Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• CLI for XDG trash
  https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli

  It's the first compatible cli tool that I've seen that respects freedesktop standards.

• Feedings the trolls before midnight only creates more ogres
  https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you-dont-own-the-word-freedom-a-full-burn-response-to-the-gnulinux-comment-that-tried-to-gatekeep-me-off-my-own-machine/

  OP didn't have to say anything, the troll's reply sounds like a copy-paste. That was painful to read.

• Simulating a fan in a WM
  https://wbenny.github.io/2025/06/29/i-made-my-vm-think-it-has-a-cpu-fan.html

  That's not specifically Unix-related but custom patching the system management BIOS is pretty amazing. See also "Linux hardware info" in issue 266.

• History of UNIX manpages
  https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

  Some archeological work trying to piece the inspirations and sources of today's manpage, where they originated.

• wayback
  https://github.com/kaniini/wayback

  An expiremental X compatibility layer within Wayland by creating a tiny compositor that supports an X session. The project is in its infancy, let's see how it develops over time.

• FOSS in space
  https://www.dwarmstrong.org/foss-in-space-1/

  A series about certain software that are used in the space-related industry.

• TCP fingerprint with eBPF
  https://halb.it/posts/ebpf-fingerprinting-1/
  https://halb.it/posts/ebpf-fingerprinting-2/

  As is usual with lots of eBPF articles, a lot of background info needs to be provided before diving into the core of the topic, it really start in the second article.

• Starlink, OpenWrt, and others
  https://btxx.org/posts/starlink-openwrt/
  https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/luci-app-adblock

  It's basically about configuring a router to have adblock, and still work with Starlink connectivity.

• Chimera Linux for day to day
  https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2025/daily-driving-chimera-for-work/

  Chimera is the new Alpine or Void, but with differences. Obviously, some of the hassle comes from the common cli tools but, apart from that, development for work seems fine.

Life & Other

• Serializing some DER
  https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/

  See also "Let's play with encoding and formats" in 71 and maybe "What's in a private key" in 231. So yeah, LLMs can help with certain encoding.

Thoughts

"The long-term is just a series of short-terms you didn't waste." — A common saying

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A peek into someone's terminal usage
  https://jyn.dev/how-i-use-my-terminal/

  tmux is powerful, right, and it seems, according to the author, that people don't often use its buffer search and copy feature.

• Big Emojis
  https://dgl.cx/2025/06/can-your-terminal-do-emojis
  https://vt100.net/docs/vt510-rm/DECDHL.html

  Does your terminal support DECDHL escape codes?

• alden
  https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/389

  So this is similar to other terminal multiplexers but keeps the scrollback.

• Custom prompt across systems
  https://starship.rs/

  Ricing is cool again!

• X Terminal came later
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XTerminalsNotImmediate

  As is usual with Chris' blog posts we always learn a few things about Unix history.

• Asterinas
  https://asterinas.github.io/
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1022920/ad60263cd13c8a13/
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03876

  Another month, another OS. It's using a model called the 'framekernel' written in rust.

• postmarketOS update
  https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/06/22/v25.06-release/

  They're moving forward with having a pure Linux-based mobile OS, lots of new things and device features support.

• FreeBSD Kernel Module pkg(8) repo
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/06/22/freebsd-kernel-modules-pkg8-repositories/

  This solves an issue in which your system is more up-to-date than the kernel modules and they become out-of-sync, which could crash a couple of things.

• New vulnerabilities just dropped
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/new-linux-udisks-flaw-lets-attackers-get-root-on-major-linux-distros/

  These ones emphasize local privilege escalation through Polkit's "allow_active".

• cosmoe
  https://cosmoe.org/index.html

  A BeOS inspired UI.

• NAT64 for Linux
  https://github.com/apalrd/tayga
  https://github.com/apalrd/tayga/blob/main/docs/index.md

  TAYGA is a stateless NAT64 translator that does IPv4 to IPv6 and vice-versa.

• X11 scaling
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/forbidden-secrets-of-ancient-X11-scaling-technology-revealed

  So yeah, X11 does have the ability to query screen sizes and properties.

Life & Other

• Planned Obsolescence
  https://technical.ly/civic-news/windows-11-upgrade-myth-old-pcs-still-work/

  Well, business is business, as usual.

Thoughts

"The sea does not apologize for its storms, and yet the sailor learns to dance with the waves."

Archive

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Contribute

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• GNOME and Red Hat Linux 11y Ago
  https://linuxgazette.net/165/laycock.html

  Well, it's older from today's point of view, but we still nag in the same way about UI. It has come a long way though.

• Sandboxing as a Dev on Unix-like systems
  https://kristaps.bsd.lv/devsecflops/

  A comparison of how difficult it is to write sandboxing code using different libraries and tech, and how much traction it will generate.

• strace tips
  https://rrampage.github.io/2025/06/13/strace-tips-for-better-debugging/

  That's a lot of arguments, but I'll keep it in mind.

• Porting Unix stuff to Windows
  https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/4/how-i-ported-pigz-from-unix-to-windows.html

  It mostly consists of having translation layers and pollyfils.

• SSH private keys
  https://noratrieb.dev/blog/posts/fake-openssh-keys/

  A deconstruction of the format of SSH private keys, and how you can swap the public part even if it doesn't match the private.

• tattoy
  https://tattoy.sh/

  A terminal that has an internal compositor. You'll get street creds as they say.

• GdkPixbuf Image on GNOME
  https://blogs.gnome.org/sophieh/2025/06/13/making-gnomes-gdkpixbuf-image-loading-safer/
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glycin

  GNOME swapped its image loading library, but why? Apparently, it was a big source of memory-safety issues.

• bash /dev/tcp with tls
  https://blog.pkgforge.dev/https-via-http

  The solution they came up with isn't very satisfying, they're just running a tls termination proxy on another machine. They could've done something much cooler.

• The high level OS challenge
  https://ochagavia.nl/blog/the-high-level-os-challenge/

  Is it possible to write a hobby-OS without the low-level drudgery?

• NAT on Linux
  https://vivekn.dev/blog/grokking-nat-and-packet-mangling-in-linux

  A quick explanation of NAT types along with how it's used in linux internals.

• Resurrecting a tracker
  https://kianbradley.com/2025/06/15/resurrecting-a-dead-tracker.html

  Putting something on the public internet is a challenge, putting a tracker than everyone expects to be up is tougher. Yet, it's a single service machine, so it's simpler.

Life & Other

• Designing for unstable internet
  https://bytes.zone/posts/should-we-design-for-iffy-internet/

  And that info is limited to the USA, the worldwide situation is worse.

Thoughts

"Old fires leave warm ashes, until someone stirs them again."

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Killing X11
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11

  Time to be a cynic and make fun of the state of certain projects that are too forceful and often too political in their ways. Where are the diplomats?

• New Sway release
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.11-Released
  https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/1.11

  If you haven't been on the block recently, sway is a Wayland copy-paste of i3. Each upgrades in the Wayland-space usually includes support for new stuff in the protocol, along with custom things in the protocol that isn't part of the standard.

• Curate and Upgrade your shell history
  https://esham.io/2025/05/shell-history

  There seems to be a global awakening about shell history and its usefulness. See also "Better shell history" in 286 and "A year of command line usage" in issue 283.

• Too Many Open Files
  https://mattrighetti.com/2025/06/04/too-many-files-open

  256 is a low number, I'm guessing this was running in some sort of container which defaults to these low limits, I'm guessing it's macOS‘s App Sandbox or FreeBSD jail, but I'd bet on macOS.

• binfmt_misc scripting
  https://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/binfmtc.html.en

  See also "Writing your own linux module" in 285, "binfmt for WSL" in 229, and "Magic bytes" in issue 100, among others on similar topic.

• Apple containers
  https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/tutorial.md
  https://github.com/apple/container
  https://github.com/apple/containerization
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/whatever-happened-to-sandboxfs

  So this is Apple's way to better support docker-like images.

• Apple Network Server 500
  https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-apple-network-servers-all-too.html

  Lots of history, and then register a new service on ppcd that talks JSON.

• Creating a polyglot Markdown/Makefile
  https://zoo.dev/blog/polyglot-makefile-markdown

  A fun experiment into deconstructing the syntax of two formats and find a middle ground. Now, here we have a diplomat!

Life & Other

• Cells for software
  https://neilmadden.blog/2010/01/08/are-cells-a-good-analogy-for-software/

  See, so you can't use that metaphor when referring to distributed systems.

Thoughts

"You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies." — Tutu

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Ironclas OS
  https://ironclad-os.org/
  https://ironclad-os.org/manual/Mandatory-access-control-_0028MAC_0029.html
  https://ironclad-os.org/formalverification.html

  This is a formally verified, rt capable, Unix-like OS.

• Another tmux cheat sheet
  https://tmuxai.dev/tmux-cheat-sheet/

  It's a pretty good one.

• Wayland Keyboard Pointer
  https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr
  https://github.com/moverest/wl-kbptr?tab=readme-ov-file#supported-compositors

  And it might possibly work on some compositors.

• Linux Mount Namespaces
  https://jmtd.net/log/mount_namespaces/

  A useful reminder and mini-tutorial to get acquainted with mount namespaces.

• Inode zero
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/POSIXAllowsZeroInode

  It's might not be that anything that isn't commented on (in an fs in this case) is allowed, but more that it might lead to undefined behavior.

• Better rsync defaults
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/05/31/sync/

  Could be the filesystem?

• Forgetting your disk encryption password
  https://catgirl.ai/log/fde-oops/

  Maybe you can learn something from someone else's mistakes.

• Getting root on a PoS
  https://stefan-gloor.ch/yomani-hack

  Reverse engineering, opening up the hardware and learning how things work is amazing. Now, it's also reassuring to know there are two cores on this machine, one running securely and the other for maintenance.

• The Apple Jonathan
  https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept/
  https://512pixels.net/2024/10/defending-the-jonathan/

  That would've been a neat machine if it had made it to the market, sliding swappable modules like on a server rack.

• The Meaning of Icons
  https://www.datagubbe.se/iconmeaning/

  Designing icons that remains and are directly meaningful is tough.

Life & Other

• Not everything is on the internet
  https://www.bruh.ltd/blog/not-everything-is-on-the-internet/

  Go over that list, and remember it! Also, share whatever you can help with if you can.

• Self-help for bloggers
  https://www.jeetmehta.com/posts/thrive-in-obscurity

  I mean you can also just write because you like writing, no need to look for social media hype.

• Always use UTC
  https://timestripe.com/magazine/blog/timezone/

  That's a nice experiment, especially if you have family abroad, or...

• When you're a digital nomad
  https://www.businessinsider.com/remote-work-digital-nomad-rto-2025-5

  The world is moving what was a trend for certain, is more solid for others, but what's good is that people try things and see what sticks with them and what they prefer.

Thoughts

The text is a lazy machine that demands the bold cooperation of the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps — Eco

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• stty defaults
  https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/stty/

  Some random notes about terminal defaults and their meanings.

• Timeout in bash
  https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/timeout/

  It's more like timeout(1) from GNU coreutils (not built-in bash).

• Monitor screen session attachments
  https://200ok.ch/posts/2025-05-19_monitor_your_screen_session_attachments_right_in_your_prompt.html

  Now can this be done with tmux, I haven't searched yet, let me know on IRC.

• VM without VM
  https://popovicu.com/posts/linux-vm-without-vm-software-user-mode/

  So basically a container, aka OS-level virtualisation, pretty neat.

• Prolog WM
  https://github.com/Seeker04/plwm

  The code is actually really readable for a language almost no one uses.

• ROCKNIX
  https://rocknix.org/

  This is an "immutable distro" specialized for handheld games. It includes things to make this easier: bluetooth, touch, media support, simple game management GUI (EmulationStation), etc..

• Fedora shipping as Wayland only
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-43-Wayland-Only-GNOME

  Here goes my clipboard manager..

• The future of flatpak
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HkYJ7M119I
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1020571/

  I guess that's similar to the life of any big project, the hype slows down, and development and features too, new ideas dwindle.

• A CUPS driver in 100 lines
  https://behind.pretix.eu/2018/01/20/cups-driver/

  This is for an open source project to print tickets.

• On File Formats
  https://solhsa.com/oldernews2025.html#ON-FILE-FORMATS

  Some things to keep in mind when you have to pick a file format.

Life & Other

• One sentence books
  https://borretti.me/article/non-fiction-has-bad-incentives

  They do have another useful, and probably main, purpose: To sit on the shelf and have people glance at the title and make a value judgement about who you are based on it.

• Two types of Open Source
  https://filiph.net/text/two-types-of-open-source.html

  I think they're unto something, but not only for software, expectations play one of the biggest role in a lot of things.

Thoughts

"Metaphors are not just a matter of language, they are a matter of thought." — George Lakoff

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Use ramoops for logging under Linux
  https://embear.ch/blog/using-ramoops

  Rely on persistent ram to store oopsies/panic logging, see also "Kernel Storage and Circular Buffer" in issue 146.

• Difficulties in sorting hex stuff
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/SortingIPv6Addresses

  But as the author said, it's probably doable with a bit of awk.

• Karton the KDE VMM
  https://blogs.kde.org/2025/05/18/gsoc-2025-project-intro-developing-karton-the-kde-virtual-machine-manager/
  https://invent.kde.org/sitter/karton

  It's basically a wrapper over libvirt but with some QT widgets on top, instead of the GTK-based ones.

• Linux kernel Dev tries a Home Assistant
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/
  https://www.home-assistant.io/

  We got react videos style articles now. Home Assistant seems like a cool project for anyone that has a few automated stuff around their home.

• OpenBSD is cozy
  https://btxx.org/posts/OpenBSD_is_a_Cozy_Operating_System/

  Yes, you need to patch a few things and cut your fingers a few times, but then you'll feel warm inside afterward.

• Modifying macos context menu
  https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/30/taking-command-of-the-context-menu-in-macos/

  And it's about adding a quick tool to compress videos, and obviously, it can't be macos without the mention of a paid software.

• The good old Cathedral and Bazaar discussion
  https://matklad.github.io/2025/05/20/open-source-cant-coordinate.html

  There is also FreeDesktop too and a couple of other entities that gather standards.

• Hotspot
  https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot

  A linux perf visualizer that's a bit more approachable.

Life & Other

• Dive into Japan's NFC transport cards
  https://aruarian.dance/blog/japan-ic-cards/

  It's always fascinating to read about tech that stood the test of time, and that include different parts.

• Memorization is essential to Creativity
  https://shwin.co/blog/creativity-fundamentally-comes-from-memorization

  This reminds me of a documentary called Everything is a Remix, and of the difference between originality and creativity. This is why teenagers are so impressed with today's music while older people feel like it's the same song on repeat.

Thoughts

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." — George Shaw

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• iOS app dev on Linux
  https://forums.swift.org/t/xtool-cross-platform-xcode-replacement-build-ios-apps-on-linux-and-more/79803

  This might be something a lot of people were waiting for.

• I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!
  https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-1-built-for-control-but-not-for-people/
  https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-2-the-audio-stack-is-a-crime-scene/

  And as usual, negative feelings have an inner quality to attract eyeballs on the internet. Still, there's a lot to learn from the tidbits about accessibility scattered across the articles.

• fan service
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/fan-service

  It takes a look sometimes to get "simple" things working.

• Faster sync
  https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/4x-faster-network-file-sync-rclone-vs-rsync

  Basically try rclone with multi threading.

• Interrupt CPU Usage
  https://tanelpoder.com/posts/linux-hiding-interrupt-cpu-usage/

  That's some very important info that is hidden away while it shouldn't

• Path to Memory Safety is Inevitable
  https://hardenedlinux.org/blog/2025-05-07-the-path-to-memory-safety-is-inevitable/

  A decade of experience comes with nuances. Things aren't as clear cut as the internet hive mind would like us to believe with "rewrite it all in a memory safe language".

• Terminal Colors
  https://github.com/termstandard/colors

  Does your terminal support truecolor and how do you know?

• BeaST Grid
  https://mezzantrop.wordpress.com/2020/08/28/the-beast-grid-early-stage/
  https://mezzantrop.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/the_beast_grid_raid_ctlha_bq.pdf

  That's an advanced failover mechanism I hadn't heard about before.

• Self-hosting, self-defense
  https://sanctum.geek.nz/presentations/self-hosting-self-defense.pdf

  It's tough to host things on the internet these days when you can suddenly get attacked like this. Also, a great opportunity to learn to stay zen and be imaginative with solutions.

Life & Other

• Silly is good
  https://blog.ttulka.com/the-power-of-silly-questions/

  Always improve, ask questions.

• Where did the WWW go?
  https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/what-happened-to-www/

  So it was all a dream?

Thoughts

The successful man was out and on the job long before opportunity came a-knocking. And this same opportunity, by the way, is ofttimes disguised as hard work — No attribution

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Cool WMs
  https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
  https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

  These are worth giving a go if you haven't before, even if it's just to see what they're about.

• Bootloader and GRUB
  https://github.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stefan20162016/linux-insides-code/master/bootloader.asm

  Want the most minimalist bootloader, or the coolest inspo.

• High quality streaming on Linux
  https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-to-play-videos-in-hdr-on-linux-for-a-home-theater/

  This can be interesting for those who have a TV or device with high dynamic range.

• x86 on Android
  https://0f5f.blogs.minster.io/2022/08/running-x86-binaries-on-android/

  It's with qemu but with the specs of phones these days, this might become our new platforms.

• Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD
  https://www.netmeister.org/blog/netbsd-pqc.html

  That's how to setup OpenSSL OQS Provider or other PQC on NetBSD.

• passt with pasta
  https://passt.top/passt/about/
  https://slirp.sourceforge.net/

  This is a software relying on user-mode networking to "proxy" the TCP/IP stack, mostly for container-host networking. The graphics are well-done. It's a cool project.

• podfox
  https://codeberg.org/valpackett/podfox#podfox
  https://val.packett.cool/blog/podfox/

  "Podfox is a SOCKS5 proxy for accessing Podman's rootless network namespace from the host. It creates a virtual domain hierarchy in the proxy: a ..podman request gets resolved as .dns.podman on 's aardvark-dns server. Firefox can be configured to use it through a PAC policy or an included one-liner extension."

• Core Unix programs
  https://wizardzines.com/comics/every-core-unix-program-i-use/

  A useful cheatsheet for newcomers.

• System boundaries and the Linux kernel
  https://www.tedinski.com/2019/01/15/system-boundaries-and-the-linux-kernel.html

  Don't break user-space, but these days people dabble in kernel-space all the time, see also "eBPF issue, then blame Fred" in issue 280.

• LWNs of the week
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1018082/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1017846/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1017315/

  Please contribute to LWN if you can afford it.

Life & Other

• Richly flavored farts
  https://utsavmamoria.substack.com/p/how-to-live-an-intellectually-rich

  Some things were cool, others felt like fluff.

• No more daydreaming for you
  https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming

  Go read some Byung-Chul Han too. This feels a bit like an over-stretch to me, but it's probably because I don't use my phone as much.

• Got to be mad to be stylish
  https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/dying-for-beauty/

  And prettiness is also efficient and clean.

• Web Athologists
  https://olano.dev/blog/web-anthologists/

  If you write the history of the web then it's going to be the only thing we remember, not the actual web.

• A Sisyphean quest
  https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

  Can't say I haven't felt that.

Thoughts

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes" - Kafka

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Using authorized keys for granular access control
  https://dan.langille.org/2025/04/17/using-ssh-authorized-keys-to-decide-what-the-incoming-connection-can-do/

  I knew authorized keys was flexible, but I didn't remember it could be used that way.

• Shell script mistakes
  https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/shell_script_mistakes.html

  These are a lot of great tips, but also remember shellcheck to find problems you've missed.

• Linux is Chicken Soup for the Programmer's Soul
  https://smustafa.blog/2025/03/10/chicken-soup-for-the-programmers-soul/

  The main lesson is that it forces you to be a self-learner and to discover things, changing your perception.

• Isolated Execution Environment for eBPF
  https://ebpf.foundation/research-update-isolated-execution-environment-for-ebpf/

  A proposed approach to consider eBPF to have their own isolation environment. They do that by first making a summary of all that the verifier currently checks before loading the eBPF in the kernel with the JIT, but then cut the exploration to future posts mentioning a Software-Based Fault Isolation (SFI) approach.

• OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD
  https://unixdigest.com/articles/the-main-differences-between-openbsd-freebsd-netbsd-and-dragonflybsd.html

  It's been such a long time since I had seen the vehicle analogy.

• GNOME Shell Frippery
  https://frippery.org/extensions/

  Get your toes wet in the ricing space with some of these ideas.

• Mute machine when locked
  https://blog.fernvenue.com/archives/mute-when-lock/

  Now that's a neat idea I never thought about.

• The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers
  https://blues.win/posts/joy-of-linux-theming/

  A reproducible ricer mode or an immutable distro rice?

• Keeping an old Mac alive
  https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/15/classic_mac_os_apps/

  This should keep you going for another 25 years.

