Someday you will need this – Page 8

2016/10/092016/10/07

Lazy Reading for 2016/10/09

This week’s Lazy Reading came together in perhaps 10 minutes.

Mouse cursor disappears when my refrigerator turns off. (via)
Roll20.net. Role-playing game tools. (via)
choose boring bugs.
tilted abstractions. I feel this way about many web frameworks.
You can register your child’s name in any language providing you use any Unicode character.
Unix as IDE. (via)
Cisco config -> HTML converter.
Mapping colors. This could be very useful. (via)
gruvbox. (also via)
vim.sensible. (via)
History of Xenix – Microsoft’s Forgotten Unix-Based Operating System. (via)
Internet Security Exposure 2016. I like the map, of course.

Your unrelated music video of the week: Danny Brown – When It Rain. The music may not be what you are used to, but I like how “damaged VHS tape” is being used as a visual design choice. (via)

2016/09/252016/09/23

Lazy Reading for 2016/09/25

I manage to avoid a topic this week, really. That’s good!

#! /usr/bin/env considered harmful
The #! magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours. (via)
The Future of Procedural Generation. For games.
So many cow jokes. (via)
Munchausen Numbers and How to Find Them. (via)
Showing The Weather In Tmux. (via)
The Festival Floppies. Anything named “Dinosorceror” must be good. (via)
A Very Long Post On How to Become a Creator. The last paragraph in Advice #1 is the important bit.
Dither me this.
Oh shit, git! (via)

2016/09/20

Who wants FUSE on DragonFly?

Tomohiro Kusumi is thinking about porting it. Follow the whole thread for details.

2016/09/132016/09/13

Restarting pf

I may have mentioned this in part before, but Matthew Dillon has a brief script to reload pf when an interface IP changes. I’m linking it here in case it’s useful in the future.

2016/08/042016/08/03

For VPS users, an ISO

Thanks to a reminder from IRC user ‘cgag’, I’ve put an uncompressed ISO image of DragonFly 4.6 up on the main site. It’s linked on the download page, and should be available within 24 hours on the mirrors. If you are buying service from a virtual host provider, and can install an operating system directly from a downloadable URL, this is for you.

2016/07/242016/07/24

Lazy Reading for 2016/07/24

Off-the-beaten-path links this week. Strap in!

The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99. (via)
Magnetic core memory reborn. (via)
Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance – Bunnie Huang.
Why I’m Suing the US Government – also Bunnie Huang.
Old, special phone numbers. I’ve used 800-444-4444 a lot when tracing lines.
The Wanton Role-Playing (WaRP) and Mini-Six game systems. (via)
Brief interviews with very small publishers. (via)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. (via)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers. (via previous and here)
A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute. A PDF, and infinitely useful. (via)
I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But I Miss My CDs. (via I lost it, sorry)
This used to be Ethernet. (via)
turn up the hope (report from the HOPE convention from Ted Unangst)
VimGIFs. (via)
HyperTerm, an open-source in-browser terminal emulator. (via)

Your unrelated animated GIF of the week: Permanent Wink.

2016/07/15

Reminder: move your Hammer cleanup

A useful tip: if your DragonFly machine isn’t usually on 24/7 (e.g. a laptop, not a server), you should move your Hammer cleanup from 3 AM to sometime when the computer is normally on.

2016/07/13

UEFI booting and manual installation

karu.pruun shares a story of manually installing DragonFly on a UEFI-booting machine. In this case, it’s a Macbook, though there’s other non-fruit UEFI machines out there?

2016/07/12

Two tips for video and audio

That’s one tip per subject, really. If you need to set up a ‘video’ group for xorg, here’s the one-liner to do so. If PulseAudio annoys you, which is not uncommon, ‘chmod -x /usr/local/bin/pulseaudio’ and it’ll go away.

2016/06/242016/06/24

Reminder: sometimes VESA is better

This is limited to some users of specific Intel video chipsets, but: if you get odd screen artifacts in X, the ‘vesa’ driver may work just fine for you. Or turn acceleration off. Or set ‘drm.i915.enable_execlists=0’ according to zrj on #dragonflybsd.

