BSD – DragonFly BSD Digest

2024/12/152024/12/13

Lazy Reading for 2024/12/15

I could use a recommendation for a good, cheap registrar to use for domain names; I use gandi and the price has been creeping up. Any suggestions?

Next NYCBUG: QEMU Virtualization on BSDs, Jim Brown, 2025-01-08. QEMU is far more influential than I expected.
For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. (via)
The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023).
A physical save button.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (1978) vs Spanner (2012). (via)
SCCS roach motel. A pretty exhaustive description of SCCS and the weave format.
Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer.
Public domain works done for NASA. (via previous)
The Biggest Shell Programs in the World. You want to look and also look away. (via)

2024/11/242024/11/17

Lazy Reading for 2024/11/24

Links are from a wide range of sources this week; it’s often a good idea to follow the (via) tags to find even more.

NYCBUG meets 12/4 at the usual time, for lightning talks.
Maximizing Time For Reading. (via)
Half-Life 2 20th anniversary. Documentaries like this are sort of about the game but also an inside track on software development case studies. (See also Psychodyssey)
Asterogue. (via)
Procedural text and tabletop roleplaying. Speaking of roguelikes…
The missing text focused programming environment. Makes me think of Smalltalk.
IMG_0416. (via)
MyNoise. (via)
CW&T, a design studio. (via)
Keep It Simple Tools. (via)

This week’s music: Thank You, Dream Girl. (via)

2024/11/06

QEMU on BSDs, tonight

NYCBUG is having a streaming-only event at 6:45 PM eastern tonight, with Jim Brown presenting on QEMU. Go, if you are near a computer. Also join IRC on #nycbug on Libera, too.

2024/11/032024/10/27

Lazy Reading for 2024/11/03

I don’t have a good link for the SDF item; their mailing list doesn’t appear to have a public archive, or I haven’t found it. SSH will get you there faster anyway.

DragonFly: git: rtld – do not allow both dynamic DTV index and static TLS offset. Useful if p5-DBD-mysql is failing for you.
inetd and daemons, a 4 part series.
Moving my FreeBSD laptop to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon G6. Linked cause I just handled a newer X1 recently; might replace my ancient x220. More links in article.
You can now play WUMPUS and OREGON TRAIL on the sigma-9 instance at sdf.org.
Technical Marvels, Part 8: Historical Surveying Instruments. (via)
Next NYC*BUG: 2024-11-06 @ 17:45 EST “Life with a FreeBSD Laptop” by Brian Reynolds. RSVP if you are going, so you can get in the facility.
What Are The Civilian Applications?
Building a game with the Real Engine. A heck of a lot of work but the results will be unique. (via)
revealing the fediverse’s gifts. (via)
Paper types ranked by likelihood of paper cuts.
Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old.
Broughlike.

2024/10/202024/10/18

Lazy Reading for 2024/10/20

BSD mini-theme.

Histories of the Greater West. Charts! Graphs! Excellent use of character encoding!
Cabinet of curiosities: A bunch of cryptographic protocol oddities. (via)
Trebuchet for sale. (via)
The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk. (via)
The uConsole, as recommended by you! Specifically this.
Filtered for time and false memory. Conspiracy theory, but fun.
Open-AMP: My OpenBSD Alternative to Devilbox/XAMPP.
EuroBSDcon 2024 in Dublin, Ireland: some notes after the conference.
OpenBSD Webzine 18.
Roguelike Celebration 2024 is happening now. See the merch and the Steam sale,
Plasma6 and FreeBSD 14. Probably applies somewhat to other BSDs.
Commoning. I opened 7 more tabs following up on what I read in that article, so it must be useful.
3rd Annual International Crisp Sandwich Day, this week on the 25th.

2024/09/30

NYC*BUG Oct 2: EuroBSDCon Recap/BSD Fund

Next NYCBUG meeting is Wednesday night, and you need to RSVP if you’re going to be there in person. It sounds like there’s going to be a nice roundup of EuroBSDCon experiences and also the video … team? squad? support.

