I realize my title is a little bit buffalo buffalo buffalo, but it makes sense: getopt(3) now has a double colon option to indicate an optional argument. I link to it because I like seeing the length of the trip to DragonFly. It started as a GNU option, then showed up in NetBSD, brought to FreeBSD, and now I’m posting about it.
SEMIBUG’s meeting tonight has Susan Hurst presenting on database implementation, via Jitsi. 7 PM Michigan time.
Old hardware is the mini-theme.
- RAIN PSP, a homebrew 80s-style laptop.
- Cosmic Background Radiation Dice. Of course a nixie display.
- The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2021. (via)\
- ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories: Seeking Submissions and Pitches! (via)
- Video game preservation vs copyright. I’m still not sure who owns Castle Wolfenstein. (via)
- CR+LF has a long history. (via)
- GitHub – ViolenceWorks/VT-69. Possibly vapor but looks neat. (via)
- PC booting from a vinyl record (turn volume down). (via)
- DNSSEC Mastery, second edition, creeping out.
- My retrocomputer projects, Q1 2022.
- Epitaph to Laptops.
No mini-theme.
- Mail Server Hosting on OpenBSD. (via)
- Harmful things. Linked for #2. (via)
- ultima online.
- quBSD. “jails/bhyve implementation of a Qubes-inspired containerization schema” (via)
- RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch.
- UNIX: On the Path to BSD.
- Modern inetd in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD and Alternative Inits.
- Books About FreeBSD.
- Valuable News – 2022/02/07.
- XFCE Cupertino Way.
I missed posting about BSD Now last week, so if you didn’t check either: BSD Now 440: BSD Inside Zone and BSD Now 441: Migration to BSD. Lots of links in both to follow.
Mini-theme: music.
- Retrocomputing can be more than games.
- The PinePhone keyboard case. PDA nostalgia.
- Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode. Linked cause The Mythical Man-Month talks about the 360 and I never had a picture in my head to connect.
- The Whimsical Web. (via)
- (Non-)Human, AI Reproducing Absence.
- Sendxmpp as a Replacement for Mail(1). Odd but I can’t say why. (via)
- The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back. (via)
- Chuck Moore’s Creations (Forth and ColorForth). (via)
- Writing better release notes. Points 3, 5, and 6 are important.
- “A Political History of X” – Keith Packard (LCA 2020). (via)
- Dialing Up. All modem sounds. (via)
- Track, a vector music visualizer. (via)
- John Peel Roulette. Eclectic forever. (also via)
Note the first three items are events with deadlines happening now.
- There’s a NetBSD chat happening online this morning – in a few moments.
- Noting again: BSDCan 2022 is going to be online, and the CFP closes Monday.
- FOSDEM 2022 is happening today and tomorrow, and there’s several BSD events as usual. It’s online so you can get there.
- What a FreeBSD/KDE user misses on macOS.
- The reason Unix has the argv[0] issue (and API).
- Why we’re migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD. (via)
- OPNSense 22.1 released.
- Smallest desktop of the day with BSD: Raspberry Pi 400.
- Related: r/Hardware_for_BSD.
- Valuable News – 2022/01/31.
- d-ptr pitfalls.
- HardenedBSD January 2022 Status Report.
- FreeBSD 13 on Thinkpad T460s.
- Can’t run Stardew Valley on OpenBSD.
This is pretty esoteric, but all of DragonFly’s syscalls can be found in the links Aaron LI provided in this post. There’s code in there that dates back to Berkley UNIX.
BSDCan 2022 is now going to be online, which also means the CFP has been extended so any last-minute-I’ll-go-now-that-its-virtual people can get their proposals in.
(Posting now because waiting for the normal In Other BSDs post will only give you 48 hours of prep time for a proposal.)
If you are using AMD graphics on DragonFly, Aaron LI’s “how I set this up” post may be useful to you.
No theme; nicely eclectic.
- 3D-printable void switches. Nicely documented.
- Successfully Crowdfunded Product Designs of 2021. Interesting to see what makes it. (via)
- Related: poke around core77.com for a bit.
