
- Vibe code is legacy code. (via)
- TRMNL X. I preordered.
- Projects can’t be divorced from the people involved in them. The “Nazi Bar” idea sort of in reverse.
I preassembled this list of links over time, so some of them have probably changed. For the “I’m sorry…” link, that just means more material.
- Precision Clock Mk IV. Not kidding about the precision part. (via)
- Calibre News. An excellent complement to RSS.
- TMG, or Transmogrifier, a compiler for PDP-7. Not what I first thought. (via)
- Mark V. Shaney, really an early LLM. (via) Plus, this followup.
- Single-function devices in the world of the everything machine. I was in the same regional blizzard mentioned.
- I’m sorry I’ve written a joke.
- tmux cheat sheet. (also via)
- The Webcomic List. This re-acquainted me with some comics I haven’t seen in years. (via I lost track, sorry)
- Why Some Satellites Use NetBSD? (indirectly via)
- can an email go 500 miles in 2025? A nice sequel of sorts to the 500-mile email.
- The A2DVI gives the Apple II DVI and HDMI output.
- Towards a Complete List of Excellent Medieval/Fantasy Combat Scenes.
Some of these links are relevant to my personal history. (dinosaurs, mining)
- forbidden secrets of ancient X11 scaling technology revealed.
- The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. (via)
- Mining And Refining: Drilling And Blasting.
- The Historical Tech Tree. (via)
- watch(1) utility added to -current. Does what it sounds like.
- XScreenSaver 6.12. More Wayland changes.
- Switching From Desktop Linux To FreeBSD.
- The Wild Wild Web.
- AI-operated vending machines and business process innovation (sorry). A decent analysis, though I feel like too many LLM examples are for avoiding feedback, when you want the opposite.
- Which leads me to Paul Pangaro’s Cybernetics page.
- New zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal.
- FreeBSD 14.3 on FrankenPad T25. Linked for the FrankenPad.
- Some notes on X terminals in their heyday.
- Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon. Preorders are open.
Your unrelated music of the week: Chali 2na x Cut Chemist – Melt Like Plastic. (via)
I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment.
- The Best Interfaces We Never Built.
- The 80s were shit. (via)
- Memory Banks.
- Malleable Software. (via)
- Lightweight C compilers.
- Exterminate all rational AI scrapers, redux.
- A year of funded FreeBSD.
- Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74. Few people realize how much of the modern software world came right from what he did. (via)
- So you should read Memories of Lisa for the details. (via)
- Unveiling the EndBOX: A NetBSD-based embedded box for EndBASIC.
- BoxyBSD. (via)
- Look for the UNIX license plate.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: What’s the best comic I’ve ever read? Lynda Barry is a master of the form. (via)