today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 29, 2024

• Carl Svensson ☛ On Complex Simplicity and Simple Complexity

  Clearly, the Unix heritage runs deep in Plan 9. Consequently, so does the Unix philosophy. Everything - quite literally everything - is a file. Even the contents of a particular buffer in the acme editor is a file - that can, of course, be cat:ed and echo:ed to. Using webfs, any URL can be treated as a set of files - a fact utilized by both the basic, ancient web browser Mothra and the more recent port of Netsurf. The same goes for the git9 port of git, where each commit is described by a set of files in a directory structure.

• University of Toronto ☛ Our slowly growing Unix monoculture

  The old multi-Unix, multi-architecture days had their significant drawbacks, but sometimes I wonder what we're losing by increasingly becoming a monoculture that runs Ubuntu Linux and (almost) nothing else. I feel that as system administrators, there's something we gain by having exposure to different Unixes that make different choices and have different tools than Ubuntu Linux. To put it one way, I think we get a wider perspective and wind up with more ideas and approaches in our mental toolkit. We have that today because of our history, so hopefully it won't atrophy too badly when we really narrow down to being a monoculture.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Free Software Security Podcast Episode 439 – Where are all the youth in open source?

    Josh and Kurt talk about a story talking about the “graying” of open source. There doesn’t seem to be many young people working on open source, but we don’t really know why that is. There are many thoughts, but a better question is why should anyone get involved in open source anymore?

• Games

  • Blake Watson ☛ Monster of the Week: Game introduction and rules summary

    You’ll describe what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and I will describe how the world and its inhabitants react. Sometimes you’ll roll dice (in MotW it’s two regular d6 dice) because you’re using a specific move. Unlike D&D we won’t be rolling dice constantly for every action. If you want to do something your character could do and no one or nothing is trying to stop you, then you’ll just do it. In MotW rolling dice happens less often, but should always result in something interesting happening.

• Arch Family

  • Juan B Rodriguez ☛ 5 ways to update zfs on archlinux

    i generally update archlinux once a month, but since zfs is not built-in into the kernel, there are times when zfs gets behind newer kernels

    additionally, archzfs, which builds zfs for archlinux can sometimes get behind zfs/openzfs

    i mitigated this by switching to an lts kernel (linux-lts) and while this helps, i still found myself in a situation where i can’t do a full system upgrade due to zfs

    there are some potential solutions to this, let’s take a look

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • OpenSUSE ☛ Aeon RC3 Released

    The biggest change with this release is the introduction of Full Disk Encryption by default, configured automatically as part of the installation.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Robert Haas ☛ PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - August 2024

    I'm pleased to be able to formally announce the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop, as well as our first two topics, planned for August and September 2024.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Zerowriter Ink typewriter sequel comes with larger 5.2-inch eInk screen, all-week battery, and mechanical keyboard

    This distraction-free word processor comes with a 5.2-inch eInk display, a hot-swappable mechanical keyboard, and enough battery to last a week of daily use.