• sandbox-exec
  https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/

  See also "macOS sandbox" in issue 184. Since the profile syntax is undocumented, maybe some LLMs can help with gathering all it knows from around the web and decipher it, putting an end to the dogma.

Life & Other

• Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web
  http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/webident.html

  It's the type of things that seem obvious nowadays but that needs to be written down and explained.

• How to make people feel stupid
  https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200801/how_to_make_people_feel_stupid.html

  That's a tip for when you're presenting a topic.

• irongeek
  https://www.irongeek.com/

  Who remembers this legendary blog?

Thoughts

It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. — Roland Barthes

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• PulseAudioDB
  https://unnamed.website/posts/pulseaudiodb/

  And no, this isn't the restore DB of pulseaudio that uses TDB, it's about storing info within sinks. See also the stuff on kernel keyring in "Relying on the Linux kernel keystore" in issue 226. Seriously, I love these types of random experiments.

• The modern OpenBSD router
  https://www.azabani.com/2015/08/06/modern-openbsd-home-router.html

  It's never about the outcome, it's always about what you learn along the way.

• 5 levels of confs
  https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/config_levels.html

  I like the guiding principle "using the lowest level possible".

• Debian oh Debian
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2025/why-debian-changes/
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2023/debian-reasons/

  At this point Debian is its own nation-state.

• Fedora wants 99% reproducibility
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1014979/
  https://github.com/kpcyrd/rebuilderd

  I think that's a good idea for supply chain security.

• Better shell history
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2025/better_shell_history_search.html

  This is similar to "A year of command line usage" in issue 283.

• Get your own home bin
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/MyPersonalProgramsSetup

  It's something we probably all do already in our own special ways.

• Bootstrapping Understanding
  https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/bure.html

  Every reverse engineer has a tale that differs but that captivates. It starts with opaque gibberish hexadecimals and end up with structures and logic.

Life & Other

• IBM Code Page 437
  https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/why-is-there-a-small-house-in-ibm-s-code-page-437/

  The amazing story and usage of the house character.

• Setting up your own LTE network
  https://lantian.pub/en/article/modify-computer/legal-lte-network-at-home-for-100-bucks.lantian/

  So many limitations, where's the free market and liberty.

• Fuzzing the APDU-ME interface
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ou_MxSmiVo
  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rr9i5y9IzNo4tO0YLGBz-blq1aHc9lKHI1NVTW1qe2w/edit

  A continuation on the previous post on telco, that should open your appetite to learn about sim cards.

• Virtualization for Isolation
  https://blog.snork.dev/posts/we-don-t-need-no-virtualization.html

  Food for thought (see we're using the hungry metaphors).

Thoughts

I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool — The Brains Trust

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• 8-pin Linux
  https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=36.%208pinLinux

  The mad man does it again, see "Linux on intel 4004" in issue 262. I'm truly impressed, and the design is shared and "reproduce able".

• XNU deep dive in Darwin
  https://tansanrao.com/blog/2025/04/xnu-kernel-and-darwin-evolution-and-architecture/

  The first sections of the article is mostly a historical listicle, it's the second part that touches the core of the topic. There's a lot to learn about the interaction between Mach and the BSD part of the kernel.

• Same subnet, dual NICs
  https://egbert.net/blog/articles/dual-nics-same-ip-subnet.html

  I thought it'd be more complex than this, but a few routing rules and it's ok. Can this be called multihoming if the two interfaces are on the same subnet?

• The Wizard and His Shell
  https://terminal.click/posts/2025/04/the-wizard-and-his-shell/

  That reminds me of the Arcan project (but not free, it's kind of an ad), see also "Moving on from terminal" in issue 275.

• BPF in rust
  https://yeet.cx/blog/bpf-from-scratch-in-rust/

  "Linux kernel’s deepest, weirdest, most misunderstood subsystem" or is it? It's also and ad for their yeet thing, so meh (why people write to make ads).

• Linux kernel Defence Map
  https://github.com/a13xp0p0v/linux-kernel-defence-map

  A diagram of different mechanisms found in Linux to thwart certain attacks.

• exherbolinux
  https://www.exherbolinux.org/
  https://man.exherbolinux.org/sydtutorial.7.html
  https://man.exherbolinux.org/syd.1.html

  This came up during a discussion and it seems I've never shared it in the newsletter. SYD is a new mechanism for access control over the whole OS (the documentation is horrendous).

• The chroot technique
  https://livesys.se/posts/the-chroot-technique/

  Old school, old trick, but I guess it's often much easier to just boot a live distro.

• Are jails containers?
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/are-freebsd-jails-containers/
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/freebsd-jails-security/

  As with most things, words are redefined and reused and that creates useless misunderstandings. So, when arguing it's better to simply not use the word altogether and instead actually explain what you mean by it. OCI standardized container solution, or the idea of OS level virtualization?
  The second article is an overview of FreeBSD jails and the security mechanisms of isolation it has.

• Demystifying the shebang
  https://crocidb.com/post/kernel-adventures/demystifying-the-shebang/

  See also "Magic bytes" in issue 100 and "Executables & default program" in issue 77.

• Writing your own linux module
  https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/mopb.html

  And the goal of that module is to get a new binfmt running, without an external interpreter, see also previous link. A great and fun write up. See also "Tiny ELF" in issue 47, since the goal of the module is to run even tinier execs.

• Man pages vs Man Readers
  https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/

  Yes, mdoc is messy and archaic and probably most people have not read it and that might be why the man reader/display doesn't support all features.

• journalctl cheatsheet
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-12-24-systemd-journald-cheatsheet.html

  I can never remember how to use journalctl, it's the type of software that needs a second software to understand it, and you have to remember you're manipulating a binary log db, with fixed defined fields, and not a file.

• userdbtcl
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/247/userdbctl.html
  https://commandmasters.com/commands/userdbctl-linux/

  TIL this existed but I don't know why other than adding another layer of abstraction and to unify things.

• Things spammers believe
  https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-things-spammers-believe-tale-of.html
  https://www.bsdly.net/~peter/traplist.shtml

  Fighting spam is Sisyphean work, it never ends, never gets anywhere, it's like doing the chores.

Life & Other

• Ancient Art
  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/141203-mussel-shell-oldest-art

  This is the type of things that makes you wonder in awe at what humanity mean and what it is about.

Thoughts

Motho ke motho ka botho

For those who know and remember.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Writing a bash built-in
  https://mbuki-mvuki.org/posts/2021-07-12-writing-a-bash-builtin-in-c-to-parse-ini-configs/

  Usually, I think people choose option 1, it's the first time I see someone going the second route.

• Disk IO mishaps
  https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html

  A lot of good things to keep in mind, there's a buffer and possible error at every layer.

• Where do the bytes go?
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/where-do-the-bytes-go

  This is related to the previous article, but focusing on the path taken within OpenBSD's kernel.

• Swap, no swap, or somewhere in between
  https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/
  https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-part2-zram/
  https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-no-swap-space/

  I fear the OOM-killer too much to disable swap, I'd disable swap only in case of real-time systems with fixed procedures that run for set amounts of time.

• vramfs
  https://github.com/Overv/vramfs

  It's taking the idea of tmpfs/ramfs but with the graphic card memory instead, see also issue 20.

• Benchmarking a distro
  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/benchmarking-a-distribution-and-some-o3-results/58027

  That's a very hard question, they went for a selected few packages and discovered that the "optimization" didn't provide the benefits they were looking for, but actual regression.

• Converting Linux to Windows
  https://philipbohun.com/blog/0007.html

  That quickly went from an idea into a rant about stable ABI. So Windows exe is the new java run everywhere.

• Ricing
  https://marcelofern.com/posts/linux/rice/index.html

  Where are my fellow ricers at?

• Thinking of modernizing Plasma login manager
  https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/a-roadmap-for-a-modern-plasma-login-manager/

  It's good to have a clear plan of action and be open about ideas, also it shows that some things we take for granted are much more complex than we thought.

• DWARF
  https://calabro.io/dwarf
  https://calabro.io/dwarf/elf
  https://calabro.io/dwarf/die

  A series teaching about the DWARF debugging format (which ended abruptly).

• Another issue of PagedOut
  https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf

  There's something for everyone in it.

• Dipping in OpenBSD
  https://ewintr.nl/posts/2025/dipping-my-toes-in-openbsd-in-amsterdam/

  Long story short, you can get a website running on OpenBSD, whowudavknown. The setup is relayd with acme for TLS termination, and httpd as the webserver.

• SSHing regardless of limitations
  https://blog.frost.kiwi/tunneling-corporate-firewalls/

  That's a very long way to say they'll proxy ssh within an https tunnel.

Life & Other

• We have a reality problem
  https://www.chrbutler.com/we-have-a-reality-problem

  "Who was rebelling and who was vlogging?"

• You know, you've seen it
  https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
  https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students

  Yet, it's comforting to read the studies and other people's account.

• TV Garden
  https://tv.garden

  Want to see what other countries watch on the big screen?

• The politicization of everything
  https://shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-discuss-politics-with-friends
  https://andrewchatora.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/a-critical-review-of-pierre-bourdieus-distinction-a-social-critique-of-the-judgement-of-taste/
  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
  http://www.metamodernism.org/
  https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

  A couple of links to get you going down a rabbit hole.

Thoughts

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less" — Through the looking glass

"There are no facts, only interpretations" — Nietzsche

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." — Jean-Luc Godard

Basically: read my mind. Communication is tough.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Oxidizing Ubuntu
  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1014002/580b8750bf02cf41/
  https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/22/coreutils-in-rust/
  https://github.com/jnsgruk/oxidizr

  What do you think of all this? The justifications are a bit flimsy, but in my opinion if it keeps 100% backward compatibility, size, and speed, then I don't see the issue (but it's probably not the case).

• A new LSM
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Hornet-Linux-LSM
  https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250321164537.16719-2-bboscaccy@linux.microsoft.com/

  Hornet's idea is to load a cert to verify eBPF signature. The big question is why?

• Another LSM we don't talk enough about
  https://github.com/Zouuup/landrun

  The landlock LSM isn't frequently spoken about, it's Linux equivalent of OpenBSD unveil. See also "Following landlock development" in 204, "Landlock" in 161 among others. Or what I've written about it.

• Tiling on macos
  https://lilysthings.org/blog/tiling-macos/

  With 25 years far behind, ricing might soon arrive to macos.

• A preference
  https://matklad.github.io/2025/03/21/use-long-options-in-scripts.html

  And I got to admit it, when sharing example, I prefer reading long options too.

• A year of command line usage
  https://danishpraka.sh/posts/year-in-command-line/

  That's cool, now I want to store all my shell history in a place where it won't rollover. There's nothing like the feeling you've done something before, knew a few part of the command, but can't find it in the history. Overall, insightful!

• Desktop icons are hard
  https://akselmo.dev/posts/plasma-desktop-icons-positioning-refactor/

  We learn a little bit every day, and today I learned about stripes, and icon positioning, which is more work than you might believe.

• Debian dev guide
  https://anarc.at/software/debian-development/

  This is golden, it's the guide that everyone wishes they had when making or modifying packages.

• Supply chain attack on Fedora
  https://fenrisk.com/pagure

  We need more PoCs like these to learn to protect our stack, as the meme goes: XKCD 2347.

• Why BSD in 2025
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/03/23/osday-2025-why-choose-bsd-in-2025/

  This is more of a scratch on top of the topic.

• The little book about OS dev
  https://littleosbook.github.io/

  Condensed and straight forward, it can be used either as an introduction to OS or as a good refresher.

• DNS resolution and Kubernetes
  https://jpetazzo.github.io/2024/05/12/understanding-kubernetes-dns-hostnetwork-dnspolicy-dnsconfigforming/

  See also "DNS unmystification" in issue 139 and a couple of others in the newsletter.

• You Need To Know About Bootc
  https://sean.thrailkill.cloud/posts/you-need-to-know-about-bootc/

  Lots of talk about immutable/atomic distros the past few years. What do you think of them?

Life & Other

• Open source myths
  https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-open-source-mythology/

  We should have a new "jargon" files but with tidbits like these, but they don't do them like these anymore.

Thoughts

"Power operates most effectively when it is invisible" — Colapietro

Another interesting one, that might be related

"Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable"

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• PAM unixsock
  https://miek.nl/2025/march/14/pam-unixsock/

  I love pam modules, but pam modules never love anyone back.

• A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash
  https://codeberg.org/calebccff/6502.sh

  Now we'll wait for someone to run a shell on top of 6502 on top of ash.

• Disaster recovery or disastrous recovery
  https://tinyhack.com/2022/09/16/when-you-deleted-lib-on-linux-while-still-connected-via-ssh/

  Heard this folks, install a static busybox as a failsafe, otherwise you'll have to do some gymnastics.

• Spreadsheets vs CLI utilities vs SQL
  https://blog.qiqitori.com/2018/07/spreadsheets-vs-cli-utilities-vs-sql-for-pivot-tables/

  Use the right tool for the right job, or change the job to fit your tool. Also TIL about q.

• shèlĺ's-éval
  https://susam.net/shell-eval.html

  Sequentially testing to prove the theory.

• Image-based Linux
  https://supakeen.com/weblog/image-based-linux/

  Nice intro, but we need to send encouragement for the rest of the article series.

• They don't want FreeType anymore
  https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts
  https://skia.org/

  The Rust bandwagon is now a fast moving bullet train.

• The long lost hidden partition
  https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/03/apples-long-lost-hidden-recovery-partition-from-1994-has-been-found/

  The actual content of the recovery partition isn't as interesting as the path it took to reach it.

• How costly is context switch
  https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/context-switching-and-performance

  A comprehensive, one of the few, articles about context switch cost and how to think about it (Other than the famous "About memory" from back in issue 58).

Life & Other

• whois change
  https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-update-launching-rdap-sunsetting-whois-27-01-2025-en
  https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Protocol

  The new protocol is RDAP and it's been a long time cooking.

• Teach, don't tell
  https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09/teach-dont-tell/

  One thing that is never mentioned is that documentation, by nature, isn't teaching, which is the big issue.

Thoughts

"Myth is not a lie: it is a system of signs." — Roland Barthes

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Apple Exclaves
  https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c37194

  A tiny lesson in the difference between monolith and microkernel architecture followed by a list of hardware level security mitigations, and then a focus on the exclave extension to XNU for resource isolation. There is not a lot of open information about how it's implemented but they possibly are set in a separate kernel, SK, based on seL4. It runs on the same processor as the main kernel, but the processor has to provide privilege separation when swapping context between the two, possibly via TrustZone. There is then a dance between the main kernel to discover the "domains" provided by the exclaves, and a way for processes to manage, use, and communicate with these . A fascinating article.

• Good code design from Linux kernel
  https://leandromoreira.com/2019/08/02/linux-ffmpeg-source-internals-a-good-software-design/

  That's a good exercise in learning that polymorphism is a concept that can be applied regardless of the language.

• Linux scheduler in user-space
  https://medium.com/tier-iv-tech-blog/customizing-linux-kernel-scheduler-in-user-space-39baf0a60af0
  https://cs.stanford.edu/~jhumphri/documents/ghost.pdf
  https://github.com/google/ghost-kernel
  https://github.com/google/ghost-userspace

  ghost is a handy project if you've ever been interested in scheduling and how it works. See also "It lands in Linux 6.12" in issue 262, "PREEMPT RT support" in 260, among others.

• ed for everything
  https://aartaka.me/this-post-is-ed.html
  https://aartaka.me/sed-ed.html

  Should you use it? Sure, but it's a case-by-case, don't go using it everywhere.

• Parsing json with awk
  https://akr.am/blog/posts/parsing-json-in-forty-lines-of-awk

  It's much simpler than you thought.

• fontconfig, it works so you don't have to worry about it
  https://www.1a-insec.net/blog/11-fonts-where/

  It's been a long time since I've read anything about the font stack on Unix-like OSes, is it a good sign?

• ANSI escape codes
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/03/07/escape-code-standards/

  That's the most humble and straight intro to ANSI escape codes and terminfo I've read.

• Kitty's text-sizing protocol
  https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/

  A follow up on the previous link with someone that is trying to get a new standard accepted.

Life & Other

• Eisegesis
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisegesis
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eisegesis

  You've learned a new word today.

• The Hierarchy of Hazard Controls
  https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/hoc/

  This should be read by anyone that dabbles in security and safety.

• Introduction to PDF syntax
  https://gendignoux.com/blog/2016/10/04/pdf-basics.html

  "Can this PDF run Linux?" of issue 276 should make more sense now.

• A visual explanation of data storage
  https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latency

  That's one of the best I've seen thus far, take a look!

Thoughts

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
— Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Chapter XI, London, 1895

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• What is this dbus thing
  https://deathandthepenguinblog.wordpress.com/2021/09/21/whats-all-this-new-fangled-dbus-rubbish/

  See also "dbus-broker vs dbus-daemon" in 230, "A critique of D-Bus activation" in 199, "Polkit and dbus" in 126, "Your inner daemon" in 79, among others.

• ACPI & Device Tree
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hardware-autoconfiguration

  A series of questions will always take you to the answer. Let's learn about device mapping with NetBSD as example.

• Mapping iSCSI filesystem mounts on Linux
  https://blog.unixwiz.net/2018/06/mapping-iscsi-filesystem-mounts-on-linux.html

  Ever configured an array of disks over the network?

• FP in the shell
  https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shell-aint-a-bad-place-to-fp-part-1-doug-mcilroys-pipeline/index.html#main
  https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shell-aint-a-bad-place-to-fp-part-2-functions-as-unix-tools/index.html#main

  So yeah, pipes can be functional, now what to do with that idea is up to you.

• Rich CLI
  https://ballingt.com/rich-terminal-applications/
  https://ballingt.com/rich-terminal-applications-2/

  Deeply thinking about how and where history and completion should appear, whether in multi-screen programs or not. The main example is bpython REPL.

• How to play an oldie game
  https://www.dedoimedo.com/games/reviving/pharaoh-cleopatra-hd.html

  But isn't it as simple as installing the WINE? Nope... You might need an embedded X session too.

• eBPF issue, then blame Fred
  https://tanelpoder.com/posts/ebpf-pt-regs-error-on-linux-blame-fred/

  eBPF is exposed to changes at the kernel level that user-space usually isn't, that FRED thing for instance for Intel CPU level switching.

• Everyone hates fork?
  https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/01/25/why-does-everyone-hate-fork.html

  Indeed, in most Unix-like OSes today we have more efficient functions, and it's a good summary of how fork was and is still used for parallelism.

• Foldable Words
  http://bit-player.org/2021/foldable-words

  I didn't think I'd get emotional when reading the story of someone tackling an algo challenge.

Life & Other

• Yet more content about writing
  https://kupajo.com/write-to-escape-your-default-setting/
  https://andregarzia.com/2025/03/the-web-should-be-a-conversation.html

  A good friend recently launched their blog, so I'm guessing these types of posts are inciting people to do something.

• Explore mythology
  https://www.theoi.com/

  Learning the past can help guide people for the future.

Thoughts

Hold your identity lightly.

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Which init process for containers
  https://ahmet.im/blog/minimal-init-process-for-containers/

  I know that feeling, when all good practices say something, yet you somehow have to go against it because of some edge case.

• A primer on rcctl
  https://brynet.ca/article-rcctl.html

  For when the manpage isn't enough (sshhh, it's excellent and definitely enough).

• A refresher on shell redirection syntax
  http://rednafi.com/misc/shell_redirection/

  Nothing extraordinary, a quick read.

• Deleting files with find
  https://b4d.sablun.org/blog/2023-10-19-deleting-files-with-find/

  Well.. the most interesting part was the "why". I guess it's because the maxdepth has changed.

• Compression to compromise
  https://trebledj.me/posts/attack-of-the-zip/

  TIL about zip slip.

• Sharing secrets
  https://www.netmeister.org/blog/sharing-secrets.html

  "This document is intended to help you decide how to share confidential information with others. It describes in some detail the various trade-offs, assumptions, and risks associated with each approach."

• macos for kde
  https://matklad.github.io/2025/02/23/macos-for-kde-users.html

  This comes down to homebrew, keybind tool, learning the shortcuts, and that's it.

• Adopted WorldWide?
  https://brajeshwar.com/2011/a-thought-about-worldwide-adoption-of-linux/

  Someone has to ring on his doorbell and tell him that it's already adopted on most servers by all big corps worldwide.

Life & Other

• Check this person's Amiga setup
  https://datagubbe.se/coolestamiga/

  Go bump the battlestation thread on the forums while at it.

• I miss Worms
  https://heckmeck.de/blog/fun-with-worms-dc-custom-levels/

  Having a cutom level building is a great addition.

• AnAnAnother one about writing
  https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/02/20250223-til-deep-dive-posts

  Having a blog is fun, go make one NOW! See also "Another one about writing" in issue 221.

Thoughts

"The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument" — Bacon

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Debugging a Linux kernel
  https://dasl.cc/2025/01/01/debugging-our-new-linux-kernel/

  These debugging stories are always captivating, it's like reading a detective novel.

• runaway processes
  https://thinkingeek.com/2024/01/05/mitigate-runaway-processes/

  It's my first time encountering this use-case to track short-lived processes, I might give it a try, or not.