(Updated to reflect all the answers in the thread and elsewhere.)

2016/06/22

Don’t forget tuning(7)

If you didn’t already know about it, you will find this useful: DragonFly has a tuning(7) man page, about getting the best performance from your system. Matthew Dillon recently updated the man page with some tips about SSD setup.

2016/06/17

When a mouse isn’t a mouse

There are USB devices out there that are sort of like a mouse, as in they work as a pointing device, but they don’t show up as a mouse device. For example, the PowerMate USB Multimedia Controller. It’s possible to pipe the events from this or similar ‘weird’ devices to sysmouse, and use it the way you’d expect, with this fix from user tautology.

2016/06/13

The rescue undo

Did you know there’s a rescue image, created with crunchgen, in DragonFly? If your system can boot to single-user mode, you can use it to at least manipulate data on disk – it includes mined as a simple small editor. (Since vi assumes /usr is mountable.) This rescue image now includes undo, so you can back out changes on a Hammer volume.

2016/05/23

Mounting as non-root

Read this email thread for how to mount devices (e.g. USB drives) in DragonFly when you aren’t root.

2016/05/17

Remember: join the ‘video’ group for direct rendering

If you get “libGL error: failed to open drm device: Permission denied” when using direct rendering, make sure to add your user id to the ‘video’ group.

2016/05/16

TeX, clisp, and DragonFly

DragonFly versions of TeX have been available for some time now. However, Nelson Beebe, who is part of the TeX project, is having trouble building some related binaries – asymptote and clisp. He could use help from anyone interested, to match up with this summer’s release of TeX 2016.

2016/05/112016/05/11

Acceleration for Skylake users

If you are on the Skylake series of processors, and also running xorg on DragonFly, pick ‘uxa’ video acceleration. Andrew Slaughter found this made a significant different in visual quality.

2016/04/292016/04/28

NFS tuning tips

If you’re on DragonFly, or maybe even if you aren’t, and you are using NFS, here’s some tips on how to wring the best performance out of it.

2016/04/102016/04/09

Lazy Reading for 2016/04/10

I’ve finally used up my Lazy Reading links backlog!

Hand-crafted containers. A good explanation of how containers are set up, and a certain sense of deja vu for anyone familiar with BSD jails. (via)
Punctuation in Novels. I like seeing the conversion of data from text to image. (also via)
Overclocking an old IBM 701. The butterfly keyboard model. (via)
Accurate CRT Simulation. (via)
RS-232 for Commodore PET and Dialing a BBS Over WiFi. (via)
tmux2html: “Render full tmux windows or individual panes as HTML.” (via)
MobaXterm – all-in-one SSH/X client. Anyone use this vs. PuTTY?
Documentation is for the weak.
A Brief History of ClarisWorks. Back when office packages were actually light. (via)
Dwarf Fortress’ creator on how he’s 42% towards simulating existence. (via)
What Infrastructure Should Learn from NPM JavaScript Debacle. “Don’t execute programs directly from the Internet” should not be a hard lesson to learn. (via)
Debian ships very outdated packages. It frustrates upstream creators. The response from most people misses the point, but the maintainer at least has a sane response. (via and via)
Ubuntu on Windows. I think it’s less “Let’s use Linux” and more “Apple’s UNIX tools get everyone to buy Macbooks, let’s try that.” It unfortunately does not do anything (yet?) with process control or user authorization or other things you would actually need. Related: GNU/kWindows. (via).

Your sort-of off-topic link of the week: Michael W. Lucas’s fiction is, for a short time, part of a larger book bundle which is available for less than the price of buying it all individually. Buy now if you want a deal/lots of fiction to read.

2016/03/31

Many, many network connections

I keep posting about Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on sustaining extremely high traffic loads in DragonFly. Now I’m posting about a tool to create that load: kq_sendrecv. It creates tens of thousands of TCP connections, without creating a process for each, and uses kqueue, as you might guess from the name. This may be useful if you really want to tax another system.