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.
Some BSD-specific links mixed in.
- Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium videos. Scroll right. (via)
- What The Internet Did To Garfield, a video. (via, via)
- RDAP is replacing WHOIS. (via)
- The Flywheel Spin Top.
- Netnews: The Origin Story. USENET, or nntp, if you prefer. (PDF, via)
- The NetBSD General Meeting is coming up on the 17th.
- A 55-year example of Moore’s Law.
- Hacker Laws. (via)
- TRMNL, which I might have linked to before, but two different people have told me they got it and love it recently.
- diff-jfk, a use I didn’t expect for diff. (Thanks, Paul)
- NumFOCUS concerns. “Linux Foundation: Voltron of Bureaucracy” is a funny section title. (also thanks, Paul)
- The History of Solaris. “UNIX is plural.” (PDF, via)
- The modern OpenBSD home router. (via)
- tinypod, turning an Apple Watch into an iPod. (via)
Your unrelated music video of the week: DRASS – Nucleation Point. Makes me think I need to start making my phone less useful. (via)
Michael Neumann proposed a lot of changes to crypto(9) and dm_target_crypt(4); his initial proposal is I think now complete and committed, other than that tcplay(8) was updated instead of removed. Here’s a sorted list of his commits. These are not in the 6.4.1 release.
6.4.1, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4, is ready to download. The commit log from 6.4.0 to 6.4.1 is available if you want the details.
Maybe I should add a ‘odd hardware’ category.
- “Open source is everything!“
- Epistemological Slop.
- Pomera DM250 Tinkering.
- MNT April 2025 Update. The handheld prototype is interesting.
- The DNS system isn’t a database and shouldn’t be used as one. “Lies in order to create truth” is one way to describe DNS.
- Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries and Poisoning Well and anticrawl. I am seeing multiple AI text poisoning tools being published, which gives an idea of the size of the problem. (first two via)
- A local perspective: roughly 15% of my traffic logs for the Digest in the past week contain the line “bot”, which is probably an undercount of actual activity. If I was running more heavyweight services this would definitely concern me.
- Poisonify, same but for music. (via)
- The Qwerkywriter.
- DOOM plus DOOM 2. I had no idea how many rewrites there were.
- Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code page 437? (via)
- Digital hygiene. (via)
- Don’t use AI for technical answers.
- If it hadn’t been C, what language would have been most common? Brian Kernighan’s answer.
- “What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9” by Geoff Collyer. Read the Closing Thoughts section at the end. (PDF, via)
Your unrelated music of the week: Keep Pushing from clipping. (via)
Aaron LI has made a whole lot of POSIXy updates to timeout(1), of which I think these two are the most informational, but there’s a bunch more if you look at the month. I’m also linking to it cause I didn’t know timeout(1) existed; never used it.
I have definite link overflow – I will start next week’s post now.
- Vim essence.
- “…when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.” Why I keep doing this.
- ‘vibecoded’ saas are a privacy nightmare. (via)
- dated carbon.
- Who Uses To-Do Lists? Donald Knuth’s advice works well. (via)
- Gamer Games for Non-Gamers.
- “An off switch? She’ll get years for that.”
- How I set up VimWiki for notetaking. (via)
- The Curation Paradox. (via)
- The office in Severance is a historic Bell Labs building – where a lot of Unix work happened. Here’s some anecdotes about it.
- “Webster’s Second on the Head of a Pin” by Morris and Thompson. (via)
Mini bot/brute force attacks theme.
- The New Control Society. A very long essay. (via)
- Do Not Comply With the Terms of Service. I don’t necessarily agree with the arguments but the links at the end are useful. (via)
- Dormitorium: The Film Décors of the Quay Brothers.
- A different approach to blocking bad webbots by IP address
- and A deeper dive into mapping web requests via ASN, not by IP address
- and then Notes on blocking spam by filtering on ASN.
- Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others).
- A summary of my bot defence systems.
- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face.
- And that leads to: iocane. (via)
- Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025. (via)
- KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD on Framework 13.
- FediMeteo.
- Designing A Portable Mac Mini. A fatmac is what it looks like to me.
Old home computers is the accidental theme this week.
- Home Assistant Voice. Runs standalone, but related to ESPHome.
- Necronomicon Ex Mortis, up for sale. (via)
- Clockwork PicoCalc. Kinda a toy but also fun.
- Box124: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. Touches on a lot of topics I’ve linked to here before – but more descriptively. My favorite article this week.