• Fear of IPv6
  https://techlog.jenslink.net/posts/ipv6-is-hard/

  If it doesn't work it doesn't mean it's hard, fix it instead.

• Using raw sockets/packets on Linux
  https://schoenitzer.de/blog/2018/Linux%20Raw%20Sockets.html

  I'm surprised by the discrepancy in behavior between IPv6 and IPv4, I'd expect them to act the same way.

• UNIX maximalism and minimalism
  https://0x19.org/posts/2023-05-21.php

  It's the kind of articles that lives in between parody and seriousness.

• Trying out fzf
  https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf

  You've heard of fzf, installed it, but don't know what to do with it, then this article is for you.

• A few thoughts about s6
  https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2019-12-19-s6-love/s6-love.html

  Keep in mind that when love is blind or makes you wear rosy tinted glasses.

• Reverse DDoS Attacks
  https://parkalex.dev/posts/reverse-ddos

  So you want to shoot yourself in the foot?

• The origin of the word "mainframe"
  https://www.righto.com/2025/02/origin-of-mainframe-term.html

  Someone had to go down the rabbit hole and give us the nitty-gritty tasty details.

Life & Other

• Cybersecurity Superstition
  https://vale.rocks/posts/cybersecurity-superstition

  Something to send to your non-techie friends.

• The Inner-Platform Effect
  https://mattrickard.com/the-inner-platform-effect

  This reminds me of Zawinski’s Law.

• What's interesting
  https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/what-is-interesting

  My expertise gives me the ability to appreciate the exquisite flavors in complex spaghetti code.

Thoughts

"The press may not be very successful in telling us what to think, but they are extraordinarily successful in telling us what to think about." — Bernard Cohen

Or in simple terms: They pick who and what gets free rent in your head.

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• getaddrinfo issues
  https://valentin.gosu.se/blog/2025/02/getaddrinfo-sucks-everything-else-is-much-worse

  I can't say I've used getaddrinfo info directly, most of the time indirectly through other functions, but I didn't know it had so many obvious drawbacks.

• 14 years of systemd
  https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6648-14-years-of-systemd/

  Ever heard of systemd? It's a new service manager along with a suite of tools to manage things in its cosmology.

• ParticleOS
  https://github.com/systemd/particleos

  A novel immutable distro that wants to rely on the hermetic tools of systemd (verified image on boot, home management, TPM, and others).

• Patching the kernel pipeline tools
  https://github.com/geico/tuxtape

  kpatch can be tough, the TuxTape project tries to make it easier.

• What grinds your gears
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/02/05/some-terminal-frustrations/

  Everyone has frustrations and if these frustrations are aggregated and sorted, we can see that we might have so many in common.

• Solving sudoku with tmux
  https://willhbr.net/2024/12/27/solving-sudoku-with-tmux/

  Obviously, if you add an interpreter to any software it's going to be Turing complete.

• Use /tmp more!
  https://atthis.link/blog/2025/58671.html

  In the opposite direction of "Against /tmp" in issue 273.

• Fast and Slow BPF experiments
  https://www.p99conf.io/2023/08/31/running-fast-and-slow-experiments-with-bpf-programs-performance/

  If you thought BPF programs were all as efficient as they could get from the start, you're wrong, there's always some optimizations here and there.

• Linux physical page frame data structure
  https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/struct-page-the-linux-physical-page-frame-data-structure

  You thought a page was just a plain empty area to store data, nope, it has a structure too.

• IPv6 WiFi on OpenBSD and FreeBSD
  https://vincentdelft.be/post/post_20250208

  To be fair when I started reading the title I was ready for a 20 page redaction on how to setup WiFi, but it's straight forward.

• Connecting to the internet
  https://pjg1.site/linux-internet-from-scratch

  From scratch.

• A packet journey through pf
  https://2024.eurobsdcon.org/slides/eurobsdcon2024-alexander_bluhm-a_packets_journey.pdf
  https://fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-2025-4306-a-packet-s-journey-through-pf/slides/237084/presentat_GzZfyhT.pdf

  There's nothing better to learn about networking than to see how firewalls handling things.

• One of the best Linux networking blog on the internet
  https://thermalcircle.de/

  I'm still sifting through this gold mine, so much to learn!

Life & Other

• Ok, ok, here's you LLMs-related articles
  https://thebullshitmachines.com/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI
  https://anfalmushtaq.com/articles/deep-dive-into-llms-like-chatgpt-tldr
  https://bbycroft.net/llm

  This content is high quality and recommended by most dentists in your country.

Thoughts

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." — Walter Lippmann

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Vanilla vim
  https://leblancfg.com/i-miss-vim.html

  This is more of someone's woes about neovim than it is about vim.

• Can this PDF run Linux?
  https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf

  Or how someone will always abuse Turing completeness.

• Can this Android run Linux?
  https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-doom-3521804/

  Pedantic: It always was. But the novelty is that the terminal can now run graphical apps and support a display server such as weston (Wayland compositor).

• Can this Linux run Android?
  https://waydro.id/

  It's been available for a while, but it's resurfacing in the tech news.

• Perfetto
  https://perfetto.dev/docs/quickstart/linux-tracing
  https://ui.perfetto.dev/

  This is an advanced tracing system that also has neat visualizations tools.

• X-Ray vision on Linux
  https://0x.tools/
  https://tanelpoder.com/posts/tpargs-list-tracepoint-arguments-and-structures/

  Tracing on Linux has moved forward a lot with the appearance of eBPF. 0xtools is also, similarly to the previous link, part of these tools that can be used for that.

• Creating a nameless file
  https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vmucmc/is_there_a_way_to_create_a_nameless_file_in_linux/
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/381474/can-i-create-a-file-without-metadata#381476

  There's no such thing as a stupid question, if you follow through deeply enough in the details.

• This message will self-destruct
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8981164/self-deleting-shell-script
  https://github.com/reedHam/self-shred

  This will go in your "neat tricks" directory.

• disown
  https://www.commandinline.com/cheat-sheet/disown/
  https://phoenixnap.com/kb/disown-command-linux

  Let's revisit a job management shell commands that we constantly use.

• Worse is Better
  https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

  A classic duel of design classicists.

• Fiwix a Unix/POSIX-compatible OS
  https://www.fiwix.org/features.html

  It's always interesting to see someone create a new OS from scratch, especially the novel aspects in it. Here, there's not much, but it's simple enough that if someone wants to play around with, let's say the scheduler, they can easily modify and run it.

Life & Other

• Stuck in Someone Else's Theory
  https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/stuck

  I gotta put that on my CV: "theory builder".

• The library of libraries
  https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/
  https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/

  That's one amazing visualization!

Thoughts

"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like." – Lao Tzu

What makes you enter your flow state?

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Oracle Linux VM on MacBooks
  https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/k8s-dev-mac-oracle-linux/

  That's a trick for those that need it that makes it easier with UTM.

• Faster resume/suspend on Linux
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-ACPI

  This is the type of small change that has a noticeable impact on certain hardware.

• Unix print driver fun
  https://jholloway.dev/posts/print-driver-fun/

  As soon as anyone reads CUPS, they know there's going to be a mess. It ends up in a juggling of binary compatibility.

• Chimera Linux distro
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1004324/

  A distro made with modernity in mind, with musl as the C library, it's systemd-free but not for ideological reasons and instead relies on dinit which offers similar features.

• A fast(er) linker for Linux
  https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild

  You'll be shaving off milliseconds from your start time, worth it on tiny devices.

• X11 listening to events
  https://nrk.neocities.org/articles/x11-timeout-with-xsyncalarm

  Every time I think I know a bit about X11, I learn that there's another extension or feature I had never heard of.

• Real world latency between GNOME rendering backends
  https://mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/

  So, is X11 always faster than Wayland? Let's see if it's a reproducible finding on different machines too.

• bisecting the Linux kernel using nixos
  https://mathieu.fenniak.net/bisecting-the-linux-kernel-with-nixos/

  git bisect is this utility you take out of the garage once every 5 years to debug something, it's huge and bulky, tedious to use, but it eventually gets the job done.

• Moving on from terminal
  https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-emulation/

  We've been following the arcan project for years in this newsletter, and it's always daring and rethinking, and pushing forward what we take for granted, and the pieces that blocks us from moving away from terminal and novel HCI that don't depend on it.

Life & Other

• Dual qr code generator
  https://dualqrcode.com/

  Someone comes up with a novel attack and the PoCs pop up everywhere.

• Cookie banners or spirit of the law
  https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compliance/

  It's a case of pedantic nagging, but a great reminder that it's not the cookies that are important, it's the tracking.

• HTML display page
  https://iamwillwang.com/dollar/every-html-element/

  That's a great way to visually learn what the elements are.

Thoughts

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." — Chomsky

That also irks back to the concept of the Overton Window.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Graphics without X11 on NetBSD
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/netbsd-graphics-wo-x11

  This kinds of reminds me of Amiga. See also "The graphic stack on Linux" in issue 225 and "Accessing the DRM framebuffer" in 271.

• Unix Spell
  https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

  Now that's some innovative algorithm for the time, impressive.

• Interactive systemd
  https://github.com/isd-project/isd
  https://isd-project.github.io/isd/#working-with-isd

  This stands as an alternative to TUI and GUIs such as "systemd gui" in 54.

• Essential CLI/TUI Tools for Developers
  https://packagemain.tech/p/essential-clitui-tools-for-developers

  A standard listicle where the interesting suspects are the ones at the bottom: jq, bat, ripgrep, etc..

• dinit
  https://github.com/davmac314/dinit

  This is the init system we mentioend in "Dinit on Chimera" in issue 244.

• UNIX Epoch from UTC
  https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-to-get-a-unix-epoch-from-a-utc-date-time-string/

  As with anything related to time and timezones, it quickly gets messy.

• eSIM from Linux
  https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/01/using-esims-with-devices-that-only-have-a-physical-sim-slot-via-a-9esim-sim-card-with-android-and-linux/

  Now that we have local assistants and the hardware card readers are widely available, there's nothing stopping the innovation.

• Migrating from bcachefs
  https://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2025-01-20-21-45_migrating_away_from_bcachefs.html

  Trying bleeding edge tech comes at a cost, but it has its fun aspects too.

• Tiny linux from scratch
  https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/

  What better way to learn than to build it from scratch.

• Line anchors in regex
  https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-regexes-use-and-as-line-anchors/

  I think the guess makes sense, now let's wait for the reply from the actual authors.

• Dreaming of new shell experience
  https://taylor.town/smel-000
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge
  https://man.archlinux.org/man/vipe.1.en
  https://github.com/ericfreese/rat
  https://domterm.org/index.html
  https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

  I've also added a couple of tools that could actually allow this dream to be true.

Life & Other

• Memory management
  https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/memory-management-1/

  That's a good summary/refresher, or a good intro, to C basic allocation and programming.

• Postdoc broken dreams
  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00142-y
  https://archive.ph/E5aqe

  I'm not surprised, from all that I've heard from people who also left postdoc.

Thoughts

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. — Peter Drucker

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Against /tmp
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-10-22-tmp.html

  The author makes a good case, tmp has generated so many workarounds over the years because of the security "mishaps".

• 18 years in the Linux console
  https://eugene-andrienko.com/en/it/2024/01/02/life-in-console

  Oh, these stories are always captivating—the journey of learning and growth someone has undertaken over the year, along with all the things they've accomplished and reflect upon.

• 20 years of Linux desktop
  https://ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html
  https://ploum.net/2024-12-16-linux_desktop2.html

  Another story but this time it's a bit different, it's from someone who started installing and helping people around them with Linux desktops. Then dreamed of more friendly desktops, which then became a quest.

• "modern" terminal setup
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/01/11/getting-a-modern-terminal-setup/

  When I read the first sentence I had a similar train of thought, and then I went through the list, and I couldn't agree more. It sounds like a few common-sense ideas, yet, they're not easy to achieve.

• sudo-rs
  https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs

  A follow up on "sudo in rust" in issue 206.

• Eternal Terminal
  https://eternalterminal.dev/

  Think of it as an infinite auto-ssh.

• The state of vim
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1002342/a8d8a17f30968b93/

  What happens when a BDFL dies or quits the project, here's a relevant example.

• Process creation in io_uring
  https://lwn.net/Articles/1002371/

  Like any cool project, it starts as a small idea, and then slowly gets extended with more features.

• Files and actors with io_uring
  https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250104.html

  Or, another way to view things. There's always some perspective to stuff, if you find some paragraph in history that somewhat resembles/match it.

• Is Unix microservice?
  https://www.brandonbloom.name/blog/2021/08/02/unix-and-microservice-platforms/

  Similar to the previous post, it's not really, but again, it can be used as a metaphor for software architecture and design.

• Context switch in Linux
  https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/linux-context-switching-internals

  Kind of a continuation of "Disillusioning the Magic of the fork System Call" in issue 2070.

• Multi-Path and routing fundamentals on Linux
  https://blog.sdn.clinic/2025/01/linux-routing-fundamentals/
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/multi-path-tcp-revolutionizing-connectivity-one-path-at-a-time/

  Two excellent networking articles. The first one is mainly an explanation of iproute2 and the second explains MTCP.

• The Makefile effect
  https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/01/10/Be-aware-of-the-Makefile-effect

  An aptly named effect/situation.

• hashmap in bash
  https://xeiaso.net/notes/2024/bash-hashmap/

  Well, someone learned something today, let's take this as an opportunity to refresh our memory too.

• Plan9 is a bicycle
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/93196.html
  https://asyncial.github.io/plan-9-linux/

  I remember that whole first article used to be summarized in a single meme image back in the days. Go find it and share it on IRC!

• CLI Club
  https://cli.club/

  A categorized list of command line interfaces to perform different things.

• Viewing images
  https://wolf.nereid.pl/posts/image-viewer/

  There's ton of tiny trivia in there, from someone truly passionate and that went down the rabbit hole when it comes to cursor rendering and image rendering in general. It's a golden nugget to go through.

Life & Other

• A New SUPERPOWER
  https://danielwirtz.com/blog/spot-the-difference-superpower

  Simply said: they discovered stereograms aka magic-eye.

• Adulting
  https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares

  They've just realized the world is a mishmash jumble of random stuff held together by people who care just enough to keep the crumbling mess functional. Also, the grass isn't always greener, don't go on believing it's not the same everywhere, no need to be idealist either. How I personally cope: a bottom-up approach, I care about my personal space and stuff and then move up if I still have the time and energy. How do you do it?

Thoughts

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." — Aldous Huxley

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Some common sense
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/

  A couple of "rules" that we implicitly learn while using terminals.

• Manpages are Turing complete!
  https://codeberg.org/cve/mott

  ...And you can implement Conway's GOL in it.

• Xfce new release
  https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html

  It's starting on it's route towards full Wayland support.

• Spring system
  https://web.archive.org/web/20100116211311/http://research.sun.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/mitchell.htm
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052403/https://labs.oracle.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/Mitchell.pdf

  An experimental project that was made to "reimplement UNIX in an object-oriented fashion".

• Adding objects in the Unix shell
  https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/12/objects.html
  https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/project-overview.html

  To be fair, it's a completely new shell language, it's not your POSIX shell script. The language is clean, I might give it a try.

• What is Vim?
  https://blog.jonas.foo/whats_vim.html

  That's a compelling meta-point about what vim is, I'll keep it in mind.

• Why Don't We Have a General Purpose Tree Editor?
  https://pcmonk.me/2014/04/01/why-dont-we-have-a-general-purpose-tree-editor.html?

  And obviously, commenters had a lot of answers with pretty good software. Mine is hnb.

• Eye Tracker Reviews
  https://thume.ca/2016/03/24/eye-tracker-reviews-pupil-labs-tobii-eyex-eye-tribe-tobii-x2-30/

  Ever heard of eye trackers, neither did I. Yet, it makes total sense in the context of an HCI research and I guess I indirectly read about it once.

• How fast are they talking?
  https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/talk-fast/

  Pretty impressive analysis, I never thought of doing it like this. I also guess that for the transcript, these days, AI would help quite a lot.

• NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
  https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html

  NetBSD stays true to its motto: runs everywhere.

Life & Other

• Map of Github
  https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#2/0/0
  https://paperscape.org/

  The Github relations map, reminded me of the amazing map of research papers, showing galaxies, and how to visualize references as if they were a living organism, constantly evolving and growing.

• RAM data remanence times
  https://blog.3mdeb.com/2024/2024-12-13-ram-data-decay-research/

  How long does data stay in RAM? You can jump to the measurement graph at the end for the conclusion.

Thoughts

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. — Alan Watts

What do you think: plunge in the change, or resist change?

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The biggest shell programs
  https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Programs-in-the-World

  If someone reaches a certain number of lines in a shell script, others will start to frown and propose switching to another language. This list is about certain cases where they didn't listen, for a reason or another, be it portability, or simplicity.

• OpenWrt supply chain attack
  https://flatt.tech/research/posts/compromising-openwrt-supply-chain-sha256-collision/

  It starts with the usual catch of trusting user input, then to container escape, and finally hash collision and possible supply chain attack.

• We're not a museum anymore!
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-EFI-Zboot-Gzip-Zstd

  So it's passing from seven different compression types to only two.

• Accessing the DRM framebuffer
  https://embear.ch/blog/drm-framebuffer

  The old /dev/fbN interface is one we're familiar with and often seen when using the TTY, but what about cases where it's not available and a bit more complex.

• Conjuring a Linux distro from thin air
  https://blog.brixit.nl/conjuring-a-linux-distribution-out-of-thin-air/

  Sometimes we have to do this just for the sake of it.

• TCC and sandboxing on macOS
  https://bdash.net.nz/posts/sandboxing-on-macos/
  https://bdash.net.nz/posts/tcc-and-the-platform-sandbox-policy/

  See also "macOS sandbox" in issue 184.

• Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined
  https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/12/11/making-memcpynull-null-0-well-defined

  It's not everyday that an UB gets removed from C, rejoice!

• Mac servers
  https://eclecticlight.co/2024/12/07/a-brief-history-of-mac-servers/

  Short-lived, they still were kind of niche and interesting.

Life & Other

• More powerful phones or not?
  https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-pc-performance-3504716/

  The car metaphor is a classic that I use because it discerns clearly between utility and appearances.

• Creating an AS
  http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html

  This is epic, it reminds me of "Build your own anycast network" in issue 197.

Thoughts

"Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• sudo warning history
  https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12521/when-was-the-famous-sudo-warning-introduced-under-what-background-by-whom

  I didn't expect to be so much trivia and history behind this.

• Mis-issued certificate
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

  Since the Moz CA trust store is used in a lot of places, these discussions and related decisions are very important.

• Disillusioning the Magic of the fork System Call
  https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/the-magic-of-fork

  Seems to be the trend these days to explain forking over and over again, see also "Linux threads and processes" in issue 264. This one has an emphasis on examples in assembly.

• Why your pipe gets stuck
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-buffering/

  It couldn't handle the pressure and go with the flow, some plumbing should fix it.

• Low maintenance password management
  https://tzcrawford.com/blog/secure-and-low-maintenance-password-management.html

  It's secure and low maintenance, but definitely not simple, it's now a whole distributed key management system (KMS) from scratch.

• git submodules
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2024/03/20/submodules.html

  I got to say, it's the first time these make total sense to me, it's a great explanation.

• OCI containers on FreeBSD
  https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

  Containers are coming to FreeBSD, you'll get your podman and companies.

• Linux TCP SO_REUSEPORT
  https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/298/12538.html

  I finally understand why sometimes restarting my server quickly will fail and say that it's already binded, then I have to wait a bit to restart it again.

• Easier man pages
  https://kokada.dev/blog/praise-to-scdoc-to-generate-man-pages/

  This is really neat, I didn't know about scdoc before, it covers any simple man page creation (which are most man pages).

Life & Other

• Restaurant Menus
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171120-the-secret-tricks-hidden-inside-restaurant-menus
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028z2z0

  Who doesn't enjoy a good meal? Personally, I mainly look for a picture of the meal and the ingredient description.

• Security model of dark web markets
  https://boehs.org/node/dark-web-security

  There's so much to learn from that article and the dark web, give it a glance.

Thoughts

"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking." ― NNT

Or in other words, we are hurt by our unfulfilled desires, whether they emanated from us or society.

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Getting in the shoes of others to understand them
  https://www.5snb.club/posts/2024/making-your-connection-bad/

  I wasn't aware this can be done with simple traffic control.

• Search in everything of every type
  https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/

  That's useful, I'll test it out, it's a wrapper over rg.

• You've built a kubernetes
  https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/

  Things can quickly go the slippery slope argument with that type of articles.

• Freshly baked malware
  https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/linux-devices-hit-with-even-more-new-malware-this-time-from-chinese-hackers
  https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/unveiling-wolfsbane-gelsemiums-linux-counterpart-to-gelsevirine/

  The second link is a deep technical analysis of the code and how the malware works.

• Tiny code but huge improvements
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-2.6p-Faster-Scale-Patch
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-3888.9-Performance

  It's always impressive when small changes lead to amazing outcomes.

