DragonFly BSD Digest

I am linking to the Public Domain stuff “late”, seeing as how we’re 3 weeks into the new year.  It’s good forever though.

• The Dream of the Universal Library.
• Related to the previous link: Public Domain Day 2026.
• Also related: ImageS Magazine.  The man who put them together died a few years ago; pick up any you can find now because a collection like this won’t happen again.
• Dead Archivist Society.  A worry I have too.
• Corporate Breakfast, a Kickstarter.
• The Market for Lemons, about web frameworks.  (via)
• Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off?  (via)
• How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.  (via)
• @YouAreCarrying, an Infocom inventory bot.  (via)

More BSD content than usual.

• Home Assistant as Personal Device Tracker.
• BSD PF versus Linux nftables for firewalls for us.
• The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure.  “The tale grew in the telling”
• Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution.
• ASP level generation autoplay.
• The story of Propolice, the OpenBSD stack protector.
• Modern Commodore 64 cartridge loaders.
• Trying Navidrome on FreeBSD.
• Flock and Urban Surveillance.  See also 404 Media’s Flock coverage.
• Tangible Media.  (via)
• How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Webtoons revisited.  Many links to follow.

Happy almost 2026!  Some end-of-year lists linked here.

• The annoyances of the traditional Unix ‘logger’ program.
• Grow slowly, stay small.  Anti-enshittification, if you will.  Related.
• MidnightBSD 4.0 is out.  (via)
• The original Mozilla “Dinosaur” logo artwork.
• The Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System.  But what’s this PS-85?(via)
• The Best Metal Albums and the Best Electronic Music of 2025.
• What are your favorite Shadertoys?
• “Greatest Comics of All Time” meta-list.  A statistical answer.  I would change the relative positions of some of them, but read anything listed that you haven’t already.  (via)
• The best comics of 2025, as chosen by our contributors.  Perhaps better, to follow up on.
• pkgsrc-2025Q4 released.

Some good long reads.

• Claude is listening.  Linked to note there’s no standard in how long a company keeps your data.
• Strandbeest evolution 2025.  I am glad this has kept happening.
• Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again.  (lost the source, sorry)
• Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices.
• The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah.
• Running a PDP-8 from 1965.  (video, via)
• Colossus: The Missing Manual.  (via)
• ACM has gone open access.  This is a significant leap from a major publisher.
• Related: the most comprehensive technical journal bibliography I’ve ever seen.  (both via)
• Apple 2 Black Friday sales.  (via)

No theme though a bit dark.

• The only existing copy of UNIX v4.  (via)
• readtape, for Magnetic tape data recovery in software.  Related.
• The Internet of Things That Don’t Work.  Surely I’ve linked to this before?
• The Baby and the Black Box, about ‘Steve’ Shirley, who died earlier this year.  (via)
• User Specific Runit Supervisor.  Not BSD-specific but interesting detail.  (via)
• Always check that your bug report wasn’t solved a hundred-plus years ago.
• What was the Dark Age of Comic Books?
• Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative.
• Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology.  (via)
• how to use the internet again: a curriculum.  (via)

Hey, I made my averaging-once-yearly commit!

• The Questing Beast Appendix N.  I like the idea of “personal” Appendix Ns.
• Phrack is still publishing.  (via)
• PagedOut, tech articles with a one-page max.  (also via)
• Winners of the 2025 IFComp.  (via)
• One of Pascal’s original calculating machines from 1642 is up for sale.  (via)
• AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System.  Seeing the inside of Brian Kernighan’s office is sorta neat.  (video, via)
• Drawing an ASCII TIE fighter for post?quantum cryptography.
• Robot Phone Home…Or Else.
• Cursed Knowledge.  (via)

Doing my best to clean out old to-post items, so some of these sources are weeks old – but I hope new to you.

• Overview of alic and Differences from C.  (via)
• Introducing TCP-in-UDP solution.  That seems weird.  (via)
• How 100MB Ethernet came to exist.
• Project MadHat, building a CPU from the ground up.  (via)
• Paper Apps Labyrinth.  Single player notebook game.  (via)
• Same place, Pencil Dice.
• A Retrospective Survey of 2024/2025 Open Source Supply Chain Compromises.  (via)
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case.
• A coffee chat in links.
• OpenSSH and Post-Quantum Cryptography.  Now a default warning.