- Haunted Machines, related.
- Free Media Heck Yeah. Some legit links, some pirate, so exercise caution. (via)
- Not Feeling Big Tech This Year? Start an Indie Blog! (via)
- Ultima III for the Vic-20. (via)
- Vic-20 Elite, same author. That’s not an easy fit!
- Four new patches for 2.11BSD released in March 2025!
- Booting A Desktop PDP-11.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Brutalist Riffs: A Guide to Math Rock.
No overriding theme this week, though several trends did start to crystallize.
- FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands. I like the low-resources aspect. (via)
- The HTML Review issue 3 and The HTML Review issue 4. Linked for the rotating table of contents / doorways table of contents; it’s neat. (via)
- this page is under construction. Read to the end for more links. (via)
- The Graphing Calculator Story, (via)
- “A calculator app? Anyone could make that.” (via)
- Manage UPS on FreeBSD. Linked cause it mentions how to turn off the beep.
- BSDCan 2025 registration is open.
- NarraScope registration is open too.
- The cleanest VAX you’ll ever see,
- Bolt Action, WWII minature gaming I’ve not seen before.
- A USB interface to the “Mother of All Demos” keyset. Borrowing one of Englebart’s original chorded keysets is the startling thing here.
A lessons learned week.
- Computer Science the Fun Way, a Humble Bundle. (via)
- Fight On! issue 16 is out. (via)
- FreeBSD and KDE Plasma generations. I think the right answer on versioning there.
- Patrick Collision’s bookshelf. (via)
- Framework 13 AMD Setup with FreeBSD. I could use a new laptop; this x220 is getting long in the tooth.
- Silicon Valley’s thing about Great Men, a followup on the previous source.
- Owning your own space and content is important.
- Make yourself less valuable to tech companies. The sheer number of things you can turn off that are just extractive data about you is a sort of wake-up call. (via)
- BBC Micro emulation directly in the browser. (via)
- If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling. And leave extra cable length when you pull; everyone gets to learn this the hard way.
Done early!
- Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. For pre-order, and excerpts are available. I think this is a unique book; catch the limited print while you can. (via)
- Vim Spellcheck Cheat Sheet.
- NetBSD on Raspberry Pi!
- State of virtualizing the BSDs on Apple Silicon.
- From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer.
- Walter Bright’s Classic Empire, Empire Deluxe, and original author Walter Bright. (incidentally, original available as a port/pkg/port)
- Standalone Digital Scratch Instrument.
- Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD]. For reference.
- Free MWL excerpts/books. (via)
- If you’re going to GDC, there’s a Roguelike Celebration meetup on the 18th.
- UNIX advertisements. (via) From that page:
The remainder of my tab cleanout from last week.
- Blocko – Lego TC LOGO interface for Apple II. (via)
- The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead… I never knew these details.
- Good Movies as Old Books. The URL does not lie. (via)
- Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass | Clip | Quay Brothers. (Youtube, via)
- FreeBSD 13.5 Overcomes UFS Y2038 Problem To Push It Out To Year 2106. The first actual Y2038 fix I’ve heard of.
- If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well.
- Gamer Deep Lore, Exhibit #5. Star Fleet Battles. The format is similar to much-less-complicated Silent Death.
- Brick your phone, on purpose. (via)
- Captured Innovation: Technology Monopoly Response to Transformational Development. “Disruption” no longer applies to the large Internet companies. (via)
- Possibly the earliest runnable version of Unix?
Your unrelated link of the week: My Six-Point Plan To Help You Stop Living Mindfully And Enter A Constant State of “Living Sleep”. Ha ha ha wait.
I had to get some of my tabs closed, so here’s a dump of some of them. Still have 30 to get through.
- Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of ProVUE at MacWorld Expo! Rare to see software that started on a FatMac, still going. (via)
- Auto-Download Your Kindle Books Before February 26th Deadline. Makes the alternatives look better.
- The Perfect Pi Pico Portable Computer which led me to the more accessible DevTerm.
- Related: the Ink Console. Read all the way through for more story.
- The hardest working font in Manhattan. If you think that article’s in-depth, you should read the author’s book, Shift Happens – which I am halfway through.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography in February 2025. Short version: start preferring AES now and deprecate ECDSA.
- The Pocket Computer Museum. (via)
- Analog vs. Digital? Nah. PC vs. Hardware. (via)