• Advanced Wireguard
  https://sloonz.github.io/posts/wireguard-beyond-basic-configuration/

  Mainly two points, on NATing and IPv6.

• A week in the TTY 2024
  https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/10/could-i-cope-with-a-terminal-only-computer/
  https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/11/using-only-a-linux-terminal-for-my-personal-computing-in-2024/

  We should try this out again, there's a lot to learn and what people write after such experience is full of knowledge.

• Arch adds a license for PKGBUILDs
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/998778/aa5fd76c0574a311/

  After 22 years, it's just now that we see this happen.

Life & Other

• Nearest neighbor attack
  https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-nearest-neighbor-attack-how-a-russian-apt-weaponized-nearby-wi-fi-networks-for-covert-access/

  Lesson of the story is to not trust login and skip MFA, even when authenticating at proximity.

• Human compiler?
  https://news.radio-t.com/post/i-m-a-developer-not-a-compiler

  Do you think we're moving away from memorizing facts and towards a more practical, creative, and hands-on way of learning?

• Beyond bcrypt
  https://soatok.blog/2024/11/27/beyond-bcrypt/

  This article has a lot to teach, especially if you've also used bcrypt in similar situations.

Thoughts

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• bpftune
  https://github.com/oracle/bpftune

  It seems bpf is used more and more in everything these days, this specific tool is for Linux kernel tunables observability and calibration by relying on some for of control theory. See also "Tuning TCP" in issue 191.

• Mental model for links
  https://bhoot.dev/2024/on-linux-file-and-links/

  A simple explanation for inodes, soft and hard links.

• Losing NFS locks and the SunOS SIGLOST signal
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NFSLosingLocksAndSIGLOST

  Some trivia and history about SIGLOST.

• Scan on FreeBSD
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/11/17/scan-on-freebsd/

  An everyday story of setting up something and getting it to work.

• Using find to solve a problem
  https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/11/12/find-file-names/

  I'm not sure I find the solution to be clean, but it works.

• gdb frontends
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

  A repost of "Less annoying gdb usage" in issue 154.

• traceroute isn't real!
  https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

  Now this might be news to some people that traceroute is a hack, but to others, it's a known fact. Yet a hack that consistently works is called a solution.

• Container 101, again
  https://maelstrom-software.com/blog/spawning-processes-on-linux/

  A summary of the difference between different ways to spawn processes on Linux.

• Safety in an unsafe world
  https://lwn.net/Articles/995814/

  A few examples from Fucshia OS about how Rust can be used to make things "safer" and "reliable".

• Why solene stopped using OpenBSD
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-11-15-why-i-stopped-using-openbsd.html

  Coming from one of the biggest online OpenBSD blogger, this is surprising, and interesting to read.

Life & Other

• DIMM vs UDIMM vs RDIMM vs SODIMM vs CUDIMM: What's the Difference?
  https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/memory/dimm-vs-udimm-vs-rdimm-vs-sodimm-vs-cudimm-whats-the-difference/

  Apart from the obvious product placement, it's a good summary of the differences. Interestingly, every time I tried to find such a comparison article, it was also riddled with placements.

Thoughts

Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person. — Doctor Who

Now I got to add Doctor Who to my watchlist.

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• NetBSD on a ROCK64 Board
  https://simonevellei.com/blog/posts/netbsd-on-a-rock64-board/

  The usual "NetBSD will solve it".

• setenv and multithreaded envs performance
  https://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/the-steam-client-update-earlier-this-week-mentions-fixed-some-miscellaneous-common-crashes-in-the-linux-notes-which-i-wante.html

  It doesn't answer why the setenv/getenv makes the threads crash, I'm curious.

• Macintosh Garden Library
  https://blog.persistent.info/2024/11/infinite-mac-macintosh-garden-library.html
  https://macintoshgarden.org/

  Now it's easier than ever to play around with retro Mac software.

• Shells again
  https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-linux-shells/

  A repost, but worthwhile. Find when we initially posted this and you'll get a round of applause.

• zram tool
  https://github.com/eylles/zram-service

  We've explored "zram" in 227 and ram disks in a couple of issues. This tiny set of scripts should be helpful for those that want an easy management.

• An interview with Kernighan
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VloimYuCxBs

  Apart from the very repetitive questions that the speaker constantly gets, there's a lot of golden questions that dive deeper.

• Security Is A Useless Controls Problem
  https://securityis.substack.com/p/security-is-a-useless-controls-problem

  Catchy title, but it's a great explanation of security theater.

• Syncing shell history
  https://calebhearth.com/search-sync-shell-atuin
  https://atuin.sh/

  I'm not sure I'll rely on this particular tool, but I've always wanted to do something similar to this.

Life & Other

• Something light for this week
  https://neal.fun/

  Simply enjoy it!

Thoughts

"Common sense is for common people" — A random internet user

But what does it mean?

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux hardware info
  https://nixsanctuary.com/best-linux-hardware-system-info-commands/
  https://www.golinuxcloud.com/dmidecode-command-in-linux/

  A sort of listicle about commands that can be used to get hardware info.

• POSIX 2024 novelties
  https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu

  A continuation of "A continuation on POSIX 2024" in issue 251. It's a much deeper and better explanation, going into the reason why the changes were made too.

• Dive into mseal
  https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/10/25/a-deep-dive-into-linuxs-new-mseal-syscall/

  Now that's a true deep dive, within the kernel and with as many details as you want.

• ioctl and window size
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WindowSizeIoctlAndSignal

  As usual there's some SunOS innovation in there.

• Useful built-in macOS tools
  https://weiyen.net/articles/useful-macos-cmd-line-utilities

  There's a bunch of these that could inspire some to create similar tools.

• systemd and embedded linux
  https://kevinboone.me/systemd_embedded.html

  If you happen to be developing on embedded systems, then this is relevant.

• a smaller getopt
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-11-06-getopt.html

  Revisiting basic constructs is a great way to enhance insights into how they can possibly be improved or seen with new eyes.

• wildcard expansion
  https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q4/56

  We all know that wildcard expansion has devilish details that can often be abused. For some, this is a new bug, for others, it's why shell scripts are so messy.

Life & Other

• The last ones standing
  https://johnhawks.net/weblog/the-mystery-of-the-german-cockroach/

  The idea of them traveling on planes around the world, and on cruise ships is as old as time, and still a funny one.

Thoughts

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." — Leonardo da Vinci

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Making FreeBSD more user-friendly
  https://gyptazy.com/freebsd-how-can-we-make-it-more-attractive-to-new-users/

  A follow up on "Laptop support NOW" from issue 263. There's an earthquake-like awakening within FreeBSD to focus on this.

• Switching from Linux to BSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/03/i-solve-problems-eurobsdcon/
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_to_bsd/

  Boring, predictable, and low-maintenance sound like extremely good qualities in the world of software.

• OpenBSD is hard to show off
  https://atthis.link/blog/2024/16379.html
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-10-01-octopenbsd-2023.html

  A somewhat follow up on the stability topic: obviously OpenBSD also provides reliable and stable computing.

• macOS 15 is UNIX/POSIX certified
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/macos_15_is_unix/

  If you can pay for it, then get it. It seems to be the motto, even if another OS is UNIX-compatible, if it can't pay then it can't have the trademark.

• Plan9 and GNU Guix
  https://the-dam.org/docs/explanations/Plan9ListenOnLinux.html

  An implementation of a super-server-like system similar to Plan9's listen by relying on Guix' service mechanism.

• Updating the BIOS using Linux
  https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/
  https://superuser.com/questions/1683932/write-custom-nvram-entry#1683937

  Risky procedure, but good to know.

• The life of a container
  https://indradhanush.github.io/blog/life-of-a-container/

  This is your typical post about the components that make up a container, see also "What, why, and how of containers" in issue 239 and "Another look at containers from scratch" in issue 234, among others.

• JS tricks for polkit granular authorization
  https://www.timesys.com/security/linux-polkit-implementing-user-space-authorization-on-embedded-platforms/
  https://gist.github.com/grawity/3886114

  It's always good to have a refresher, even on topics you've already researched and think you know well, especially when it's someonene else explaining it in a different way.

• Multitasking in the kernel
  https://kukuruku.co/post/multitasking-management-in-the-operating-system-kernel/

  The formatting is a bit broken, but the content is gold. A big reminder of OS courses and basics.

• X11 selection sharing
  https://github.com/splitbrain/clipscreen

  This creates a virtual monitor to share only sections of the screen, pretty handy.

Life & Other

• The end of the pagerank era
  https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

  Apart from walled-gardens, now I see so many people relying on AI instead of search engines for basic day-to-day questions. (I don't care much about Kagi and have never used it, this isn't an ad for them).

• DST evolution in pictures
  https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.html

  ...and we're still to see the removal of DST in the EU.

Thoughts

"Peace begins with a smile." — Mother Teresa

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Comments over SSH
  https://blog.haschek.at/2023/ssh-based-comment-system.html

  That's a fun idea. It thwarts automated bots that rely on standard comment systems but won't deter any other attacker.

• RootAsRole
  https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/
  https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/chsr/file-config.html

  This is a new tool I had missed when doing research on access-control on Unix. It's neat but a bit cumbersome to use compared with relatively more simple mechanisms.

• Solaris profiles
  https://softpanorama.org/Solaris/Security/RBAC/profile_shells.shtml
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2023/02/28/access_control.html#sunos-derivatives-profiles

  Now, this is something I do know and it's similar to the previous one, though it's a bit simplified yet requires a "keywords" learning curve to be able to configure it properly.

• Proxying CLI tools
  https://blog.ropnop.com/proxying-cli-tools/

  Now the big question is why the trust stores are not consolidated.

• Linux threads and processes
  https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/common-misunderstandings/
  https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/threads-async-runtimes-part0/
  https://learnlinuxconcepts.blogspot.com/2014/03/process-management.html

  These might sound basic operating system components but it's still good to go back and do an overview of key differences.

• Software supply responsibilities
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/swroles/

  Can you split this up even more, probably, but having a big idea of the usual persons or roles and responsibilities involved alleviate the planning when thinking about releasing your software.

• Cypto proto odds
  http://blog.bjrn.se/2016/08/cabinet-of-curiosities-bunch-of.html

  A list of protocols cryptographic operations that are a bit odd, according to the author.

• BGP endless AS paths
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-bgp-endless-aspath

  A combination of two features that might sound good separately then give rise to the worst outcome.

Life & Other

• Learning to fuzz by examples
  https://github.com/antonio-morales/Fuzzing101

  I've always been fascinated by fuzzers, how by mere bruteforce, constant trial and errors, one can find weak points in software. Now is a good chance to learn a bit about this.

• A few notes on indoctrination
  https://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2019/06/26/doctr.html

  "all incoming information has to be understood exclusively by the subject in terms of the main doctrine; also the school system has to actively instill the doctrine and expunge all doubts and heresies."

Thoughts

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective. — Noam Chomsky

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The network ate my font
  https://verticalsysadmin.com/2017/09/13/sysadmin-war-story-the-network-ate-my-font/

  ... I didn't expect caches at this level. But why not, always expect caches at all levels.

• The latest hyped attack
  https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems-via-CUPS-Part-I/
  https://ubuntu.com/blog/cups-remote-code-execution-vulnerability-fix-available

  It's a pretty neat attack, I got to say, I was pretty sure somehow zeroconf/multicast services would be like IoT and be full of holes and assumptions (though mostly limited to local network).

• Everything is a file
  https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180722143912/https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file

  One of the few times I see this distinction explained in a well-put manner.

• trying a simple task
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/

  An experience in masochism just to see if someone was right!

• What rm does
  https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180424164514/https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it

  The type of learning I like, trying to reverse engineer something, reassemble it, dissect it, and see what every part does.

• Unix error messages
  https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix.errors.html

  Old school puns, might not be for everyone, but got a few laughs from me.

• Laptop support NOW
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/why-laptop-support-why-now-freebsds-strategic-move-toward-broader-adoption/

  It's a move to be applauded.

• Picking the right terminal colorscheme
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/10/01/terminal-colours/

  I don't think I've seen the terminal colorscheme issues laid down like that before, but each of these hit a particular pain spot I've had and most people had before.

Life & Other

• Flow not force
  https://www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com/living-life-through-flow-not-force/

  Sometimes we need a bit of positivism.

Thoughts

"When a man is stung, he doesn't destroy all beehives." — proverb from Tanzania

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Another visual guide to ssh tunneling
  https://ittavern.com/visual-guide-to-ssh-tunneling-and-port-forwarding/

  This is very similar to a previous one I had linked: https://robotmoon.com/ssh-tunnels/.

• Linux on intel 4004
  https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

  This is a continuation of "Linux on 8-bit microcontroller" in issue 125.

• More modern horror stories
  https://www.blopig.com/blog/2021/07/linux-horror-stories-and-protection-spells-volume-i/

  At least these ones are accompanied with remediation, can't say I haven't encountered the second scenario with a huge number of files in a single directory.

• self-contained exec
  https://brioche.dev/blog/portable-dynamically-linked-pacakges-on-linux/

  You've heard of nix, and container-based pkg managers, this is similar. See also "Portable Linux binaries" in issue 53 for fun.

• Container desktop, again
  https://container-desktop.com/
  https://rancherdesktop.io/
  https://orbstack.dev/
  https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture

  As time passes by, it seems this tech and trend is here to stay.

• Rethinking the Unix shell in Lisp
  https://github.com/PuellaeMagicae/unix-in-lisp/blob/master/TUTORIAL.org

  Do you prefer this way? I'm not sure I personally do, but it is nice to think about.

• It lands in Linux 6.12
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Lands-sched-ext

  A follow up on "PREEMPT RT support" of issue 260, it allows for an extensible scheduler in Linux that can have its policies implemented with BFP, which is pretty cool.

• A post-quantum world
  https://lwn.net/Articles/973231/

  The new FIPS is still in draft format but it's good to keep up-to-date.

• A simple explanation of io_uring
  https://matklad.github.io/2024/09/32/-what-is-io-uring.html

  I've seen a lot of convoluted blog posts about io_uring but this is probably the most concise and clear one.

• Stricted OpenBSD's ksh
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240924105732

  It won't allow invalid NUL characters as part of the input string.

Life & Other

• Notre-Dame is back
  https://www.gq.com/story/the-miraculous-resurrection-of-notre-dame

  I've been following the reconstruction of Notre-Dame for a while, there are a few wonderful documentaries about the artisans and craftsmanship, which I'm sure lots of people would enjoy.

Thoughts

Families, when a child is born, Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove, Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life, By becoming a Cabinet Minister
Su Tung-Po (K. Rexroth's translation)

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Power management GUI for Linux
  https://github.com/TheAlexDev23/power-options/

  This is a somewhat GUI copy of powertop, see "Powertop" in issue 169.

• Raw socket different behavior across systems
  https://swagnik.netlify.app/posts/how-raw-sockets-behave-in-different-systems/

  "All this time. I repeat, all this time, I have been poring over the linux man pages while sitting comfortably on macOS." See also "Raw sockets" in issue 160.

• Falsehood about tcp
  https://lwn.net/Articles/990281/

  I think to better understand TCP, anyone should go back to the basics and take a few pages from "computer networking a top-down approach" and try to see how a from-scratch tcp-alike protocol would work.

• Running 32-bit on 64-bit Linux
  https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/02/aarch64-32-bit-compat-pitfall/

  If you're doing cross compilation, pay attention to this issue. Otherwise, you might infer runtime costs.

• A better UX for shell scripts?
  https://nochlin.com/blog/6-techniques-i-use-to-create-a-great-user-experience-for-shell-scripts

  For the color and progress report, be sure to include a way to disable those so that the script can be used in a pipeline.

• Installing Arch
  https://giacomo.coletto.io/blog/arch-amd/

  Good ol' blog post about notes taken during an installation, along with tips.

Life & Other

• Steganography technique
  https://diffusionillusions.com/

  A mix of optical illusion and steganography.

• Turns out it might be a scam
  https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

  As they say "if it's too good to be true, it probably is".

Thoughts

"No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been
Since Good, though only thought,
Has life and breath -
God's life - can always be redeemed from death.
And evil in its nature is decay,
And any hour may blot it all away.
The hope that lost in some far distance seems,
May be the truer life, and this the dream."
― Adelaide Anne Procter

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A guide to cronjobs
  https://ittavern.com/cron-jobs-on-linux-comprehensive-guide/

  See also the classic, and so helpful, "This is genius, why didn't this exist before" in issue 39.

• Gnome files
  https://www.datagubbe.se/gnomefiles/

  It's basically a dissection of the GNOME file manager.

• Fuzzing an X compositor
  https://trace.yshui.dev/2024-09-fuzzing.html

  And unsurprisingly, fuzzing uncovers countless bugs.

• NetBSD's kauth
  https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.3/kauth.9

  A centralized way in the kernel to manage all authorization requests.

• PREEMPT RT support
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-PREEMPT_RT-Close-Patches

  Linux has had some facilities for real-time scheduling for a long time, but it wasn't covering everything. Now, we're approaching this.

• Linux hibernate
  https://tookmund.com/2024/09/hibernation-preparation

  Yet, even when diving into the kernel code, it still might not work on too many machines.

• Copy-on-write archive
  https://github.com/teknoraver/car

  This is tar but without copying data, it's only support on BtrFS or XFS.

• A dive into NT
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

  This is a really good overview of all the early features that came into windows NT and how it compared to different Unix-like OSes at the time.

Life & Other

• Against rereading
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/04/against-rereading/

  I've never pondered as much as the author about rereading a book. However, in cinema there are many critics who swear by rewatching and that its the only way to truly enjoy a movie. Yet, at the same time, like the author, I feel like something is lost when doing so.

• When security gets in the way
  https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p0

  Software for the real world should be tested with real people in real scenarios.

Thoughts

If it costs you your peace, it's too expensive. — Paulo Coelho

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Copy instead of install
  https://battlepenguin.com/tech/copying-linux-between-machines/

  This seems very cumbersome, having an immutable distro, or just a list of packages with user files alongside would be easier to set up.

• Swap the cloud OS
  https://cloudbsd.xyz/main/

  I had heard of this risky procedure before, but I'm not sure I'd ever try it on one of my VPS.

• Why learn Linux
  https://opiero.medium.com/why-you-should-learn-linux-9ceace168e5c

  They mean by that to develop software using a Linux-based OS. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cliche and superficial article, but probably something worth sending to newcomers to Unix-like environments.

• SSH certificate authority with TPM
  https://linderud.dev/blog/ssh-ca-with-device-and-identity-attestation-ssh-tpm-ca-authority/

  This supersedes issue 175 "Using certificates for SSH authentication" by adding hardware keys (HSM/TPM).

• Yubikey got pwned
  https://www.zagaja.com/2024/09/yubikey-digital-seatbelt/
  https://www.yubico.com/support/security-advisories/ysa-2024-03/

  ..And when we were just starting to discuss hardware sources of trust. The attack requires physical access, but still.

• Debian is an easy target
  https://unix.foo/posts/insecurity-of-debian/

  See also "16 years anniversary of a CVE" in issue 244.

• WiFi auth using SIM cards
  https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/08/31/wifi-auth-with-osmohlr/sim-cards/

  You've all heard of WEP and WPA for WiFi auth, but get ready for this. I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's something I deal with professionally and when I saw the article pop-up, I couldn't resist adding it here. It can seem a bit complex with an HLR, a RADIUS server, custom firmware on the router, and configured sim card and device. Yet, it also the same sort of things used when doing tunnels towards the operator's core network for VoWiFi for example.

• TCP thin-stream on Linux
  https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/2346888.2346891

  In sum, it reduces the latency by modifying the TCP retransmission mechanism (fast retransmitting on first duplicate ACK, instead of 3 if I'm not wrong, and to not apply exponential backoff, so not reducing the wait time between retransmission and possibly window size).

• Myths and controversial info
  https://itvision.altervista.org/

  A lot of miscellaneous articles you might find interesting.

• Missing BSD/Linux
  https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/05/i-miss-bsd-linux/

  The basic woes of someone who owns a macbook.

• ALSA bit perfect
  https://kevinboone.me/alsa_bitperfect.html

  Who needs a sound server when you can force yourself to use ALSA. Yet, I don't understand why not configure the audio server to simply not resample audio if it's under a certain bitrate.

• The dc calc
  https://howdytx.technology/unix-history-the-dc-calculator/

  RPN is one of the CS student's first weapon of choice.

• wak and awk implementation
  https://www.raygard.net/awkdoc/

  Ever wondered how awk works, let's write it from scratch.

• A shell rabbit hole
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2022/09/28/a-little-shell-rabbit-hole/

  That's one way to learn.

• Manual driver binding on Linux
  https://lwn.net/Articles/143397/

  It's nothing novel but one of the TIL sort of posts, you can bind/unbind device drivers through the /sys virtual fs.

• A beginner's guide to install from source
  https://moi.vonos.net/linux/beginners-installing-from-source/

  A very basic tutorial to get people initiate on what it means to download from source, how to check it was downloaded properly, extract, patch, and install software.

