If you don’t know how to use regular expressions, and know it well, you are making your life harder in spectacular ways.
(posting now instead of for Lazy Reading cause it ought to be fixed by then.)
I’ve got an eclipse happening right over me tomorrow – hope it’s not cloudy!
- Playing Piano to Control My Smart Home. MIDI could be considered an instruction set.
- Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted. A case study from Harvard, not just an opinion piece.
- One hour of the thruster sound from the 1979 video game LUNAR LANDER. Too many bits; sounds too modern. (via)
- The Single File Philosophy. (via)
- The Lost Worlds of Telnet. Galactic Trader looks fun. (via)
- Master of Magic – The Official Rob Hubbard Softography. For C64 music history. (via)
- Tiny undervalued hardware companions. Remember this at Christmastime.
- The xz hack. I think it does not affect any BSD, going by the structure as described.
- The First Appendix N.
George Rosamond is presenting on the 20th anniversary of I think the longest-lived BUG, NYCBUG, tonight. Go if you are near (and RSVP so they can let you in), but it’s also going to be streamed.
iwm(4) on DragonFly has been updated, mostly with patches from the FreeBSD version of the network driver.
/proc/self/exe now exists on DragonFly. This is probably most useful if you are porting software.
The mini-theme this week is all DragonFly. There’s been some commits lately to well-known tools so I’m going to gather them here.
- A bugfix for FUSE led to it being re-enabled.
- However, FUSE was designed in Linux-specific ways, so it does not translate well to BSD.
- So, Matthew Dillon went to town.
- Also, interfaces now automatically get a loopback route. This means wg(4) (i.e. WireGuard) devices can ping themselves.
- vn(4) devices can now be detached.
- mount_cd9660(8) (ISO mounting) gained a number of features.
- And TeX Live 2024 for DragonFly is out.
- DragonflyBSD on Acer Nitro AN515-51/58-XXX Laptops. (via)
I have been saving up posts from some long threads on the TUHS and COFF mailing lists, so you’re getting some esoteric history today.
- Every OS Sucks. (Youtube, via)
- Aztec C, which I did not know existed. (via)
- “romcc is a C compiler which produces binaries which do not rely on RAM, but
instead only use CPU registers.“ - Ford, first commercial BSD UNIX client. (via)
- Random facts about rand().
- Related: insults as random passphrases, a generator. (via)
- paranoia, test your computer’s floating-point ability. (via)
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know. (via)
- Are We Watching The Internet Die? “Habsburg AI” (via)
- The Coherent operating system. I’ve never heard of this before – a sort of clean-room UNIX. (via)
- XigmaNAS, a horribly-named FreeNAS replacement. (via)
- 20 Years of NYC*BUG and Can We Handle 20 More? April 3rd.
It’s for COBUG, and details are available here.
Command line / history is I guess the mini-theme.
- ELIZA Effect, something important to remember about AI. From a dinosaur blog of all places.
- The Art and History of Lettering Comics. Authoritative work from a master in the field. You have seen his work even if you do not realize it. (via)
- State of the Terminal. (via)
- The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock. Links to interesting sources.
- Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way. (via)
- Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast. (via)
- Related: Structural Regular Expressions (PDF). You may not be surprised to see it’s by the author of sam. (via)
- Followup: video is up for the most recent NYCBUG event, “NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist“.
- Editing long commands in your shell. (via)
No theme arose this week.
- The Voyager Keyboard.
- Important efibootmgr(8) Command.
- Shift Happens is a fantastic set of books. Sold out, but dig around in the companion for gems like this.
- History of the supercomputer, a video. (via)
- Post-Scarcity Web Mapping. (via)
- A history of the tty. In-depth!
- The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal. (via)
- Player vs. Monster, a video game talk. (via)
- nixbsd: An unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel. (via)
- RGBtoHDMI, converts old computer RGB outputs to newer video with a Pi. (via, via)
It took almost 3 decades, but it’s much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with ping now.
The March 6 NYCBUG meeting is coming up, and it sounds like something I’d want to see: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist, working remote using only a $100 Pinebook. Be sure to RSVP if you can go cause this is in-person and they need to know who is coming into the NYU facility.
The Realtek E2600 – “Killer Ethernet Adapter” – is now supported in DragonFly. Or it’s an Intel product? I’m not sure.
I had Covid in February, which made me sit still long enough to find all these links way ahead of time.
- “I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH” Linked for the links within. (via)
- Max Brückner’s Polyhedra (1900). I’d enjoy constructing these.
- Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets). (via)
- Download the whole IF Archive.
- Gathering Structures. ‘Lightning talks’ can be fun.
- Okay, Color Spaces. CIE XYZ is new to me. That rhymes! (via)
- Images are just videos with a single frame. A Sora quote that is intensely wrong, and I have a decades-old argument against it, The rest of that article is spot-on, too.
- Huffman Codes – How Do They Work? (via)
- Ahab’s Leg Dilemma: Part 1. (via)
- A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us. Does this mean the Hail Mary Cloud finally petered out?
- British Cryptids: The Ramflaggie Of Argyll. The point is not the story it tells but the style it uses; this is a modern video. (via)
- Create for Yourself. Own your work, and own where it is located, or else it will eventually be lost.
You get to see a rabbit hole I went down just by following the links in order.
- Today in “Daylight Savings Chaos Monkey”.
- A description/history of Centrex phone systems.
- How SSH port became 22. Surprisingly simple. (via)
- Folk search engines. You’re sorta reading one now.
- The Berkeley Software Distribution. (via)
- Box109: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries. An excellent transcript of a talk about design and what it means.
- Death, Lonely Death. 15 billion miles away and we’re still talking to Voyager 1. (via)
- Say We Do, a broadsheet about game design. $1 to subscribe. Much more satisfying delivered like this than via Twitter or SubStack. (via)
- This led me to some other treats like Social Generation of D&D Stats In the Time of Pandemic, and The Classroom Game of Cool Swords.
- That then led me to MOSAIC Strict, a way of defining modular, minimal games.
- Undying Dusk, a game inside a PDF. (via)
Aaron LI’s written up a nice summary of what’s been added to support WireGuard on DragonFly and how to get started. You need to be on -master to use it, but if you want to read about it there’s always the man page.
Mini-theme: collections of media.
- Backblaze Drive Stats for 2023.
- ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. (via)
- NetBSD 10.0 RC4 available! There’s now a Wii port, which is neat. (via)
- The Salmar Construction, a 1970s “large music synthesis engine”. (via)
- The miracle of the commons. Principles that apply to open source projects. (via)
- Reversing the Web-@nywhere Watch: browse fragments of the Web on your wrist.
- An RNG that runs in your brain.
- Lost infosec battles.
- The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive. (via)
- This message does not exist.
- Computational Poems. (via)
- At long last: the MWL Title Index.
- A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only.
Your unrelated music link of the week: Omni: Souvenir.
No theme this week.
- BSDCan papers submissions close tomorrow – get yours in.
- Next NYCBUG meeting, March 6: NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist. Traveling and working with only a Pinebook.
- Anatomy of a Hollerith Card.
- More stories about the famously idiosyncratic author of that previous link, David Mills. (via)
- Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.
- Add coffee stains to LaTeX documents. (via)
- What is a terminal-based game you’ve played that’s worth mentioning?
- Understanding phonetic symbols. Written for IBM but talks about a standard.
- D100 sheets. I enjoy just reading these. (via)
- Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts. (via)
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.