There’s a huge amount of commits for this, but I’ll point at the first with FreeBSD code; one of several incorporating OpenBSD changes, and of course it rolls out to tools.
Deep dives week. I was on the road almost all week for my main job so a bit sparse.
- Dave Mills, the guy who created NTP (and possibly FTP or at least one of the earliest versions) died recently. Here’s some history / anecdotes. (via)
- Single-service sites are getting very specific. (via)
- Origin story of the Digital logo, which is not Helvetica. (via)
- Tom Harned wrote up DragonFly on a Thinkpad 480.
- web-adventures.org. (via)
- The “Cheap” Web. (also via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Send my former coworker to baking school. He thinks more intensely about bread and how to make it, than anyone you’ve ever met. I’m not exaggerating. Help him out; it’ll make his day.
I have been on the road so it’s a short week. The links are more cheery, though.
- Failed Product Designs: A Laptop with Seven Screens.
- The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…
- The Dobbstown Mirror. I subscribe; it’s a treat in the mail
- Ship of Theseus on Wikipedia is a Ship of Theseus. (via)
- Crusty, the Indestructible Mac. (via)
- Reboi, I suppose the 2020s version of a MAME Cabinet.
- The Book 8088. I almost think it’s a prank?
- Inside .git. (via)
I’ve got some real gems this week.
- MULTIPLY – A BOOK ABOUT CALCULATORS. Discussion of the open source tools used to process it. (via)
- diagram.website, or An Internet Map. Lots of links there. (via)
- Googling symptoms of the flu.
- Sorry but I can’t generate a response to that request. AI, a customizable spam tool. (via)
- What was ISDN? Analog lines completely going away makes me nervous.
- The biggest problem with selling print books is the software. A nice Print on Demand summary in there.
- ou sont les blogs d’antan? Lots of links to other esoteric blogs in there. (via)
- Fast NetBSD booting, which led me to smolBSD.
- DSA removal from SSH. Matters most if you are running an very outdated system.
- Modern Commodore 64 motherboards.
- Exploring FreeBSD service(8) basics. Applies to DragonFly too.
- Hardening an OpenBSD Workstation.
Your unrelated extended music of the week: Bill Laswell featuring DJ Rob Swift – Reanimation. Which of course reminds me that Rob Gets Busy. If you like that, here’s a crazy amount of beat juggling, at its best when it creates new music and rhythms. (via)
The DragonFly release process now includes an automatic build of supporting packages.
Aaron Li has committed different crypto implementations for support.
Mini-theme is about building the Internet without platforms, or at least without ones designed to extract revenue from you.
- Please, Own Your RSS Links.
- “I’m ChatGPT.”
- Vintage Calculator Designs, 1968-1983.
- Why do I know shell, and how can you?
- Banner Depot 2000. (via)
- Damaged Earth Catalog. More links. (also via)
- Multiplayer Mandelbrot.
- Barely Minimum.
- TeX == blech.
- Standard Ebooks and classic web tech. (via)
- Floppy Disk Fever.
Your difficult music link of the week: There Will Never Be Another Harry Partch.
Assuming the weather hasn’t interfered (I am preposting this), NYCBUG meets tonight.
ChiBUG meets tomorrow, in I assume the normal place.
Update: postponed due to weather.
Of course the first thing I did was type the wrong year into the title of this post.
- OpenBSD printing and Avery labels.
- pkgsrc-2023Q4 out.
- Next NYC*BUG: Jan 10th.
- DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s.
- There’s a thread about disklabel on the TUHS list that went from interesting history to OpenFirmware discussion and then into the problem of bootstrapping/hardware monitors. Lots more I didn’t link. (iPhone-related)
- ‘Merchants of Complexity’: Why 37Signals Abandoned the Cloud. Recurring monthly payments for static goods are a goldmine – for the seller. (via)
- Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone. (via)
- Ten Things To Do After Installing FreeBSD. I don’t agree with it but it is interesting.
- 2024 FreeBSD community survey. Closes tomorrow.
- Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate. I don’t know the products well enough to say this is the only analysis.
- Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store. Counterintuitively, he’s charging less money but making more money.
- The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again. Read the article for the links inside it.
Happy new year! More BSD content in this week’s summary than usual.
- The Infinite 8-Bit Computer Game Character Archive. (via)
- OSR Rules Families. (via)
- How about not having platforms so large that their policy decisions carry this much weight? Having an alternative platform makes these problems go away.