• Command line conventions over time
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/05/07/unix-cli/

  A summary of different techniques and conventions used on the cli that appeared over the years.

• SIGnal handling presentation
  https://sunshowers.io/posts/beyond-ctrl-c-signals/

  It consists of a basic review of signals, a few mentions of security, and mostly an how-to handle them in Rust.

• Steps to secure a Linux server
  https://kenhv.com/blog/securing-a-linux-server

  See also "Fail2ban: an enemy of script-kiddies" in issue 145.

• Porting systemd to musl lib
  https://catfox.life/2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-powered-linux/

  As the title says.

Life & Other

• An InfoSec homelab
  https://www.archcloudlabs.com/projects/5-years-of-homelab/

  We tend to see a lot of posts about random homelabs, but never something specifically made with the intention of learning security.

• Internet hourglass again
  https://systemsapproach.org/2024/08/19/how-the-hourglass-won/

  Another perception of the hourglass, see also "Internet hourglass" in issue 194.

Thoughts

90% of the work is always maintenance, life is maintenance.

Enjoy the longer than usual newsletter this week!

Archive

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5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Android adding support for bigger PAGESIZE
  https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/08/adding-16-kb-page-size-to-android.html

  This won't appear until Android 15 is out and even then it'll only be as a dev option.

• Explaining any shell
  https://www.shell.how/

  The explanation isn't always extraordinary helpful but it's a start. It relies on fig.io docs (which seems to be soon deprecated).

• Removing Greek quiz for a ship quiz
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=172443408727088&w=2

  The Greek quiz appeared in 1995 but most people aren't learning Greek.

• OpenSSH Backdoors
  https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

  The story of a 22yo attack on OpenSSH and how it related to today.

• netcat for IRC
  https://gir.st/ircpipe.html

  This reminds me of ii, the suckless irc client. I bet it could be used in the same manner.

• Linux pipes are slow
  https://qsantos.fr/2024/08/25/linux-pipes-are-slow/

  Why are they slow and how does vmsplice call help.

• Pong in bash
  https://0x0.st/XJg2.bash

  Pretty impressive that it takes as few lines as this.

• New malware on Linux
  https://thehackernews.com/2024/08/new-linux-malware-sedexp-hides-credit.html

  It basically adds a UDEV rules to run the malware at boot by executing it every time /dev/random is attached/loaded.

• Overengineered todo list
  https://taskwarrior.org/docs/start/

  Not dismissing the usefulness, but I personally prefer either a plain text file, or paper and pen if it's for something this simple.

Life & Other

• Something thought provoking
  https://readsomethinginteresting.com/

  A collection roulette of random ideas and thoughts in web articles.

• When you miss traffic
  https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

  This is pretty entertaining if you put it on all day on a smart TV.

• Who's stuck in space
  https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

  Just a fun trivia website.

Thoughts

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven — John Milton

Archive

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5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Building an embedded Linux system
  https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/

  A comprehensive yet accessible guide to help build an embedded system that includes Linux.

• FreeBSD considers Rust
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/985210/f3c3beb9ef9c550e/

  As with anything Rust related, even rumors have a huge sensationalism online.

• The day /proc died
  https://dev.to/rkeene/the-day-proc-died-53ic

  A full storage always leads to the weirdest bugs.

• Cathedral vs Bazaar Design discrepancies
  https://j3s.sh/thought/trainwreck-design.html

  An argument that things don't have to be black and white, there could be a middle-ground.

• lyrebird
  https://github.com/lyrebird-voice-changer/lyrebird/

  Once upon a time, I used to have fun with these voice modifiers, some were amazingly good, others not so much. With a bit of fiddling these can sound convincing.

• OOM kill count
  https://medium.com/opsops/there-is-an-oom-kill-count-in-linux-e9936aa33102

  Well, today I learned something! My previous machine used to have a trigger happy OOM-killer, so I guess its kill count was quite high.

• epoll
  https://darkcoding.net/software/epoll-the-api-that-powers-the-modern-internet/

  See also "What can you epoll" in issue 168.

Life & Other

• A reflection on the matrix
  https://theconversation.com/the-matrix-20-years-on-how-a-sci-fi-film-tackled-big-philosophical-questions-114007

  One of the best piece discussing the topic.

• More cinema reflections
  https://www.openculture.com/2015/03/andrei-tarkovskys-message-to-young-people.html

  What does this mean in an always connected world?

Thoughts

"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose, that is not failure. That is life" — Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• ML using pipes
  https://jott.live/markdown/ml_pipes

  Practically it's a command line tool relying on shumai (a tensor library), nothing too out-of-the-ordinary.

• Atomic Operations
  https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html

  A list of thing that POSIX-like/compliant systems should do atomically, and that you should trust.

• Modern or classic tools
  https://meetryanflowers.com/modern-linux-tools-vs-unix-classics-which-would-i-choose/

  In my opinion jq is now a classic, with the omnipresence of json, it's a must have tool.

• why is there a delay
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/335648/why-does-the-reset-command-include-a-delay
  https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/tset.1.html#h2-HISTORY

  As usual, the answer is because of archaic constraints.

• Writing a Unix clone in about a month
  https://drewdevault.com/2024/05/24/2024-05-24-Bunnix.html

  Interesting project, but the write-up about the experience could've had more details.

• Wayland finally merges a screen capture protocol
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Merges-Screen-Capture
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/124

  This has been cooking for more than 2 years.

• A new way to develop on Linux
  https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux/
  https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux-PartII/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-sysext.html

  A set of tools built on top of systemd-sysext, system extension images. This is a sort of overlay filesystem that is used to test new component software.

Life & Other

• What one can learn from teaching
  https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/learned-from-teaching

  I think these are good general life advices.

Thoughts

Meet them where they are.

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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Revisiting Linux CPU scheduling
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-08-03/0/POSTING-en.html

  Why does nice doesn't see to work as intended, this blog post answers this question by going through some linux scheduling, cgroup and slices. Everyone explains cgroups in their own way, I've also written a bit about them.

• A UX designer look at Linux
  https://www.chris-wood.design/resources/linux-for-ux-designers

  I'm not familiar with most of the tools mentioned, but that should come in handy for those in the know.

• The Burroughs ICON
  https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

  The peculiar ICON system running with QNX. It was a system conceived by a government for educational purposes.

• Another tracer tutorial
  https://sh4dy.com/2024/08/03/beetracer/

  This one tries to simulate an strace-clone.

• Undo function
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/linux_rollback_options/

  We're all following immutable distros, reproducible builds, snapshots, but most of these are often in the fringes. Here we see that it's starting to appear in a more popular Linux distro.

• Userspaceification of POSIX
  https://www.redox-os.org/news/kernel-11/

  Redox is a Unix-like OS written in Rust. In its signals project it's doing a rewrite of signal handling in user-space.

• A screen tutorial
  https://linuxtldr.com/installing-screen/

  Someone asked me for a basic screen tutorial.

• Cat9 Microdosing: Each and Contain
  https://arcan-fe.com/2024/08/05/cat9-microdosing-each-and-contain/

  An update on the Arcan's side projects to experiment at making better CLI.

Life & Other

• Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art found
  https://dfarq.homeip.net/andy-warhols-lost-amiga-art-found/

  Now, that's a type of computer art you won't see much these days.

Thoughts

Credula est spes improba.
He that lives on hope will die fasting.
He that lives on hope dances without music. — Latin proverb

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• In the Beginning was the Command Line
  https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

  A pre-2000s article about a generic history of computing from the author's personal point of view, it emphasises on the idea that we shouldn't take things at face value. Very entertaining!

• The ultimate guide to Linux network performance
  https://ntk148v.github.io/posts/linux-network-performance-ultimate-guide/

  Yet, it's more of an amalgam of random network info and configs than an actual guide.

• Path of a packet in Linux
  https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/path-of-packet/Network_stack.pdf

  A bit old but it complements the previous link.

• Are find and mkdir together Turing complete?
  https://ogiekako.vercel.app/blog/find_mkdir_tc

  From that article, it's close to being, with some limitations.

• ed from less
  http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/calling-ed-from-less.html

  If you're into ed that's a great setup, as for others it's a neat party-trick.

• Debugging slow terminal
  https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/slowterm.html

  This is similar to issue 171 "Debugging slow shell" but for terminals on WSL.

• Computer setup of blogger
  https://jnsgr.uk/2024/07/how-i-computer-in-2024/

  Your usual battle station/setup blog post, share yours and I'll add it to the newsletter next week.

• Vanilla OS
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/vanilla_os_friendly_radical/

  Another review of Vanilla OS, see also "A review of Vanilla OS" in issue 179. Their latest version works a bit differently than the previous one.

• A self-built system
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/983340/25f5b1f6b1247079/

  Impressive and quite useful.

Life & Other

• DnD teachings
  https://ericwbailey.website/published/dungeons-and-dragons-taught-me-how-to-write-alt-text/

  I've never actually tried dnd but that makes me want to, now I have to find a group of acolytes to join me.

• Just remove the plug
  https://computer.rip/2024-07-31-just-disconnect-the-internet.html

  Basically a reply to "we can isolate them from the web".

Thoughts

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." — Ayn Rand

Now that's what news addicts will tell you, but then what are they doing with the info they get?

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• What's a stipple
  https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

  Now I've learned a lot about something I didn't know I should know, nor will ever use, but it feels great.

• Another few websites for syscalls search
  https://syscalls.mebeim.net/?table=x86/64/x64/latest
  https://syscall.sh/

  See also "Syscalls list" in issue 160.

• CAMARA project
  https://camaraproject.org/

  I had read these specs before, however I wasn't aware this was a Linux foundation project. It defines a common api to interface with telcos to do things such as phone number or location verification.

• Secure boot on Gentoo
  https://www.setphaserstostun.org/posts/secure-boot-on-gentoo-with-shim-grub/
  https://www.linux.org/docs/man1/mokutil.html

  Having every step done from scratch is a great way to learn about secure boot.

• Reasons why someone might like NetBSD
  https://mccd.space/posts/netbsd-review/

  pkgsrc one of the first cross-platform package manager, you agree?

• Linux audio stack demystified
  https://blog.rtrace.io/posts/the-linux-audio-stack-demystified/
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.html
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under-the-hood.html

  A great post touching everything on the audio stack on Linux. As someone who has dived into this before on articles on my blog, I can assess that it's great content. I've never linked them in the newsletter, so I'll add them along.

• Dell UNIX brief history
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/

  A pretty personal story in relation to Dell UNIX.

• Software supply chain sec according to RedHat
  https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/security/what-is-software-supply-chain-security

  There's nothing really new here, but it's a good summary.

Life & Other

• Evolution of Data Storage
  https://medium.com/predict/the-evolution-of-data-storage-from-clay-tablets-to-quantum-computing-c1d8cc3cf8df

  I watched a talk about this recently, and I thought I'd share something similar. Record keeping, storing information, is a fascinating topic. In this post you'll find a list of different technologies and future tech that are used to achieve this.

Thoughts

"You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches." — Dita Von Teese

I don't know the author of this quote, but I felt it properly encompasses the idea that people have different likings and that we should be ok with it.

Archive

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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• FAMF
  https://prma.dev/posts/files-as-metadata-format

  I like ideas like this, not because they're perfect but because they stimulate a lot of discussion around them.

• GNOME testing a new font
  https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-may-switch-to-inter-font/
  https://github.com/rsms/inter

  It's trying out Inter instead of Cantarell.

• Another TUI for wifi on Linux
  https://github.com/pythops/impala

  It relies on iwd backend to be installed.

• Bash dungeon
  https://github.com/wolandark/bash-dungeon

  This is similar to dungeonfs in issue 138 "Check your FUSE".

• terminal discipline and readline
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/

  An exploration of different tools that rely on readline and others to input text and manipulate it.

• The background for file max and nr open
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TwoFileDescriptorLimits

  So there's some historic reason for it, and also a limit per process and a global limit.

• Use the kernel as a bootloader
  https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/
  https://github.com/rhboot/nmbl-poc

  A WIP/PoC replacement for GRUB called nmbl, developed at Red Hat.

• One file linux
  https://hub.zhovner.com/geek/one-file-linux/
  https://github.com/zhovner/OneFileLinux/

  A Linux distro in a ~20MB file, it boots directly from the UEFI image.

• State of Text Rendering 2024
  https://behdad.org/text2024/

  A survey of all text rendering changes and advancement in 2024, written by a developer that has previously led and contributed to projects such as HarfBuzz, Cairo, and Pango among others. It discusses things such as OpenType adding support for colored fonts, variable fonts, and a Universal Shaping Engine. There's a good list of libraries, tools, toolkits, in the applications section.

Life & Other

• After the bankruptcy
  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/business/synapse-bankruptcy-fintech-fdic-insurance.html
  https://archive.ph/LWmgP

  That's something not everyone in the world has in mind: What if the bank fails, then what, how much is insured, can it really be covered? In the USA $250k should be covered, in theory, meanwhile the European Central Bank covers €100k. However, in the case above, it's about the new "virtual" online banks, neobanks with the hype in fintech, that younger people are starting to use.

Thoughts

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." — John A. Shedd

A classic quote to incite you to be out there this week.

Archive

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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Bash strict mode
  http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/

  A couple of setups in a bash script that can help avoid common issues, however they all have drawbacks.

• A Linux CNA Case Study
  https://grsecurity.net/cve-2021-4440_linux_cna_case_study

  It's kind of alarming that multiple projects rely on these CVE notification schemes to fix their issues, and if this chain breaks they're unaware of them.

• Y292B bug
  https://www.dpolakovic.space/blogs/y292b

  That's the definition of solving a problem just because it's a problem, not because it's relevant.

• Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
  https://antranigv.am/posts/2021/08/2021-08-13-13-37/

  A rant about porting a docker build script to a BSD system.

• Editors
  https://github.com/istoph/editor
  https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor

  They're all looking to emulate that 90s or 16-bit DOS style.

• A continuation on POSIX 2024
  https://sortix.org/blog/posix-2024/

  This is a well made summary of all that changed in POSIX 2024.

• trurl
  https://github.com/curl/trurl

  A tool to help manipulate URLs, by the same lead dev as cURL.

• Sci-fi interfaces
  https://scifiinterfaces.com/

  This blog is epic, it regroups all sorts of futuristic movie props UI.

• Pixie in a dock
  https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docker-network-boot-server-pxe

  This docker image will help you mange your PXE.

• Booting Linux from Google Drive
  https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

  First boot from FUSE then from Google Drive.

• ed semantics
  http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/ed-semantics.html

  Getting into the right mindset helps understand the tool.

• Playing H.264 videos on a Raspberry pi
  https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/06/playing-1080p-h-264-video-on-my-old-256-mb-raspberry-pi/

  And not any quality, but 1080p, which lags even on my laptop.

• Userland rootkits are lame
  https://grugq.substack.com/p/userland-rootkits-are-lame

  A list of all the evasion that userland rootkits can use, and a simple trick to avoid them.

• Job Control
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/03/reasons-to-use-job-control/

  A summary of shell job control.

Life & Other

• A new hex editor
  https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

  I've been looking for a better hex editor for a long time now, this one is better than most I've tried.

Thoughts

"Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from." — Earliest attribution to a listener to The Minimalist Podcast during call-in

Archive

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• printing teeth
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/3d-printing-my-teeth/

  Ever wanted to convert a CT scan to a 3d print.. Here you go.

• run0
  https://news.itsfoss.com/systemd-run0/

  I knew about systemd-run to execute tasks that are cpu bound or within a cgroup, and other container tech, but that's the first time I saw someone making the relation with sudo.

• GNU coreutils to uutils coreutils
  https://www.joshmcguigan.com/blog/gentoo-uutils-coreutils/

  This is a project that tries to replace the GNU coreutils with rust utilities. There are a few things that need fixing for them to work inplace, that's what the post is about.

• Comment on mseal
  https://lwn.net/Articles/978010/

  Since that 6.10 Linux includes this it now needs to be propagated to users via glibc.

• Comparing cross-distro pkg managers
  https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/Similar-projects#comparison

  I think it's a fair comparison. Usually, if a software writes their comparison doc then they're always better than the "competition" but here it's relative.

• shpool
  https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool

  Think dtach but modernized with rust.

• bhyve companion tools
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/06/23/freebsd-bhyve-companion-tools/

  Two helper scripts that can help while running bhyve.

• ChatGPT Linux
  https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/chatgpt-linux.html

  Got enough AI articles in your reading list already? Is whatever the AI is spurting out to the author confabulated or is it real? "Jailbreaking" these LLM seems like a huge security hole.

Life & Other

• NASCAR problem
  https://indieweb.org/NASCAR_problem

  I'm sure you've encountered it but didn't know there was a name for this phenomenon.

• Curated Web
  https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web

  A meditation on the state of the internet, what the web can be, and an emphasis on custom and "wilder" personal websites while making their creation available to anyone.

• 20 years of blogging
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging

  I just love reading about the path people have taken and the evolution they've had over the years.

Thoughts

"He who angers you conquers you." — Elizabeth Kenny

Seems like trolls on the web control a lot of people.

Archive

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5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• POSIX 2024
  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10555529
  https://www.heise.de/en/news/Update-of-the-POSIX-standard-1003-1-2024-with-new-tools-and-functions-9764724.html

  A new specs of POSIX is out, want to read it? Got to pay or otherwise have access through an institution. Fortunately, I think I know someone part of an IEEE group that I could ask. I'll let you know if I get indirect access.

• An ls replacement
  https://github.com/arp242/elles

  The big difference is that it's a little bit more human readable

• But is it parsable?
  https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

  Listen to the advices and pitfalls on how messy parsing ls can be and what to do instead.

• diff and merge
  https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/06/14/fifty-years-of-diff-and-merge/

  An prose chanting how the patch/diff/merge mechanism are the building block of any community contribution project.

• a key expander
  https://github.com/jarusll/keydogger

  I'm not sure it's as useful as aliases.

• Building an embedded Linux system
  https://popovicu.com/posts/making-my-first-embedded-linux-system/

  A sort of guide or story about building a small breadboard system running along with Linux.

• Traces of honey
  https://blog.sofiane.cc/ssh_honeypot/

  These types of research gives us a good idea of the current automated attacks on the public internet going on these days. Apparently, they target a lot of IoT devices.

• OpenBSD on computer appliances
  https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/openbsd-the-computer-appliance-maker-s-secret-weapon/

  This is somewhat a solution to what happens in the previous link.

• Packaging swift apps
  https://mko.re/blog/swift-alpine-packaging/

  Swift now runs on Linux, however it needs a couple of glib stuff, so what do you need to do to make it work on Alpine.

Life & Other

• Documentation Driven Development
  https://unicorn-utterances.com/posts/documentation-driven-development

  While nice in theory, and probably one of the best way to develop in my opinion, it still includes countless refining and ambiguity if you're unsure about what to initially write.

• Real-World Threat Modelling
  https://medium.com/sagefuturemakers/real-world-threat-modelling-fb14ef767c49

  Want to see a pragmatic example of threat modelling.

Thoughts

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." — Chinese proverb.

There's also the saying that the map is not the territory. Hence, maybe we should describe properly what we're talking about before even jumping to conclusion based on words that might carry meanings that were not initially intended.

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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• What is PID 0
  https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/

  A clarification on what PID 0 actually represents on Unix-like systems. See also issue 145 "It's Hard to Stay Idle".

• OpenSSH adds penalty mechanism
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240607042157

  Now you might not have to install fail2ban, by default it'll give a somewhat similar behavior.

• A linter for make
  https://github.com/mcandre/unmake

  It should be useful for minor stuff you might have missed.

• Communication
  https://www.networkworld.com/article/968450/communicating-with-other-users-on-the-linux-command-line.html

  The days where this was useful have passed, but it's still good to know about how to achieve this.

• sudon't
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-02-sudo.html
  https://dmitry.khlebnikov.net/2015/07/18/should-we-use-sudo-for-day-to-day-activities/

  We've got a lot of previous content about sudo in this newsletter archive. So here's a common critiques.

• rm -rf /
  https://web.archive.org/web/20150512013857/http://justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

  Yes, a classic horror story, and legendary admins that put the system back up.

• 007
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180322180833/https://react-etc.net/page/james-bond-007-unix-permissions

  Just a pun...

Life & Other

• Reading an RSS feed
  https://hamatti.org/posts/what-does-it-feel-like-to-read-rss-feeds/

  A few points about what it feels like to curate and read your own RSS feed (in comparison with social media and the attention economy).

• ASCII-fy this
  https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/

  This is a new auto-converter to ascii, it mostly works well for small logos which is cool to have in a terminal (but will never look as good as hand-drawn ascii).

Thoughts

"If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them." — Confucius

Confusius, aka Kong Fuzi, had a much nicer way of saying "Living rent free in your head".

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Copying a file from an older laptop
  https://www.unterminated.com/random-fun/how-to-copy-a-file-from-a-30-year-old-laptop

  This turns out to be more interesting and complex than at first glance.

• A distro for digital painting
  https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide

  This is a custom setup guide to help install what is necessary to get a good environment for working on graphic. Who could've thought that Wayland isn't ready for professional digital painters.