2024/09/152024/09/13

Lazy Reading for 2024/09/15

A bit more… artsy? this week.

Coding Together on the Apple II+. Mostly I just like the site design. (via)
Introducing MNT Reform Next. Might replace my ancient, indestructible X220.
Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison.
DOOM on a volumetric display.
“Run Your Own Mail Server” Auction for BSD Conference AV Team. Closes today!
A new BSD made out of old BSDs. (via)
Every Single Company’s Website Right Now. Also 2000s Business Names. (both via)
The Moral Economy of the Shire. (via)
‘Images Heard And A Music Seen’: A Conversation With The Brothers Quay. (via)

Your unrelated music link of the week: DJ Krush – Strictly Turntablized.

2024/08/112024/08/07

Lazy Reading for 2024/08/11

Oddities this week.

Join the Interim Computer Museum. (via)
containerization moves the learning period from “before deployment” to “during outages” I’m quoting a quote of a quote there.
public.work, visually search public domain images. (via)
And if you like that, read The mining of the public domain, an excellent analysis of public.work.
A (Very) Brief Pictorial History of Beholders. Avery D&D-specific monster.
defrag98.com. Never a good screen to see. (via)
EuroBSDCon 2024 will be September 19-22 in Dublin.
Leap smears, a proposal. “My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this scheme would work for about half a millennium”
Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
Visualizing Sound and Graphic Traces, both are.na channels. (via)
What the Microsoft Outage Reveals. Read it for the software engineering joke. (via)
Back to BASIC. (also via)
The Adler Archive of Underground Comix. (via)
Putting your phone to sleep with a pillow. (via)

Your unrelated music videos for the day: DRASS – Reaperman. Taking advantage of AI image generation’s inaccuracy, though you bet is more disturbing. (via)

2024/08/042024/08/04

Lazy Reading for 2024/08/04

FINALLY cleaned out my inbox.

NYCBUG Aug 7: Brian Callahan “Once again, I’ve done something no one asked for”
(added after I published this) “Constructing Your Own Linux and FreeBSD Packages” at GoLUG August 7. Watch both.
Beyond All Reason on OpenBSD, a video. (via)
Hypercard Simulator. (via)
Stephen King’s The Mist, 80’s text adventure.
OpenBSD Workstation for the People.
the contemporary carphone.
Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo. I find the Canon Cat interesting in a “what if…” sort of way.
Barbarian Prince – Ultimate Edition. Solitaire D&D.
How MetaFilter works.
Unigram-X newsletters, early commercial UNIX history. (Scroll down)
“in BLISS we don’t solve problems, we ELUDOM.“
What’s neater than e-ink? Ferrofluid.
Lamentations of the Flame Princess, free version. (via)

2024/07/142024/07/11

Lazy Reading for 2024/07/14

Almost all links from saved emails instead of RSS, for once.

The history of Alt+number sequences, and why Alt+9731 sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman.
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm. (via)
Entering text in the terminal is complicated. (via)
PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights. (via)
A Mini Monitor for a Pi. (via)
July 19th: Will Wright interviews Chaim Gingold, author of “Building
SimCity”. Note the reversal.
It’s Easy. But Is It Easy Enough? Not necessarily advocating this.
What You Get After Running an SSH Honeypot for 30 Days. (via)
Culinary Bibliographic Metadata. The standards for library info look to me like a good example of a standard that evolved based on users, not commercial influence. (via)
Related: Working with ACSM Files on Linux.
BSDCan 2024 on video. Set aside time for watching these. (via)

2024/07/072024/07/05

Lazy Reading for 2024/07/07

I got quote-happy this week.