- The 40 Greatest Synth Sounds of All Time. Ugh, I linked to a listicle.
- A Web Around the World, Part 1: Signals Down a Wire and Part 2: If At First You Don’t Succeed… Early, early telecoms.
- OpenQuest System Resource Document. D100 gaming is a new term to me. (via)
- 1977 computer office. The rest of Watergate Living is entertaining, or awful depending on how you feel about the 1970s. (via)
- The Making of Lode Runner. (via)
- Bud Plant’s Incredible Catalog. Anything able to survive Amazon’s impact has got to be good.
- Mycroft Mark II, a better choice than Alexa. (via)
- Processing: the Software that Shaped Creative Coding. (via)
Your unrelated video of the week: Tom Baker saying “bread”. (via)
Watch that Kernighan video; he is what a historian would call a primary source.
- The Birth of UNIX.
- “The early days of Unix at Bell Labs” – Brian Kernighan (LCA 2022 Online). History from a person who made it. (via)
- Agent constraints in OpenSSH, a good idea. As the source link comments, it’ll appear in BSD right away, Linux in… years from now.
- Twincat/BSD. BSD gets used in a lot of places that people don’t know about.
- BastilleBSD is running a user survey. (via)
- 2021 Top DiscoverBSD and BSDSec articles.
- 2021 FreeBSD Foundation Impact Report.
- FreeBSD Periodic Scripts.
- How not to execve().
- Valuable News – 2022/01/24.
- OPNsense 21.7.7 released. Apparently there is a business edition now?
- Playing with CD-RWs on FreeBSD.
The NYCBUG lunch is today, 1-2 Eastern.
There’s no pun in the title; this week’s BSD Now really links to a browser implementation of UNIX-ish resources. Is it POSIX? Not quite. Is it UNIX? No. Is it Linux? Probably using that as a reference, so it’s a copy of a copy. Still, interesting. There’s other articles too; don’t be distracted by my digression.
There’s a reported bug with NVMM and QEMU if you boot a guest using UEFI. Until it’s fixed, use BIOS.
NYCBUG is having another lunch meeting online, this Friday, 1-2 Eastern time. RSVP on the NYCBUG talk@ list if you are going.
Mini-theme: computer error.
- Astronomy community shapes their own destiny with Astropy.
- Debugging behind the Iron Curtain. (via)
- Reddit stories on crazy bugs.
- A History of Modern Computer Crashing.
- Subcutanean, a book that changes the story every time it’s printed.
- In practice, there are two types of window managers in modern X.
- Figuring out how Amiga 500 RAM expansion projects work.
- Working “Teeny-Tiny Turntable”.
- Sorta related: Is Old Music Killing New Music?
- 22 indie games to look forward to in 2022. (via)
- prior-art-dept.: OWL Guide, early hypertext, and “replacing” the Web.
Your unrelated personal frustration of the week: Legacy G Suite will no longer be free. I need to figure out a self hosting solution.
The UNIX compliance link is worth reading all the way through; it is a chunk of history I did not know at all.
- What goes into making an OS to be Unix compliant certified? Answered by the guy that led it at Apple. Note the relatively short time needed to do the same for FreeBSD. (via)
- The OpenBSD BASED Challenge Day 6 and Day 7.
- LibBSDDialog.
- GhostBSD 22.01.12 ISO is now available.
- Valuable News – 2022/01/17.
- Wine 7 is released. FreeBSD is the only BSD for it I think. (via)
- Suyimazu – Wine-based Game Launcher for FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD 13.0 Base Jails With ZFS and VNET. (via)
- Cluster provisioning with Nomad and Pot on FreeBSD.
- LLDB FreeBSD kernel debugging support summary.
- Why the FreeBSD Desktop and my Linux Rant.
- OpenBSD on the PinePhone. (via)
- BSD based solutions virtualisation/clustering of resources for VMs.
- LibreSSL update.
I only just read about it, so if you hurry you can get into the happening-now GhostBSD meetup on Jitsi.
This week’s BSD Now leads off with a toolchain name but actually starts listing all the FreeBSD Foundation year-end summaries that came out recently. Plus more links.