• kdenlive adds AI subtitle translation
  https://kdenlive.org/en/2024/05/kdenlive-24-05-0-released/

  ...And yes, the model is offline.

• Powershell
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-on-linux?view=powershell-7.4

  Isn't that your favorite shell?

• Ebury Malware
  https://cyberinsider.com/ebury-malware-compromised-400000-linux-servers-for-financial-gain/
  https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/ssh-backdoor-has-infected-400000-linux-servers-over-15-years-and-keeps-on-spreading/

  When attackers are persistent they'll use lateral attacks, spread and infiltrate through internal networks in manners that couldn't have been done without the initial phase.

• State of sandboxing on Linux
  https://git.sr.ht/~alip/syd/tree/main/item/doc/toctou-or-gtfo.md

  A few show of race-condition attacks for different sandbox techs, the so-called time-of-check-time-of-use attacks.

• Implementing a cache on NetBSD
  https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/contributions/11/attachments/2/2/presentation_bsdcan_final.pdf
  https://bcachefs.org/

  The goal is to achieve something similar to bcachefs on Linux but simpler.

• autoconf and xz
  https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2024/04/what-autoconf-got-right.html

  It has nothing to do with xz though, but more of a summary of what a well-known and well-used build system is expected to have.

Life & Other

• Intellectual Obesity Crisis
  https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis

  Everything is a "crisis" these days, a crisis of being too dramatic. Anyway, this article is about infobesity, if you've heard of the term.

Thoughts

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. — William James

Do you agree to agree, are you a contrarian, or others?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The evolution of ELF object format
  https://maskray.me/blog/2024-05-26-evolution-of-elf-object-file-format

  If you like Unix history, you might also like to dive into ELF history too. This is what this post is about, the different handover through time, additions, contributions, evolution, and new direction.

• mseal making its appearance in 6.10 Linux
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merges-mseal

  It is getting merged, see "mseal" in issue 230.

• tmux is worse is better
  https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/tmux-is-worse-is-better/

  This post sums up a lot of ideas in software dev with a few words. Often, some people are so idealists that they break basic features for their users.

• Effects in the terminal
  https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/

  These are some of the best and cool visual effects I've seen achieved in the terminal, kudos. This is definitely going to be used on some movie set.

• open source TTS
  https://github.com/2noise/ChatTTS

  This is a life changing moment for text-to-speech. Once upon a time you had to install horrible libraries in a complex mesh of voice files to download, or pay a hefty sum, to have any voice that resembles a human. And it doesn't come close to what the "AI trend" can achieve these days, truly impressive!

• Wayland compositor on OpenBSD
  https://x61.sh/log/2024/05/27052024192206-sway_openbsd.html

  I wasn't aware of the progress of Wayland support on OpenBSD, but it seems like it's coming along fine.

• ZFR on SMR Drives
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/zfs-on-smr-drives/
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/05/29/zfs-resilver-smr-drives/

  SMR have their ups and downs, but how do we configure them for efficiency, can we resilver them if within a RAID?

• Writing a USB driver
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXBC85SGC0Q&ab_channel=BitsinsidebyRen%C3%A9Rebe

  I'm not a fan of livestream, but this time it seems like the kind of topic you can actually learn from, sort of like pair programming.

• A few reasons why Linux kernel bugs won't get replies
  https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/post/frequent-reasons-why-linux-kernel-bug-reports-are-ignored/

  It's tough to fill bugs, but it's even tougher to handle them, in a way it's understandable that they'd put "a spoke in the wheel".

Life & Other

• file id
  http://pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240528063222/pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html

  Want to learn a bit about old school BBS shareware distribution info format?

• Understanding Frappe's Scheduler
  https://frappe.io/blog/engineering/if-you-wish-to-truly-understand-frappes-scheduler-you-must-first-invent-the-universe

  Things that seem simple at first rarely are.

Thoughts

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." — Michel de Montaigne

As far as I'm concerned, I think this quote is about how worrying and anxiety is worse than the actual events. Do you agree, how would you interpret this?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Terminal inner workings
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-in.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-out.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/01/27/how-tty-works-stty.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/02/05/how-tty-works-sessions.html

  Another one of these 'how terminals work' article, similar to a couple we've shared before. It's a good series, add it to your list.

• Infiltration in your terminal
  https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_5_0.changelog

  People have not taken this sudden change very positively, that is to say the least.

• Patching binaries on the fly
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/How_does_polyfill_glibc_work.md
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/The_Linux_loading_process.md

  This is a Linux tool to modify ELF executables to try to fix the libraries so that they work on older glibc versions.

• Linux on a small board
  https://www.bigmessowires.com/2014/11/17/68-katy-68000-linux-on-a-solderless-breadboard/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRdLlaUmmpM
  https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/

  This irks back to "A small linux computer" in issue 176, another impressive feat.

• Printing memory slots on Linux boot
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Prints-Memory-Slots

  This is a minor informational update that will apply to Linux 6.10 to display when the DMI driver attaches the memory slots.

• lvm thin send/recv
  https://abbbi.github.io/lvm/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-mapper/thin-provisioning.html

  Thin provisioning, as I recently learned, is about allocating storage only when needed (compared to thick/bare partitioning). The first link shows a trick to track changes on thin partitions.

• The state of X11 on NetBSD
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the

  Just a summary of how NetBSD handles the Xorg package, what they include, support, etc..

Life & Other

• Hustle Culture
  https://moneywithkatie.com/blog/to-embrace-hustle-culture-or-reject-it

  Work has a weird place in our lives today, the economy needs to go in a unique direction. The machines of society all run towards that unique goal, at all costs.

Thoughts

"Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome." — Nietzsche

Is that a control-freak quote, or do you see it in another light? Does freedom of action equal to power, and, "hence", happiness.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Alpine for a 'BSD person'
  https://rubenerd.com/a-bsd-pserson-trying-alpine-linux/

  This was too shallow of a review for my tastes. The only thing that caught my attention was that it ran OpenRC, like Gentoo and others, which has a similar config to classic rc systems like OpenBSD.

• Another OpenBSD Desktop
  https://x61.ar/log/2024/05/06052024135732-openbsd_desktop.html

  A prototypical ricer's post, just like we like them.

• Dinit on Chimera
  https://chimera-linux.org/docs/configuration/services

  Dinit usage and service file looks similar enough to other init and service managers that it seems intuitive. Yet, it also has config dirs similar to traditional rc systems.

• version control lore
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

  What about keeping the metadata in the binary too, so that you can investigate later. That is instead of adding a -v flag, obviously, yet it's simpler too.

• Keeping Netflix running
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/

  This consist of keeping up with CURRENT, a few kernel tweaks for networking and VM page caching, in-kernel TLS, all to improve throughput.

• 16 years anniversary of a CVE
  https://16years.secvuln.info/

  That's a continuation to "Debian security mishaps" in issue 241.

• super servers
  https://social.treehouse.systems/@ska/112417619168307725

  A social media post about super servers (inetd and others), ending in a bitter note about systemd (since it's a post from the author of the s6 init system).

• emacs wm
  https://karthinks.com/software/emacs-window-management-almanac/

  The best article you'll find explaining window management in emacs.

• Classic Mac
  https://www.macrelix.org/
  https://github.com/macminix/MacMinix

  Ever wanted to get back that oldies experience?

• Nvidia
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-R560-Open-Default

  So NVIDIA is moving towards more open source drivers.

Life & Other

• We are what we do
  https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

  If anything, this reminds us that what we interact with and ingest, either physically or mentally, will affect us.

Thoughts

"Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That's a beautiful quote, what does it remind you of? Growth, mentoring, children, early beginnings, etc..?

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• BSD on a PC
  https://michal.sapka.me/bsd/why-not-bsd/

  A series of points/rants on which BSDs, in general, lack features and desktop facilities.

• Lunatik
  https://github.com/luainkernel/lunatik

  I had heard of NetBSD adding Lua support in the kernel, now you can do something similar on Linux by relying on this device driver.

• Shared libs, rpath and the runtime linker
  https://carlosrdrz.dev/shared-libs-rpath-and-the-runtime-linker

  A troubleshooting session that leads to learning a bunch of things, the kind of stuff that's always nice to read about.

• Add JSON output to your CLI?
  https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/

  What do you think? Is it modernizing the Unix philosophy, or is it something you wouldn't consider?

• NLP in Bash
  https://massimo-nazaria.github.io/nlp.html

  Have your own simpler "AI", aka text-generation, at home.

• Hyra
  https://osmora.org/cgit/Hyra/tree/README?h=main

  A new project for a modern POSIX-like OS mostly from scratch.

• Accurate metrics in containers
  https://dzone.com/articles/top-reporting-accurate-metrics-within-containers

  This is a simple issue, cpu usage is reported incorrectly within the container, so how do we get the right values?

Life & Other

• The end of the web
  https://archive.is/BF0lR

  An article putting into words the obvious: the state of the web with the advent of AI content.

Thoughts

"Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." – Voltaire

In what age do we live in?

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Hidden Dependencies in Linux Binaries
  https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2024/04/hidden-dependencies-in-linux-binaries.html

  This is showcase of sotrace a new tool to show share-object dependencies.

• Getting started with systemd
  https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/linux-fu-getting-started-with-systemd/
  https://mysystemd.talos.sh/
  https://systemd-timer.havrlent.com/

  This is a great starter on systemd units, I wasn't aware that online generators existed, it's nice to know.

• bunkchat
  https://git.bunk.computer/bunk/bunkchat

  Everyone seems to want to show off that they can rewrite something in shell script.

• Can you grok it
  https://0xda.de/blog/2024/04/can-you-grok-it/

  How to make tunnel creation and management easier.

• Bubblebox
  https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2024/04/14/bubblebox.html
  https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
  https://github.com/igo95862/bubblejail

  "The easiest sandbox to maintain is the sandbox maintained by someone else."

• sched-ext development
  http://arighi.blogspot.com/2024/04/getting-started-with-sched-ext.html
  https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/blob/case-studies/case-studies/scx_layered.md
  https://github.com/sched-ext/scx

  Want to test a Linux scheduler that is written in rust, here you go.

• An XZ backdoor story
  https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-1/112354/

  Probably the most thorough analysis of the XZ 'mishaps'.

• purl
  https://github.com/catatsuy/purl

  This has no relatino to cURL and more in relation with sed and grep. Yes, it's yet another of these.

• How files in Linux work
  https://popovicu.com/posts/how-files-in-linux-work/

  That's a simple question, for a basic concept, however it's worth asking for anyone who has never wondered about this before.

• GestureX
  https://github.com/flying-pizza-69/GestureX

  We've all heard of touch-screen gestures, but what about doing hand gestures in front of the camera.

• TAI on Debian
  https://www.bortzmeyer.org/tai-on-debian.html

  Do you want more precise time and deal with atomic time? Then you'll need to constantly refresh your leap-seconds file.

• OpenBSD full text search and raw IP
  https://man.ifconfig.se/
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240418050520

  Parallel processing at the protocol layer is fine, but now on OpenBSD you can finally do it at the network (IP) layer too. This can result in faster packet processing by utilizing multiple cores, sometimes most OSes have had for a long time already.

Life & Other

• Impossible to say
  https://www.thecollector.com/sense-nonsense-wittgenstein-language/

  Language is full of limits, it's a box which we're trying to expand beyond its boundaries. Learning a new language could help, but it's also limited in its own ways.

Thoughts

"No pressure, no diamonds." — Thomas Carlyle

That's a classic quote, part of the pop culture, and of the modern day myth. But does it stand true, is anything of value only coming out of pressure, why is pressure valorized as the impetus or the action giving rise to what is cherished. What are diamonds and why do we value them? Isn't it because of marketing campaigns originating in the 40s.

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• GNOME terminal improvements
  https://bxt.rs/blog/just-how-much-faster-are-the-gnome-47-terminals/

  This is more about VTE updates, yet the actual benchmarking method by relying on a hardware sensor is pretty cool.

• rsync new version
  https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.3.0

  rsync is one software that is essential and keeps on improving and getting bug squashed.

• Writing PAM software
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190523222819/https://fedetask.com/write-linux-pam-module/
  https://github.com/fedetask/pam-tutorials
  https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/tree/master/examples

  Not everyone might want to rely on PAM directly these days, and might want to use polkit instead for more granular authorization. However, if you need a tutorial, this one is one of the best out there.

• sotrace
  https://pypi.org/project/sotrace/

  Some people rely on ChatGPT these days for the same behavior, but good ol' SO can be helpful too.

• Building BerkeleyDB
  https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/

  Ever wondered what it takes to build a B-Tree based DB such as BerkeleyDB, then this series of posts is for you.

• Debian security mishaps
  https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/04/09/how-i-tripped-over-the-debian-weak-keys-vuln.html

  No, this isn't something new, but a recollection of an issue that happened back in 2008. I promise, this one is a captivating read.

• Google's public DNS protection
  https://security.googleblog.com/2024/03/google-public-dnss-approach-to-fight.html

  DNS cache poisoning is one of the most common DNS attack. It's my first time hearing of case randomization, but it's a smart trick.

Life & Other

• Calibrating a controller in the browser
  https://blog.the.al/2024/04/09/dualshock-calibration-in-the-browser.html
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebHID_API

  I knew lots of inputs were supported on browsers, mostly finger movements. However, I didn't know controllers could be. But beware, this will only work on Chrome-based browsers (or browsers that support WebHID).

Thoughts

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." ― Søren Kierkegaard

These days even the past can be re-interpreted, what do you think of that?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• LUKS key derivation issue
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

  The author didn't answer the initial claim of how the person's laptop got broken into. Still it implies that it's from the KDF.

• I am not a supplier
  https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

  Let's discuss the "software supply chain", and how there's actually no "supplier" but just people, and that this sentence, as it needs to be reminded, is only doing a parallel with the industrial world.

• The xz attack
  https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline

  Since everyone is talking about it, I had to add something related.

• A review of GNU autotools
  https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/04/02/autoconf/

  it's a strength and weakness analysis of autoconf, and how it relates to the "xz backdoor".

• Debian monorepo
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/monorepo/

  ...Will Debian now rely on a single/mono repo for their packages management, a single gigantic 500GiB chunk where everyone can work across any packages. Definitely no, it's an April's fool!

• CachyOS
  https://cachyos.org/about/
  https://cachyos.org/blog/2404-april-release/
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-April-2024-Released

  An ArchLinux-based distro that focuses on gaming and desktop performance tweaks.

• NetBSD new release
  https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-10/NetBSD-10.0.html

  It's always nice to follow the updates of different OSes and what each inspire the other.

• IPv4 Addressing
  https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/a-crash-course-in-ipv4-addressing

  A mini refresher on IPv4.

Life & Other

• GC for systems programmers
  https://bitbashing.io/gc-for-systems-programmers.html

  A basic overview of what can be considered garbage collection in OS (and system), how RCU (read-copy-update) can be seen as such.

• Winning the rat race
  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexxubyte_systemdesign-coding-interviewtips-activity-7149441688904638464-Cs0R

  And it's posted on LinkedIn for better effects.

Thoughts

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." — Marshall McLuhan

Do you agree with the idea that the most prominent medium of communication of an era is what defines it? What about the internet and social media, how do they define this generation?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Monado
  https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/monado-2100-officially-conformant-openxr-implementation.html
  https://monado.freedesktop.org/
  https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

  OpenXR is to VR/AR as what OpenGL is to 3D, Monado is an open source compatible implementation of this specs.

• Command line is cheap
  https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-cheap/
  https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-like-mobile-interfaces/

  The question of pricing is one that I never wondered about before. However, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense if all devs are trained to quickly create web UI and all the tooling is there, meanwhile not everyone is familiar with the ins-and-outs of building a CLIs. Yet the hardware price restriction does make sense.

• Linux Crisis Tools
  https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-24/linux-crisis-tools.html

  The wizard of performance optimization and debugging strikes again, here's a list of tools that you should print out and keep next to you in case you need to perform some outage action.

• What, why, and how of containers
  https://www.annwan.me/computers/what-why-how-containers/

  This is yet another "container from scratch" type of post, but its approach is technology oriented, gradually introducing the pieces needed to build a container on Linux.

• The worlds of telnet
  https://thenewstack.io/the-lost-worlds-of-telnet/

  A collection of openly available services and trivia over telnet.

• Marking sockets
  https://dengking.github.io/Linux-OS/Network/Programming/Socket/Socket-option/Mark-socket/

  Packet marking is something I wasn't familiar with before, but it's very useful while creating routing and firewall rules.

• Linux Kernel TLS offload
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/tls-offload.html

  I'm sure I shared this before, but I can't find it, so I'm sharing it again.

Life & Other

• Explorative Programming
  https://blog.dziban.net/essays/explorative-programming/

  I like how this simple concept is presented, it's something we've all done and probably always do. Starting with miniature self-contained testable units is definitely a great way to explore things, and learn. It can be used as a teaching/mentoring tool too.

Thoughts

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal." ― Guy Debord

Do you agree with this quote, what's the difference between traveling, adventure and tourism? Does the reach of multi-media platform convert these into objects of consumption?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• realmd
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/docs/index.html

  This is a solution I wasn't aware of, usually people struggle with complex configuration in PAM, this seems to auto-discover them.

• Linux as a router
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2022/11/08/linux-as-router/

  That table with the mapping of deprecated commands is a blessing.

• TCP tuning
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/
  https://fast-data-transfer.github.io/doc-system-tuning.html

  Take these with a grain of salt and double check what each sysctl param does before applying them. Be sure to take stats and monitor the behavior. However, in general this should give you food for thought on what's possible to improve.

• Implementing SACK compression
  https://lwn.net/Articles/755078/

  Sending ack in bulk/compressed is a must-have feature when working over wifi.

• TextSnatcher
  https://github.com/RajSolai/TextSnatcher
  https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Home.html

  A neat tool that relies on tesseract (OCR) to extract text from screenshots. Pretty handy!

• It's the TTY week all over again
  https://punkx.org/jackdoe/tty.txt

  This is the same type of fun activity we used to do (and we should again organize new ones soon). It's funny that the author has a lot of the same conclusions we had here.

• Zero toil homelab
  https://blog.gripdev.xyz/2024/03/16/in-search-of-a-zero-toil-homelab-with-immutable-linux/

  Take notes if you're running your own homelab, maybe you'll consider an immutable distro.

Life & Other

• I thought I shared this before
  https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-03-14
  https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-08-09

  AI goes military (as usual)!

• For my perl loving folks out there
  https://jwgoerlich.com/we-were-wizards-learning-perl/

  They don't make such introduction to a language anymore...

Thoughts

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." — Roland Barthes

Communication is frought with issues, remember the Shannon–Weaver model, among others, that portrays such things.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Bustle
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/bustle

  If you've ever touched D-Bus then this is a must-have debug tool, it permits to see a trace of the flow of requests between services.

• Minimal initramfs
  https://blog.izissise.net/posts/initramfs/

  The reasons to build your own initramfs are varied, I don't personally have one, but I guess for iot systems it's a must.

• Losing control of your shell
  https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-to-lose-control-of-your-shell
  https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-terminal-case-of-linux

  A tale of debugging a simple problem which turns into a messy rabbit hole.

• state of terminal
  https://gpanders.com/blog/state-of-the-terminal/

  Mostly a review of escape sequences and capabilities.

• Setup your own home lab
  https://linuxblog.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/

  "Home lab" is a broad concept, here it's about hosting a home server to be able to test networking features. It's a pretty cool setup.

• Latest Linux will drop old NTFS driver
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.9-Dropping-Old-NTFS

  The news isn't as frightening as the title makes it seem, it's more like updating the driver, swapping the old one with an improved one, it's not actually removing a feature but an improvement.

• Compact relocation format for ELF
  https://maskray.me/blog/2024-03-09-a-compact-relocation-format-for-elf

  Some deep optimization in ELF formatting to make them more compact.

• A refresher on MSS
  https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-mss/

  This is a basic of TCP, the MSS and window sizing algo are the essential part of how it handles resending and congestion (which are not mentioned in the above article).

• TCP time wait assassination
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1337
  https://serverfault.com/questions/787624/why-isnt-net-ipv4-tcp-rfc1337-enabled-by-default
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39461090/tcp-time-wait-assassination

  It's nice to check a few networking (informational) RFCs that are lesser known and deal with certain issues you might not have encountered.

• Basics of Ethernet
  https://hackaday.com/2024/02/12/ethernet-for-hackers-the-very-basics/

  This is probably more than you wanted to know and more than what you expected the 'basics' to be.

• Lossless network audio
  https://interfacinglinux.com/2024/03/02/lossless-network-audio-with-netjack2/

  I hadn't heard of netjack2 before, along with multicast it makes for a deadly combo (probably also with pipewire).

• The thumbnail specs
  https://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html

  I like perusing through the freedesktop specs from time to time to remind myself of what is standardized and what isn't, or what won't be respected.

• nvtop
  https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop

  This is basically htop but for GPU, see also "Zombie processes using GPU" in issue 225.

• Linux system at a glance
  https://github.com/lsc4719/MyViewOfLinuxSystems

  A very generic diagram of the Linux system basic components.

