DRM in DragonFly has been updated to match Linux vers. 4.20.17. See the commit message for the newly-supported video chipsets.
I waited to post this cause there’s a few setup details that may or may not affect you when you try it.
This week is the right level of esoteric.
- WWVB, the radio protocol for time synch. I knew this existed as a concept but not the details. (via, via)
- Digital hygiene. The work/home separation is an underappreciated idea. (via)
- Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. Those are active, working, embedded Mac emulators on the web page. (via)
- If you are able, use the tools you’ve got.
- John Stezaker, collage artist. Here’s my favorite one I’ve seen. (via)
- The Shape of the Heavens. “Pity the poor d12”
- The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001). (via)
- Introducing CaptchaStash. (via)
- The Library of Congress publishes an updated “recommended formats” for data, which seems as authoritative a resource as it could be.
- A reminder you can log into various historic UNIX systems right now thanks to the ICM and SDF.
- BYO TRMNL.
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.
I missed this some time ago, but: you may see errors about certctl(8) when upgrading your packages. It’s not necessary, yet.
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)
RPG mini-theme this week.
- You’ll have to scroll a bit, but: Hal Foster images. (via)
- A modern version of the 1968 game Hammurabi. (via)
- I feel open source has turned into two worlds.
- Classic Computer Replicas. (via)
- Deep Fishing, a Sinclair game. (indirectly via)
- FIST, a paranormal A-Team RPG. (via)
- XScreenSaver 6.11 out – for the Wayland experimenters.
- listfile: help your scripts process a list of things.
- Blink and you’ll miss it! 4096 colours and flashing text on the console!
- KDE Plasma 6.4 has landed in OpenBSD.
- pkgsrc-2025Q2 has been released.
- The Apple Johnathan, new to me. (via)
- Microscope RPG, a GMless game for building a world. (via, via)
- my official list of post-glitch.com hosting options.
- How to install FreeBSD on providers that don’t support it with mfsBSD. I’ve linked to this sort of method before.
- Ghostty is available for FreeBSD, from a comment last week.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Beanbag metal.
Some odd, fun links.
- Tattoy: : a text-based terminal compositor. (via)
- wobbly letters.
- The Yale ‘E’ editor and the RAND “Ned” editor, design documents. It’s interesting to see how the requirements were defined, and how they match the current day. (via)
- Brain Freeze. One of the features of the Internet is to find strange things taken seriously.
- McMaster Nerf Blaster. If you aren’t familiar with McMaster and their billions of parts, this is a good first step.
- The Internet Archive’s gif badge search. The announcement of this came with this image, which I can’t actually find at the archive but is great.
- Preserving a History of Digital Mapmaking.
- How prompt injection works.
- Ban autonomous systems. Also Trying to understand the bots.
- Babelcarp, an old-school site for tea terms. (via)
- jemalloc postmortem and phkmalloc, contrast and compare. (via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Peanut Butter Breaks.
ifconfig now has ‘proxy’ and ‘-proxy’ options. The ‘proxy’ option is now on by default, so a given IPv6 interface will respond to neighbor solicitations when forwarding is on. Use ‘-proxy’ to turn it off; the previous default.
(This was back in May, and I missed posting it before.)
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)
No theme past my grumpy start.
- AI web scrapers: a data point.
- AI search: a bad data point.
- Predictions in the Apple-sphere. Linked for the note that LLMs support existing languages – not new, and therefore slow development.
- OK, getting off that theme…
- An extensive writeup on terminal colors. (via)
- Why you don’t want event-specific time zones.
- BBC Micro text mode Xevious. (via)
- The Second Annual Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Read down for links to previous submissions of good blog posts
- The Magic of Code, out now, and worth reading if the author’s newsletter is any guide.
- Related: The Humanistic Computation Project.
- An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Ring of Power Delivery Feasibility Study. (via)
- Should I Stop Caring and Let IP Address Reputation Sort Them Out? IP blacklist issues over time.
- Tinkering with an old-school cable community info channel website. Related to Weather Star 4000.
More tab-clearing.
- modern software 2025 edition.
- I’ve just implemented a Forth system. Then, The basics of an indirect threaded code ANS Forth implementation.
- Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions.
- Using TRMNL to make digital signs with LibCal. I know someone who just bought two TRMNLs just for inside signage.
- From that previous link: TRMNL-Kindle. I just found an old Kindle mixed in with some other books, too…
- Script to convert HEIC image files to PNG. For my own benefit.