Ladybird Browser Initiative. (via several places)
Related to the previous link: Mozilla is an advertising company now and Mozilla’s Original Sin.
The new Fantasy Steampunk Storybundle, with orcs! Unrelated to MWL’s about-to-come-out tech book that you should order, or his next book.
Related: Next NYC*BUG: July 10th The State of Email, By: Michael W. Lucas. Note that you should RSVP so you can get access.
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. “Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget.” (via everywhere)
Schotter, part 1 and part 2. “Sometimes it’s fun to pick a rabbit hole and follow it all the way down.” (via)
Donkey Kong: A Record of Struggle. (via)
The time smart quotes prevented the entire Office division from committing code. “Just another example of I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.”
Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets. I am pretty sure you are carrying something similar to this in your pocket right now.
A potpourri of cool-looking scripts. Scripts as in typeface.
1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch. “my wristwatch runs a full n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons.” (via)
The best version of an Apple Watch. (via)
Chernobyl power plant as table lamp. I am OK with linking to this cause I already bought mine. (via I lost it, sorry)

2024/06/162024/06/14

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/16

Text tools this week.

CommonMark, a Markdown specification.
LyX, a TeX editor. (this and previous from this thread.)
nvi command summaries. Follow the thread.
BSD User Group Düsseldorf Juli 2024.
Programming Prayer: The Woven Book of Hours (1886–87).
XScreenSaver 6.09 out now.
Greatest Comics Of All Time as Chosen by 45 Writers and Artists. (via)
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. (via many)
EuroBSDCon is in September.
ASCII-Silhouettify. (via)

Music of the week: The Deep Ark, 8 hours of 90s electronica. (via)

2024/06/092024/06/08

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/09

Technical reading is the accidental theme.

Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat. This is a far more capable machine than I ever knew about.
Terminal Text Effects. Much showier than I expected. (via)
Losing Sight of Creators. Ad-blockers aren’t the answer; finding ways to support creators without ads is.
City in a Bottle. Via multiple places.
Replacing my OPNsense gateway hardware by a Protectli appliance.
Classic Computer Brochures. (via)
Clip art. A higher quality collection than you’d expect. (also via)
A UNIX Primer. (via)
Mike Karel’s final presentation.
Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine. About simulation in general, not just the one game series. (via)
Running XVNC through inetd. Might be useful to you.
Multiple vi reference charts. (via multiple posts)

The Kickstarter for Michael W. Lucas’s Run Your Own Mail Server book is ending later today. It’s been so successful that he’s been adding copies of his other books as rewards for every backer – which means if you buy this book at any tier, you get (at last count) 7 more books. It’s a good deal, but you have only this afternoon to get it.

2024/06/05

NYCBUG tonight

NYCBUG is meeting tonight at a changed location. There’s going to be discussion of the just-finished BSDCan plus talk about membership growth and handling streaming events.

2024/06/022024/05/27

Lazy Reading for 2024/06/02

This week, extended commentary on the links.

Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links. “Even today, thirty years after Jerry and David, I still visit bookmarked webpages that maintain human-curated lists of links.” You can guess my opinion of that.
Higher Intellect, a huge repository of documents of the sort you’d find squirreled away on the Internet in the late 90’s. There’s a PHRACK section, for instance, or nice copies of US WW2 posters.. (via)
Defeating Mouse Lint. Mechanical mice only existed for a specific period in time, and probably never will again.
The Tomb of Horrors. I had heard of this ‘impossible’ D&D module but never actually tried it.
how-to.computer. This is the 2020s versions of old homesteading guides. Can you self-host too much? I think not. (via)
LaTeX for Complete Novices. Nobody ever seems excited about LaTeX but people always report “I did a ton of work with it without issue”. (via)
The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing. There’s some great quotable bits in this but my favorite is “The main change in this particular round is I can’t remember a time we had so many people showing their whole and entire ass by saying “I can’t wait to fire ______ because this MAKESHITUP.BAT file is producing reasonably full sentences”. “
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder. Even if it was a blunder, the effects would have been limited by the lack of consumer Internet. (via)
LibreOffice Substitutes. Something here to try for everyone.
Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the idea of software platforms that doesn’t exist to disintermediate users and extract revenue intriguing.
Two important things: the longest domain name I’ve seen yet, and the Kickstarter for Run Your Own Mailserver, an important technical book and also because SMTP is becoming hard to do at any scale other than “huge”. (via)
I signed up for the aforementioned Kickstarter as should you; note there’s a Signed Useless EBook edition. Don’t buy it, just be entertained by the concept.