Life & Other

• Numbers every programmer should know
  https://samwho.dev/numbers/

  This is an excellent showcase these numbers and giving the possibility of browsing through the changes over the years.

• Color spaces
  https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces

  One of the best demystification of color spaces.

• HTTP explained
  https://alexandrehtrb.github.io/posts/2024/03/http2-and-http3-explained/

  The differences between all http versions from 0.9 to 3.

Thoughts

"Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals." ― Jean Baudrillard

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Differentiated services
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230701140203/https://linuxreviews.org/Type_of_Service_(ToS)_and_DSCP_Values
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48095837/setting-dscp-value-to-socket-using-setsockopt
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/ip
  https://www.iana.org/assignments/dscp-registry/dscp-registry.xhtml

  How to provie QoS on a normal IP connection, this comes in, but how do you apply it? As usual as part of the ip socket creation, but is it respected? Probably not by every router. There's the option in sysctl also of tcp_reflect_tos, reflect type of service to set the same service in response packets.

• TCP slow start, why?
  https://blog.donatas.net/blog/2015/08/08/slow-start-after-idle/

  You can also check IP-TCP_METRICS(8) for more info on what is tracked.

• Your pipes are too big
  https://medium.com/maverislabs/are-your-pipes-too-big-c3e78e769161

  We're talking of network pipes, not unix pipes, the issue of long fat networks.

• That's a new one, cat pipes
  https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/56307/can-cat-ing-a-file-be-a-potential-security-risk

  So yeah, escape sequences from runaway programs that get interpreted can be dangerous, this is very similar to issue 218 "Rogue escape sequence" which can appear in logs.

• Plus the classic don't internet to pipe
  https://www.seancassidy.me/dont-pipe-to-your-shell.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240228190305/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

  This is one topic that we've talked about a lot before.

• A trick everyone should know
  https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/edit-long-commands/

  I've used this quite a lot and people kept asking how I did that, so here we go, that's the inspired by emacs keybind for running list expression.

• Text UI and terminal UI
  https://aartaka.me/tui-is-not-tui

  This is kind of a follow up on last issue 235 "Linux accessibility".

• Bash scripting tips/debugs
  https://wizardzines.com/comics/bash-debugging/
  https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do_things_safely_in_bash.md
  https://robertmuth.blogspot.com/2012/08/better-bash-scripting-in-15-minutes.html
  https://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/

  Not everyone writes so many bash shell scripts, but when you do you could peruse a couple of these links to have a refresher.

Life & Other

• A single vendor is the new proprietary
  https://opensource.net/why-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/

  A controversial point, but a fair one.

Thoughts

You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am. — Kant

What's identity, and are we only what we portray or do we all have a 'true' me inside of us. This is relevant in the age of the internet, everyone with one or multiple online persona that are puppet identities of us, molded how we want.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux accessibility
  https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2949-enhancing-linux-accessibility-a-unified-approach/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/
  https://opensource.com/article/22/1/linux-accessibility-settings

  A couple of links about recent updates in accessiblity (mostly on Gnome desktop).

• FAMFS
  https://github.com/cxl-micron-reskit/famfs
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/2/23/1124
  https://openfam.org/

  This is a new shared-memory file system for FAM, fabric-attached memory (had to look that up). This kinds of harks back to the entry on DAX from last week.

• Remember Unity, gnome and gnome3
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html

  It's probably a story I missed at the time, maybe because nobody that read the news took it seriously. But if that's really the reason, then I'm shocked.

• Two different TCP buffer sysconfs
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62641621/what-is-the-difference-between-tcp-max-syn-backlog-and-somaxconn
  http://veithen.io/2014/01/01/how-tcp-backlog-works-in-linux.html

  Let's continue our dive into Linux networking stack. Sometimes having someone explain the scenario in which the settings are used is more practical than simply reading the description.

• Using Linux kernel key management
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-linux-kernel-key-retention-service-and-why-you-should-use-it-in-your-next-application

  This relates to "Relying on the Linux kernel keystore" in issue 226. This seems to be getting more in the open, however I'm afraid that if people start to rely too much on it then it might tie the code to be Linux specific.

• Rust in the Linux kernel
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEznkXjYFb4

  Mostly an example and case of using Rust in the Linux kernel from an Android developer that ported "binder", the ipc mechanism in android, to Rust.

• Building Gentoo virtual hosts
  https://catfox.life/2024/02/23/experiences-with-building-a-gentoo-virtualisation-host/

  I guess most people rely on other OSes for virtual host but if you ever need Gentoo, then bookmark this.

• Review on Qubes OS
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/962787/35f1ff3af9031437/

  We had a couple of previous entries on Qubes OS before, so here's another one. In sync with the link about Gentoo, Qubes OS relies on virtualization.

• A history of TTYs
  https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html

  Brace yourself because this starts off with telegraph systems.

Life & Other

• Subjectivity of time
  https://invertedpassion.com/why-time-seems-to-pass-faster-as-we-age/

  This is a list of all the reasons we've read everywhere else, but it's good to have it summed up.

• What is cinematography
  https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cinematography/

  Even though studiobinder is a product, it seems they're pushing so much educational content online that is high quality. If you're into movies, check this out.

Thoughts

We learn from history that we do not learn from history — Hegel

What do you think?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The meaning of Unix
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/what_is_unix/

  Probably one of the best review of what Unix is today that isn't just regurgitating what someone's read online.

• The BSD
  https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution

  The most detailed history of BSD you'll read about.

• Understanding the Linux kernel
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/12/understanding-the-linux-kernel-01-introduction/
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/26/understanding-the-linux-kernel-02-memory-addressing/

  This is a fantastic amalgam of info about the Linux kernel.

• Magika
  https://google.github.io/magika/

  This is a "AI" version of file(1), to determine file type. It does a lot of false positives, so it might not be "prod" ready, but it's very convenient.

• progman wm
  https://github.com/jcs/progman

  This is a WM that looks like early 90s desktop. It's not anything truly novel, but the look of it is appealing.

• A pure bash web server
  https://github.com/dzove855/Bash-web-server

  It's an impressive project but to get the accept built-in you need to patch your bash, which isn't practical.

• TCP keepalive overview
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/overview.html
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/usingkeepalive.html

  Again, this week we'll review a couple of networking-related links. We'll start with TCP keepalive mechanism, do you really understand it? Also, the author has a nice and light way of explaining the topic.

• SYN packet handling in the wild
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the-wild/

  If you think you know TCP handshake, think again. This article dives into the SYN/ACK and different params that affects it.

• Vector Packet Processor on FreeBSD
  https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/02/17/vpp-freebsd-2.html

  To continue on our networking discussion, here's a topic that merge software-defined-networking (SDN) and fast packet processing, which has become popular these days.

• Linux' proc fd is not the same as dup
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/proc-fd-is-not-dup/

  Now this is surprising, TIL.

• Another look at containers from scratch
  https://ikouchiha47.github.io/2024/02/05/how-containers-work.html

  Similar to a couple of other posts, this is a rundown of all the tech used to make containers possible on Linux.

Life & Other

• Huffman code
  https://two-wrongs.com/huffman-codes-how-do-they-work

  A great and fun explanation of huffman coding.

Thoughts

"Words are where most change begins." — Brandon Sanderson

The words we use often reflect how we think, even implicitly. We say 'fake it till you make it', that doesn't work most of the time, but with language it has a big effect.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• dm-multipath
  https://www.thegeekdiary.com/understanding-linux-multipath-using-dm-multipath/

  The dm layer on Linux allows for some fabulous innovation and abstraction. In the above, we see something similar to lvm, the usage of multiple physical disks as if they were a single virtual one, with different rules to decide where the data will be sent.

• dm-stripe and dm-linear
  https://pmem.io/blog/2018/05/using-persistent-memory-devices-with-the-linux-device-mapper/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/dax.html

  A continuation of the previous link, let's see two other device mappers. This one focuses on persistent memory, types of devices that are non-volatile and allow direct access.

• Shared library management and debugging under Linux
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2016/05/12/linux-commands-for-shared-library-management-and-debugging-problem/

  This is an excellent resource to learn about shared libraries. Heck, I've learned a few things too, I didn't know what was ld.so.conf before, I was only aware of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Further, I've known people who literally search the whole system to find if a library file exists instead of relying on this or a well-known build system.

• Path MTU discovery in practice
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/path-mtu-discovery-in-practice/

  I'm back on a networking topics dive (I should also remove the dust from my books to re-read them), the above article was so insightful on the topic of MTU discovery! Aside: it truly seems like Marek is lifting the weight of Cloudflare by himself with his deep technical knowledge, though he's probably only the public facing part of that company.

• Time to bring Word to OpenBSD
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170742832804260&w=2

  Now that's the kind of quarrel I want to read about.

• Making windows vanish
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XOffscreenIconMistake

  This the kind of problematic that only happens when the windowing environment is as configurable as it is now.

• Fetching SSH keys from different sources
  https://git.sr.ht/~hauleth/fuk

  That's a solution to a problem we've recently invented, but yet a valid one.

• Search log files
  https://github.com/Textualize/toolong

  Kind of a neat too, but I don't think I'll even remember to use it to check logs though.

• Bootloader debug story
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-02-11-minimal-linux-bootloader-debugging-story/

  This was a rollercoaster of a debug session. Goes to show that maintaining anything at this level can quickly become insanely complex.

Life & Other

• The great GPT firewall
  https://github.com/samber/the-great-gpt-firewall

  Should we all do that on our websites?

• Body swap
  https://youtu.be/f7q8f6KMcac?si=pe2x7xv_RcDV-6Xz

  Hey I don't often link something truly off topic, but that channel's skits are really well made and full of fun twists on tropes.

Thoughts

Shit happens!

Hope everything is going fine in your life. Let's appreciate the small pleasures of everyday, we never know what tomorrow will bring.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• OverlayFS and containers
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/26/linux-overlayfs-and-container/

  We've all heard of overlayfs/union-mount and how they are used to make containers space-usage more efficient, but how do they actually work. Read more to find out.

• Building an hypervisor
  https://iovec.net/2024-01-29

  A series about building a KVM based hypervisor from scratch.

• Kernel instrumentations
  https://linuxdevices.org/kurt-the-ku-real-time-linux/
  https://elinux.org/Kernel_Instrumentation

  These were mostly before the advent of eBPF.

• What's nice about zsh
  https://www.arp242.net/why-zsh.html

  A few things that zsh does better, from calculation, to null byte insertion in strings, and more.

• OpenBSD system-call pinning
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/959562/0578b8e463f790c1/

  The linux kernel is getting a lot of inspo from OpenBSD, for instance the latest mseal, here the lwn discusses the latest additions to OpenBSD.

• Deconstructing files
  https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

  Don't go to reddit for any serious answer, visit blogs instead.

• Reducing docker image size
  https://bhupesh.me/publishing-my-first-ever-dockerfile-optimization-ugit/

  I don't know how to feel about this, a shell script distributed as a docker image that is MBs big and calling it optimization.

• Visual overview of malloc
  https://silent-tower.net/projects/visual-overview-malloc

  See also "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42.

• NetBSD in 2024
  https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3508-netbsd-10-thirty-years-still-going-strong-/
  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZzaW9eI4wmMRGOnJ1uo-kGk5b_UvIOuU9Zgur4au_8s/edit

  A historical review of BSD and NetBSD, the infamous toaster, and a look into the future.

Life & Other

• Learn the land
  https://www.namethatnation.com/
  https://travle.earth/challenge/
  https://www.geoguessr.com/

  I've always like these types of games, what do you think?

Thoughts

"Knowledge is power." — Francis Bacon

Do you agree that knowledge alone is power? What about taking action?

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Simple X Mobile
  https://sxmo.org/

  This is an environment for Linux-based mobile devices that has a suckless-style.

• niri compositor
  https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0

  A wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM, it's basically an infinite parchemin/scroll of windows.

• To learn we must admit
  https://j11g.com/2023/01/14/i-dont-understand-terminals-shells-and-ssh/

  The author realizes that they don't really know something, and shares ways to learn more.

• Mini guide to bash
  https://www.meetgor.com/bash-guide-p2/

  If you already know this stuff, then it's a good reminder, otherwise it's also a good practical introduction.

• Fun with device mapper (dm)
  https://blog.oddbit.com/post/2018-01-25-fun-with-devicemapper-snapshot/
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/29/device-mapper-and-linux-lvm/

  What fun is there with simple solutions when you can go around it and use that as an excuse to learn something new instead.

• setting up your pc for remote access
  https://ciesie.com/post/pc_remote_access/
  https://www.xmodulo.com/access-linux-server-behind-nat-reverse-ssh-tunnel.html

  That's a good start, however it doesn't address the issue of machines hidden under NAT, that would require a reverse SSH tunnel such as the second link.

• Phone audio towards pc
  https://bash-prompt.net/guides/pulse-audio-bluetooth-streaming/

  It's much easier than you thought, this should also work on pipewire.

• GNOME and gtk stuff
  https://blog.gtk.org/2024/01/28/new-renderers-for-gtk/
  https://vdwaa.nl/gnome-upower-charge-thresholds.html#gnome-upower-charge-thresholds
  https://alnvdl.github.io/2023/11/18/a-cloud-based-vs-code-workspace.html
  https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/broadway.html

  A brand new renderer mechanism is coming up in gtk, and something for laptop users to make their battery last long: charge thresholds.

• Visually learning about binaries
  http://binvis.io/#/

  This is more or less a follow up on "What does ext4 look like?" in issue 228.

Life & Other

• Diving into DICOM format
  https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-format-basics/
  https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-processing/

  I thought we saw that one when doing the series on file formats, but apparently we didn't. It's a basic TLV format. This could've been parsed using kaitai also.

• What's in a private key
  https://cendyne.dev/posts/2021-04-16-private-key.html

  An indirect intro to ASN.1 encoding by looking at the format of private keys (PKCS#8).

• IPv6 over websocket
  https://www.nuke24.net/plog/15.html

  It's better to just open the page and test it out rather than spending the time explaining it.

• A full game in a PDF
  https://lucas-c.itch.io/undying-dusk

  This is some impressive work, have a look.

Thoughts

F U cn rd dis U mst uz Unix. — Tim Roberts

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• mseal
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/958438/d5f91f251b309612/

  A new proposed syscall to the linux kernel similar to OpenBSD's mimmutable.

• An admin guide to sysrq
  https://kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysrq.html

  I've used this oh-so-many-times when in dire situations, but never went as far as understanding the nitty gritty details behind it. It seems it can be used for other day-to-day things too.

• Reversing an unfamiliar touchscreen
  https://laplab.me/posts/whats-that-touchscreen-in-my-room/

  This is a really fun rabbit hole of tidbits of reverse engineering and OSINT. Yet one thing I didn't understand is, if they got full write access to /etc/shadow, why couldn't they just add a line with the right encrypted password (plus the sshd fix obviously).

• COMMAND.COM
  https://github.com/alexmyczko/autoexec.bat/blob/master/COMMAND.COM

  Want to use your unix box like a DOS box, here you go.

• Note down your breaks for "productivity"
  https://github.com/svandragt/break-aware
  http://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what

  By taking a look at the code, this is definitely not portable, but it gives me a couple of ideas on projects. It reminds me a bit of projects like ActivityWatch and the classic arbtt.

• irq pressure stall information meaning
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/PSIIRQNumbersAndMeanings

  Some clarifications on this new metric that can be used for accounting, however it might not be that useful.

• A weird hack
  https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/driver-hack-lets-you-run-linux-after-windows-bsods-no-reboot-required

  In sum, someone was able to inject a tiny RISC-V Linux emulator in the Windows error handling function.

• Extending eBPF from Kernel to User Space
  https://eunomia.dev/blogs/bpftime/
  https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/bpftime

  bpftime is like eBPF but it runs in user space instead of kernel space. It doesn't support all features, but aims to be compatible, and to support older kernels that don't have eBPF. It can be useful for auditing, hot patching, stats, and others.

• dbus-broker vs dbus-daemon
  https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki
  https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki/Deviations
  https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-daemon.1.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/

  Fedora/RedHat and Arch Linux are switching to dbus-broker, what's the difference with the dbus-daemon. The dbus-daemon is the reference implementation that is multiplatform. The dbus-broker is a Linux-specific implementation, also written in C, that uses novel features of Linux to make itself faster, simpler, and more reliable (at least that's what's advertised). Does this mean that we might see discrepancies in what software expects of dbus or will they stick to the standard?

Life & Other

• Do lowercase letters save data?
  https://endtimes.dev/why-lowercase-letters-save-data/

  The answer is compression and probability, read to find more.

• Learning math as an adult
  https://gmays.com/how-im-relearning-math-as-an-adult/
  https://afaik.io/nebula?mode=nebula&category=blueprint&id=ed0mb7N4rYw3
  https://www.myopenmath.com/index.php
  https://mathispower4u.com/

  This is inspiring, it's been a long time since I dived into math, and I'm thinking maybe I should. The first link is referring to a paid service, but there are many others that are free and open.

• Is understandability the most important design goal
  https://ntietz.com/blog/the-most-important-goal-in-designing-software-is-understandability/
  https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load

  While this is a very good point, I'd say the main goal of software is to actually do what it's supposed to do, to be functional. Understandability is a non-functional requirement, and is assumed within the professional setting, yet a user wouldn't care.

Thoughts

"When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it." — Michio Kaku

Do you think the same applies to computer science and programming, simple programs are beautiful, but what does this imply on the proof?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• CLI user experience case study
  https://www.tweag.io/blog/2023-10-05-cli-ux-in-topiary/

  When someone gets into HCI they start to rethink how they see the world. In this case the author tries to simplify the CLI by making a clear state separation by using sub-commands among other things.

• liquidprompt
  https://github.com/liquidprompt/liquidprompt
  https://liquidprompt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html

  This is in the same vein as the previous link, making the CLI easier to use through a custom prompt.

• How fast is your shell
  https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-fast-is-your-shell
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/faster_shell_startup_with_shell_switching.html

  A comparison of the processing speed of different shells, nothing really surprising, but there are a lot of tips on how to speed up zsh. See also this comparison by jkl on the forums.

• Ed is the standard text editor
  https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard_text_editor.html

  A classic post about ed, if you've never read it then now is the time.

• FreeBSD Desktop audio improvements
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/freebsd-desktop-part-29-configuration-audio-improvements/

  This article clearly shows the need for an audio server. However, instead of taking the hassle to write a script to automatically switch to the device when it is plugged, the only thing needed instead is to simply load the module module-switch-on-connect which will achieve the same thing.

• "Effortless" OpenBSD Audio and Desktop Screen Recording Guide
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240115170740

  As someone said "I think OpenBSD folks and non-OpenBSD folks have a different meaning of the word effortless."

• Only a tablet for studying CS
  https://ezrizhu.com/blog/tablet-for-cs

  This is basically the "dream" of having a cloud-hosted dev environment you can take anywhere. But would you actually use that?

• Preventing DNS Leak using OpenVPN
  https://blog.deepjyoti30.dev/openvpn-dns-leak
  https://github.com/jonathanio/update-systemd-resolved

  Nothing too fancy, but a reminder that your vpn conf will dictate how the traffic will be handled, and DNS shouldn't be forgotten. The second link is a solution for systemd, but openvpn works on multiple machines, and the DNS update also needs to happen there.

• Build Reliable Operating System Images
  https://www.osbuild.org/
  https://www.osbuild.org/guides/image-builder-on-premises/basic-concepts.html
  https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/containers-build-once-run-anywhere-edge

  OSBuild is kind of like a high-level docker but more complex, and corporate. It's mainly an abstract format to run in the cloud and be converted to proprietary confs.

• Exploring Podman
  https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-docker/podman-vs-docker/

  I've always wondered what the differences were between Podman and Docker apart from "Podman doesn't run as root".

• PineTime and InfiniTime
  https://blog.mlich.cz/2023/10/pinetime-experience/
  https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime
  https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/
  https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

  People often bring up the topic of open-source Unix-like system for mobile phones, but have you ever heard of it for smart watches?

• pam timestamp plugin
  https://ikerexxe.github.io/idm/2022/05/18/pam-timestamp.html

  This plugin is used to not have to type your password again if you've already done so in the last defined window frame, in a similar fashion to sudo.

• Hacking the OSS supply chain
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwBhwdLC3Y

  We keep hearing of supply chain attacks, well this is a practical example.

• binfmt for WSL
  https://kaashif.co.uk/2024/01/03/binfmt-misc-the-magic-behind-linux-windows-interop/

  See also "Magic bytes" in issue 100.

Life & Other

• Greenspun's tenth rule
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

  So have you ever written such program, or discovered one like it?

Thoughts

Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries one of the founders of XP methodology

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Misconceptions about the unix philosophy
  https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2024/01/05/0/

  You could basically say "composability" and not "atomisation".

• Adélie Linux
  https://www.adelielinux.org/about/

  A libre OS, using musl and APK, in pursuit of POSIX® cert for stability. That sounds good.

• The state of Enterprise Linux
  https://crunchtools.com/the-state-of-enterprise-linux-in-2023/

  This is a bit different than how usual distributions operate. Take a look.