- parking_lot: ffffffffffffffff… (via)
- Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple. (via)
- What is Glaze? (via)
- SysctlTUI is Out!
- Come make some candles with me. A worthwhile offer.
- Books on Unix security? Given that it’s a list from TUHS readers, it’s probably the most definitive list possible.
Your unrelated music of the week: Left Hand Path from ITX038 – 89! Gloom by Commodo x Gantz.
Open tab cleanup week! I didn’t even get to the links saved in my email, yet.
- subvert.fm, a collectively owned Bandcamp. (via)
- Reframing Abundance: Open Tools, Free Games, Distributed Culture. The text is good, and so are the links at the end. (via)
- That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List. I’ve linked a few of these before.
- The pico-mac-nano and where you can buy the parts or even the assembled thing itself, along with actual 25-year-old Apple parts.
- Viral bad plotter art, a TED Talk. (via)
- The Underground Designer’s Handbook.
- We Need Small Web Communities.
- Caddy against the Machines.
- When was peak message in a bottle? Most interesting use of a googlewhack.
I managed to get away from most of my usual themes.
- 50 Years of Text Games, final overstock sale. This is a unique book; buy it now if you want one of the fancy versions.
- Bored Spreadsheet, all the most common minigames of the last few decades, in a spreadsheet interface. (via)
- Signal Carnival, swapping a C64’s audio and video outputs. (via)
- Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, still available, and there’s a sort-of walkthrough, too. (Thanks, Phil Pirozhkov)
- The First Port of UNIX. (via)
- Zoomable User Interface, Scrolling User Interface. (via)
- How to Quit Streaming, a brief and practical guide. (via)
- Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen. Petty but I enjoyed it. (via)
- Organizational Edge Cases. Related to UNIX.
- Femur, in-browser musical doodads. (via)
If you have an hda(4) sound device – and you probably do – it’s been updated. This is not in the 6.4.2 release.
Dumbness or perhaps stupidity, today’s mini theme.
- WebSysctl is Now Live! I like the idea of this, though it would be nicer to have it accessible on the machine where you need it. (via)
- The GAFA Stack. Read section 3.
- 8 Bits & Still Brewin’.
- Mute when Locked. (via)
- Web Archives and Web Archiving – Introduction for Scholars and Students. You will need this, or at least wish you knew it better at some point. (PDF, via)
- At one point, “..” did not exist.
- Setting Up Anubis on FreeBSD via Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time.
- The amount of bot traffic has increased significantly, I assume to find content for AI, and ignoring robots.txt – and copyright. I don’t think people realize the scale of this. It’s causing a denial of service attack in server resources and developer time.
- Related, see comments here for some mod_security blocking alternatives.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD.
- Make Stupid Things. (via)
- The Wadsworth Constant, learned about in #5 here.
- Dumbware, self-hosted solutions. I like this except for the dockering. (via)
Your unrelated audio of the week: Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor, remastered.
May 14th, NYCBUG has Charlie Li presenting on the FreeBSD Laptop-Desktop Working Group, and DJ BSD? Anyway, go if you are near (but RSVP so they let you in!), and watch the stream if you are not.
Oddball link collection.
- Best dishwasher ever but it gets better.
- Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love. Well, I like the form factor.
- windows experience goes to 11. Linked for my own benefit.
- Introducing an OpenBSD LLDP daemon and Introducing bpflogd(8). OpenBSD is sort of becoming a SDR, which I don’t mean negatively.
- GhostBSD: From Usability to Struggle and Renewal linked cause I didn’t know the history.
- Yet Another Provider Survey – see some places report running hosted BSD systems with ease by following the thread. Here’s the very nice to have final summary.
- XScreenSaver 6.10 is out. There’s something Ouroboros-y about having a Klondike screensaver.
- The appeal of keyboard launchers for (Unix) desktops.
- checking the wifi. Most people would parse ifconfig output, but not ted.
- I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server. (via)
- Think Twice Dice.
Unrelated link of the week: sign up for the Dobbstown Mirror. Getting something that is both real and also crazy in the mail is always nice.
6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download. Why so soon? A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed. These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.
Peter N. M. Hansteen runs a pf tutorial most years at BSDCan, and this year’s BSDCan is no different. He’s prepping now, so if you ask a good question, you’ll get taught the answer.
Michael Neumann posted a progress report on his webcam work for DragonFly. The short description is: it’s recognizing hardware but not recording yet. You can try it now.