- Battle for Libraries. Seeing some of the authors signed up to support this made me decide “yes, this is good”.
- A Murder at the End of the World: Are you Vi or Emacs? (via)
- FreeBSD Desktop – Part 28 – Configuration – Corner Actions.
- Making my own Bed Sensor. (via)
- My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter. Always check voltages / don’t trust written voltages. (via)
- First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD. (via)
- Default mail transport in FreeBSD 14.0 is DragonFly Mail Agent, neat.
- The BSDCan 2024 Call For Papers is out.
Your unrelated music of the week: Don Leisure, Halal Cool J. Music’s good, title’s hilarious. (via)
Yao Ge has created a new DragonFly mirror in Nanjing, China. It’s on the mirrors page too.
Merry almost Christmas!
- Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read. (via)
- An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities. The birth of fuzzing. (PDF, via via)
- Copyright law is living in the past. A good explanation of music copyright oddities.
- ARCC opens for login tomorrow. Buy a ticket as a present to yourself.
- The UX of delivering parcels. Reminds me of the long-ago Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research. (via)
- Val Town. (via)
- Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet. I endorse this. (via)
- The sound of Wikipedia. Bells for additions, string plucks for removals, pitch to indicate size of edit. (via)
- Early Computer Art by Barbara Nessim. (also via)
- EuroBSDCon is happening in Dublin in September 2024. (via)
- A vt100 compatibility question that led to talk about termcap hacking and printer shenanigans. (follow all those links)
Here’s a weird confluence of things all based on me searching out links and stories for this blog: Based on the recommendation of Cooking Issues listeners, I visited Hi-Collar last weekend, a Japanese kissaten (which I know of because of Craig Mod’s mailing list / book) while I stayed at St. Marks’s Hotel, which I know about through NYCBSDCon. Meal was good, and all these things would not have come together without these years of Lazy Reading posts.
- BSD on Windows. A product I never heard of. (via)
- A List of Lists. I have linked to at least one of them before.
- Children of the Geissler Tube. Seems like something to buy at United Nuclear. (via)
- From a comment on last week’s Lazy Reading: CCC is coming up.
- The original UNIX Lab had left-handed lightbulbs. Note the author of the post.
- History of SMTP. (Video, via)
- DateTime, an XKCD cartoon. Painfully accurate.
- Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. (via)
-
Ctrl+Alt Museum pictures.
- Dungeons & Directories. (via)
- Umberto Eco Formulates The AI Novel In 2011.
- Apple ][ copy protection affecting how a game plays. A game world being affected by a physical aspect of a legal status in the real world.
- Finishing Up a FreeBSD Experiment. I like seeing what people use. (via)
- “the plural of regex is regrets“. (via)
ChiBUG is meeting in the normal place tomorrow on the 19th. Go, if you are near. (Plans changed after I posted this.)
Old hardware – really old – minitheme.
- ARCC tickets 30% off with code CH3AP.
- Fun with DNS TXT Records. Password storage, bizarre but hilarious. (via)
- The BSDCan 2024 page is up.
- The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard. (via)
- Decker, Hypercard clone that builds web pages. (via)
- User Manual for Babbage’s Difference Engine #2. Which exists. And you can build it. Or 3D print it. (via)
- Saturn V Apollo Flight Configuration. Poster to print. (via)
- Fake mainframe, real lights and switches.
- The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer. Linked cause I remember seeing “PC-98” in I think the FreeBSD installer. (via)
If you have a TP-Link TL-WN722N v2 wireless adapter, you are in luck.
No theme other than maybe interesting hardware.
- Four Kinds of Optimisation.
- Investigating why Steam started picking a random font. I will always link Y2038 issues. (via)
- Dragons Reviewed and Ranked.
- MNT Reform hardware hacking. (via)
- My Useful Shell Functions. (via)
- B3ta’s 404 error pages.
- The Spectrum of Openness. The first good multidimensional explanation I’ve seen.
- WE 1981. For Western Electric employees, with a shot of a crane lowering a new central office unit into place. (via)
- VT320 Repair. And terminal tetris. (via)
- $500M Mars Rover Mistake. The value is the way they dealt with it. (via)
Elements of dsynth, the mass package builder for DragonFly, are now appearing in the base system. It looks like this is most helpful for building packages as part of the base install, but there might be other applications.
This is mostly an ID change, but the Mercusys MW150US USB wifi adapter is now supported in DragonFly.