• How to build a lab
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/ondrej_caletka_1/hands-on-learning-how-we-built-the-ipv6-security-course-virtual-lab-activities/

  Take note, if you ever want to create one of these web-console virtual env.

• A modern implementation of traceroute
  https://github.com/catchpoint/Networking.traceroute

  This is traceroute but with more options and support.

• nmstate
  https://github.com/nmstate/nmstate

  This is sort of an alternative, centralized, and declarative way to manipulate host networking configurations (think dns, routes, interfaces, etc..).

• Streaming to chromecast
  https://linderud.dev/blog/stream-to-chromecast-with-resolved-vlc-and-bash/

  That's something I've tried to do too and usually fell back to the vlc plus renderer option, now I got an alternative. See also issue 208 "An mDNS primer".

• Hardening an OpenBSD workstation
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-12-31-hardened-openbsd-workstation.html

  A couple of useful tips to make your home station more secure.

• IaM on Linux in 2024
  https://ostconf.com/system/attachments/files/000/001/693/original/Alexander_Bokovoy.pdf

  This is mostly for Fedora/RedHat systems but the ideas are still relevant to other systems too.

• systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
  https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/

  This is one of the most balanced review I've read so far.

• Linux & TPMs
  https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2023-186-linux-tpms

  systemd is including some integration with TPMs, especially for boot process, credentials, and disk encryption.

• Dropping SLAB in favor of SLUB
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-SLAB-SLUB-Changes
  https://lwn.net/Articles/932201/

  The names are confusing but it makes sense when you read about it.

• Stopping a Linux thread
  https://mazzo.li/posts/stopping-linux-threads.html

  If you've never given any thought to this topic, this will mind blow you, and even if you have, you'll still be dumbfounded by the amount you didn't know about.

• How can stdout be faster than stderr
  https://blog.orhun.dev/stdout-vs-stderr/

  And this takes us on a rabbithole learning about pseudo-terminals, curses, terminal raw mode, rendering TUI via stderr, using firefox tools to take stack traces and debug, to then trace the chain from stdout to the terminal output.

• What does ext4 look like?
  https://buredoranna.github.io/linux/ext4/2020/01/09/ext4-viz.html

  That's the type of learning I love, reverse engineering and playing around to learn the format of something and what it means.

Life & Other

• Having fun with PNG format
  https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/
  https://belkadan.com/blog/2024/01/The-Biggest-Smallest-PNG/

  These were highly entertaining and educational to read, recommended.

• ...and having fun with fonts too
  https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-font-vulnerability-to-rule-them-all.html

  This is an attack vector that we don't often hear about but that is very impactful, remember the emojis that crashed the iPhone?

Thoughts

That's a lot of Unix content for one week! It seems like there's a hype to write about anything related to OS since the start of the year, it's thrilling.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• tm.tm_gmtoff why such a great offset
  https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/9d85ed1e716fe568e20e1074c117f7c8

  As with a lot of things, it comes down to backward compatibility and historical reasons.

• Forking SteamOS
  https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/

  Even if you don't care about SteamOS it's a good rundown and dive into the architecture of a customized distro.

• Android data encryption
  https://blog.quarkslab.com/android-data-encryption-in-depth.html

  A really in-depth look at the file-based encryption mechanisms found on Android, from key derivation, encryption, PoC exploits, and more.

• Current directory
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShellsAndCurrentDirectory

  I've actually learned something from this! The ins and outs of how the current directory is interpreted differently in the kernel and in shells and differs among systems.

• Some stuff about ssh and shell
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/ssh-agent-forwarding-and-tmux-done
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/why-do-i-know-shell-and-how-can-you

  A fine looking blog. The issue of ssh sock being exposed when using the forwarding option and pointing to an invalid file on long-running tmux session is surprising but was already mentioned with a warning in the manpage (as shown at the end of the article).

• write your own terminal
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/write-your-own-terminal
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/terminal-smooth-scrolling

  A brainstorm guide to challenge yourself into writing your own terminal emulator. Followed by some cool feature the author implements.

• Spatial shell
  https://soap.coffee/~lthms/posts/SpatialShell6.html

  And this has nothing to do with shell but more with window management, a Sway plugin. It's a new way to interface with windows, I'm not a fan of it, but take a look anyway and make your mind.

• zram
  https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html

  Nothing new, but it's great to present tech that not everyone uses all the time, good reminders. If you're looking for the actual value of this check section 6 of the doc "Activate".

• Why does ACPI exist
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68350.html

  It answered the question, basically having something common via the bios, but then the argument would be "why not have it through a common hardware interface instead", but history has already played out.

• Gentoo goes binary!
  https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html

  This requires a post, since not everyone is aware that Portage also has pre-built binaries, kind of like most other source-based distros these days too.

Life & Other

• Erasure Coding Demystified
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5kVuM7zEUI

  Ever wondered how erasure coding worked (think RAID and similar), then this video will help.

• Legal definitions aside – what makes you think you’re an adult?
  https://psyche.co/ideas/legal-definitions-aside-what-makes-you-think-youre-an-adult

  Lots to ponder on. What's your take on this?

• Writing a TrueType font renderer
  https://axleos.com/writing-a-truetype-font-renderer/

  An entertaining article tackling what it takes to render a font on the screen. There's a lot of intricate details we often don't think about when looking at text.

Thoughts

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." — Rick Cook

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unicode in terminal emulators
  https://www.jeffquast.com/post/ucs-detect-test-results/

  The author is definitely someone who knows their ways around unicode interpretation in terminals. This article particularly focuses on the respect of the width of unicode.

• Reforming Unix
  https://github.com/Ericson2314/baccumulation/blob/main/reforming-unix.adoc

  A living document about different ideas, mostly related to security, to "reform" unix. Most of them are on-their-ways.

• non-interactive ssh password auth
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-sshpass-without-sshpass

  A couple of shell wrappers to make ssh with password easier (but not safer).

• puzzlefs
  https://github.com/project-machine/puzzlefs

  A new filesystem dedicated and focused on containers. It's main emphasis is on deduplication because of the sharing of layers of containers. It is currently implemented as a FUSE.

• libvpoll
  https://github.com/rd235/libvpoll-eventfd

  A few additions to the Linux kernel to add new ways to perform polling more uniformly instead of having custom implementations.

• GPLv2 is routinely violated
  https://www.devever.net/~hl/linuxgpl

  And as everything regarding laws, interpretations differ and legality is nebulous.

• Guide to eBPF networking techniques
  https://who.ldelossa.is/posts/ebpf-networking-technique-packet-redirection/

  Using eBPF for packing filtering/redirection is all the craze these days. However, it's a tough topic that requires the latest kernel and latest tool, this guide is gladly welcomed.

• Relying on the Linux kernel keystore
  https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23apac/presentation/korchagin

  This is a great presentation, it dives into what is a keystore and why we need it (different vulnerabilities). Then dive into the key-agent interface of the kernel, why it was created initially (LUKS/dm-crypt), goes into the structure (keyrings). It follows by multiple examples of the usage of the kernel keystore and how it could possibly be used with a TPM or HSM for storage.

Life & Other

• How to design Google Maps
  https://medium.com/google-design/google-maps-cb0326d165f5

  There's a lot of in-depth details about cartography in there, along with software design tricks that were used to make online maps possible.

• Cyber magicians
  https://theintercept.com/document/art-deception-training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/

  Probably nothing in this presentation is surprising to anyone reading this newsletter, but it's still appalling to see it displayed so obviously.

Thoughts

I don't know who initially created the joke, but it's been spread around so much.

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• SSH over HTTP/3
  https://github.com/francoismichel/ssh3

  A complete rewrite of ssh over HTTP/3 with addition of authentication via OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. Since it relies on this, it can possibly benefit from connection migration (when switching or changing network on the go) and multipath connections, similar to mosh in a way.

• Using ssh as sudo
  https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2023/12/19/ssh-over-unix-socket/

  This is a quite convoluted security measure, and it might be counterproductive since you're opening the door to other issues.

• Gnome's Prompt
  https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/12/14/prompt/
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt

  This is a terminal for a immutable/container-oriented desktop. Basically it tracks which containers are running or available and help you launch sessions over them, but this is limited to hosts that are Fedora based.

• Linux Cockpit
  https://cockpit-project.org/

  It might not be something that people reading this newsletter might want to use, but it still might be a tool that is interesting to get an overview and monitor a system at a glance.

• Simple tutorials on ACLs
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Security/Quick_and_Dirty_Guide_to_Linux_File_Permissions
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/security/acls_extended_filepermissions

  We've had a few weeks in the past where we've dived into anything related to access control, let's refresh on the basics.

• Bluetooth keyboard injection on Android (and others)
  https://github.com/skysafe/reblog/tree/main/cve-2023-45866

  Well, for now I'll keep my bluetooth turned off while in public.

• Zombie processes using GPU
  https://theblackcat102.github.io/fixing-nvidia-gpu-zombie-process/

  We often talk of zombie processes using a tiny bit of memory, but have you ever wondered if they could hold GPU memory too?

• Setting up your own VoIP/SIP service
  https://allanrbo.blogspot.com/2023/03/peer-to-peer-voice-over-ip-call-with.html

  We've seen something similar in issue 197 "Your personal VoIP", this is another thing you could test out from the CLI. This could be useful to get away from IM proprietary software stack.

• The BPF-programmable network device
  https://lwn.net/Articles/949960/

  On Linux, the kernel 6.7 now includes a BPF-programmable network device. What does that mean? A new virtual network device called "netkit" that allow to load custom BPF programs in it to control the routing of packets and other modifications.

• First Impressions of the Yggdrasil Peer-to-Peer Network
  https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/yggdrasil.html

  I've always been curious about what yggdrasil is and how to use it. Since I've played cyb.farm recently I got to try it first hand and test it. Read the above post to also get an idea from someone else. For me, it was relatively simple to setup, I found the list of public peers online, and added them using yggdrasilctl.

• The graphic stack on Linux
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/955376/b3fba3bbfabbc411/

  A rundown of all the pieces involved into drawing graphics on Linux.

Life & Other

• Sunk cost fallacy
  https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/not-my-money-any-more-lessons-from

  A good lesson, sometimes we imagine we have more power over the world than we actually have, we appropriate things and behavior while in reality we don't.

• Hilbert construction
  http://bit-player.org/extras/hilbert/hilbert-construction.html

  A step by step explanation of the Hilbert curve, which is part of many algorithms.

• A fun magazine à la "poc || gtfo"
  https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_003_beta1.pdf

  It's however, much more approachable and enjoyable to read, give it a go.

Thoughts

A gentle reminder:

Deleted code is debugged code. — Jeff Sickel

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Capturing Touch Events
  https://blog.owulveryck.info/2023/12/02/simplifying-complexity-the-journey-from-websockets-to-http-streams.html

  A pretty neat breakdown of a project about sending events from one Linux machine to a server, from the capture, serialization, sending, and more.

• What happened to the Linux zealots
  https://boilingsteam.com/what-happened-to-the-native-linux-zealots/index.html

  I'm not familiar with the gaming platforms available, however this post still poses a good debate about the progression of any community and its extreme through time.

• FreeBSD experiments
  https://notes.eatonphil.com/finishing-up-a-freebsd-experiment.html

  It's a type of post I enjoy but that we see less often, just day to day notes, issues, and findings about what someone uses.

• No real-life input looks like that
  https://sigwait.org/~alex/blog/2022/09/11/puYjYw.html

  Some fun trivia.

• Debunking btrfs
  https://swag.industries/debunking-btrfs/

  It's usually in debunking articles that you also find good info about a technology and insights about new things.

• SSH Hardening with ssh-audit
  https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/ssh-audit/

  Scared that you haven't setup an ssh server properly, this tool should help.

• OpenBSD adds more mitigations
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170205367232026&w=2
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170234892604404&w=2

  Always on track to have program correctness and exploit mitigation, OpenBSD adds pinning of all syscalls.

• What does it mean to remove Xorg
  https://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/12/xorg-being-removed-what-does-this-mean.html

  This is a fair explanation of what's happening.

Life & Other

• Timezones in Postgres
  https://blog.untrod.com/2016/08/actually-understanding-timezones-in-postgresql.html

  And now I finally understand timezones, and I'll store everything in UTC.

• Systems design for advanced beginners
  https://robertheaton.com/2020/04/06/systems-design-for-advanced-beginners/

  A fun and easy article describing some basics of system design that you can send to your peers that are on their ways in this domain.

• Always learning, always teaching
  https://stephango.com/always-learning-always-teaching

  Just some motivational post about continual growth.

Thoughts

It might not be your fault, but it is your problem.

This could be a sentence you tell yourself, or that someone else tells you. Often things happen that aren't caused by us, but we still have to deal with them.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Being pedantic about what immutable means
  https://blog.verbum.org/2020/08/22/immutable-%E2%86%92-reprovisionable-anti-hysteresis/

  "Reprovisionable infrastructure with anti-hysteresis properties" is a tongue twister, but trying to spend time to define the current marketing terms with more precise ones has the advantage of making us understand the mechanics.

• Patching Linux at Hyperscale
  https://thenewstack.io/how-meta-patches-linux-at-hyperscale/

  It's not the KLP in itself that's interesting but the complexity of doing this across so many machines.

• toolchain security features status update
  https://outflux.net/slides/2023/lpc/features.pdf

  Language compile- and run- time hardening is making some progress on Linux.

• Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD
  https://patmaddox.com/doc/trunk/www/2023-12-sh-relative-shell-script-includes-with-realpath-on-freebsd/

  An ingenious solution to make shell scripts includes work regardless of the path you're executing it from.

• makima
  https://github.com/cyber-sushi/makima

  This is a sort of Linux equivalent of autohotkey.

• The Origin of the word Daemon
  https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

  The story behind the word from the people involved in its initial usage.

• Pipes vs FIFOs
  https://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/pipefifo

  A post convincing you to not use named pipes (FIFOs) for process substitution, or at least point out certain discrepancies in it that could not fit certain use-cases.

• Why Unix kernels have grown caches for directory entries
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/KernelNameCachesWhy

  And obviously it's a solution to make things more efficient.

• A view on Wayland
  https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

  The author presses some fair points about Wayland, make what you want of this discussion.

• Interview with pipewire's main creator
  https://fedoramagazine.org/pipewire-1-0-an-interview-with-pipewire-creator-wim-taymans/

  This interview is a great review of all the features and changes happening the past 2 years.

Life & Other

• Building stupid tools
  https://blog.stulta.dev/posts/stupid_tools/

  The author makes some very good points about building more tools.

• money first
  https://siliconvict.com/articles/1-choose-money-first

  A quite controversial article, but worth pondering on.

Thoughts

"Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking." — Bill Venables"

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A NetBSD ramdisk kernel
  https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ramdisk-kernel/

  This is the type of post that should be added to the official documentation since it's so relevant to many people and is a standard procedure.

• Per-process capability-based restrictions on dragonflybsd
  https://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2023-October/922780.html

  This is not to be confused with capability-based access control, but it's more similar to OpenBSD's pledge and Linux' seccomp. A very nice addition.

• From Linux to FreeBSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2023/10/25/migrating-from-an-old-linux-server-to-a-new-freebsd-machine/

  After 5 years of uptime you need to be really convincing to swap that system with another.

• An stty intro
  https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-stty-command/

  A quick explanation of he stty command along with a couple examples to grasp the concept.

• Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi & Vim
  https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

  A piece about the history from ed to vim, and most things in between.

• Freezing in Style
  https://blog.broulik.de/2023/11/freezing-in-style/

  This is KDE's Plasma reimplementation of X's "your app is unresponsive" pop-up for their Wayland backend. It's not as simple to implement as it sounds and requires redesign and rethinking in a lot of places.

• The curse of docker
  https://computer.rip/2023-11-25-the-curse-of-docker.html

  An article about why the author thinks docker as a method of software distribution has many flaws. From the non-standard configuration, non-portability and bad practices, and more.

Life & Other

• Fun with DNS TXT Records
  https://thoughts.theden.sh/posts/dns-txt-record-fun/

  Basically using DNS as a small free storage, something we've recurrently seen around the web.

Thoughts

Consistency Is the Last Refuge of the Unimaginative — Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Challenging quotes, I'll let you ponder on them since Mr.Wilde was so adamant to repeat the same idea in many of his work.

On that note, let's mention this website: https://quoteinvestigator.com/, I find it fascinating to dive behind the origin of quotes. Even though most quotes are by definition extracted from their context and infinitely reinterpreted, I still like to shatter that and try to find even more meaning by doing so.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Contextual CLIs
  https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli
  https://jmmv.dev/2013/09/cli-design-subcommand-based-interfaces.html

  This is the kind of ideas that shatters pre-conceived notion, but that could be so innovative they become the building stone of other ideas. The subcommand part reminds me of the second link.

• CLI to extract context from data
  https://blanchardjulien.com/posts/textract/

  While not technically Unix-related, it's a good basic example of building a simple script from scratch. Though the exercise would be on how to make it more Unix-like and following best practices.

• Navigating around the shell
  https://blog.meain.io/2023/navigating-around-in-shell/

  A couple of basic ideas and helpers (for zsh mostly), that you can use as inspo in your daily life.

• SSH Tarpits
  https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/are-ssh-tarpits-still-effective.html

  I have to say I didn't know what ssh tarpits were before this post, but now I know that they're a sort of ssh honeypot. The stats are quite interesting.

• Gtk graphics offload
  https://blog.gtk.org/2023/11/15/introducing-graphics-offload/

  An update on the work of Gtk on Wayland Linux to rely on dmabuf for graphics offloading.

• VT320 terminal repair
  http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/blog/103-vt320_repair.html

  This is my first time reading about the loadable character set, however I can't find much information about it online. The whole post is amazing, from the terminal mingling to the keyboard fix. Aside: I do only use ctrl-[ to exit insert mode in vim, and I find it less annoying than pressing esc.

• setenv is not thread safe
  https://www.evanjones.ca/setenv-is-not-thread-safe.html

  I'm not a big fan of using environment variables to configure programs, I prefer them to really be only about the global environment, read first when a program start and then not read again nor changed. But I see a trend these days that abuses and overuses env.

• tmpout issue 3
  https://tmpout.sh/3/

  A new issue from this journal à la pocorgtfo and phrack. The content is mostly targeted towards Linux and Unix systems.

• Mess with dns
  https://messwithdns.net

  If you've ever wanted to try things with DNS but didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a local DNS then this is for you.

• Fixing the bell tone
  https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=ba48d52ca6c8

  Such a simple change but with a whole story behind it.

• Test bracket
  https://jmmv.dev/2020/03/test-bracket.html

  One of the best explanation of what the test brackets are and the difference with the bash extension double brackets.

Life & Other

• Another one about writing
  https://offlinemark.com/2023/11/05/software-engineers-must-learn-to-write/

  ...just to keep you in the mood and write more often.

• Does it make sense to build new capitals from scratch
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/why-relocating-capital-cities-can-be-a-smart-move

  There are many pieces on the topic, here's one to get the convo going.

Thoughts

"People don't spend sixty bucks on a game they know they can beat." — George Wood

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• bcachefs
  https://bcachefs.org/

  It's not everyday that an advanced modern file system is created. It's still in beta version, but worth following its development.

• Snap without the Snap Store
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/

  Skip straight to the section "Distributing without the Store" to get to the core of the topic.

• My input hardware stopped working after a kernel update, FIX
  https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1002/how-a-kernel-developer-made-my-styluses-work-again

  The response from the kernel dev gives lots of insights into what is needed to make HID input devices work, and their logic.

• CET, control flow enforcement, shadow stack
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/x86/shstk.html
  https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ShadowCallStack.html

  The security protections these days are getting so advanced, at both hardware and software level. This one requires a mix of both new hardware capabilities being enabled and the software relying on it. It reminds me of CHERI in a way.

• List of fonts
  https://jdsalaro.com/note/best-programming-fonts/

  It's just some additional ones for inspo, to continue with this thread.

• Cgroup v2 Checkpoint
  https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/cgroup-v2-checkpoint

  Most people don't deal with cgroups directly, they often rely on them indirectly through some other software that uses them. In the above, I'm highlighting one of the maintainers of the tech.

• Storing authorized keys in LDAP
  https://sigillatum.tesarici.cz/2021-03-12-openssh-authorized-keys-in-ldap.html

  It mostly relies on the AuthorizedKeysCommand directive, and you're left wondering: why use ldap as storage and not something else.

• A subtle Python bug
  https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/02/a-very-subtle-bug/

  Often bugs are about silly things because we've already thought of all the hard ways that things could fail, but in rare cases we're faced with messy ones like the above.

Life & Other

• Just use cash!
  https://steelrods.hashnode.dev/the-importance-of-cash-in-a-technological-society
  https://www.wbur.org/npr/182309623/why-almost-no-one-in-myanmar-wanted-my-money
  https://www.mybanktracker.com/credit-cards/travel/crisp-clean-us-dollar-bills-travel-country-275899

  While that first article has an USA-centric vibe, it still brings up a lot of questions about the trend to digitalize economics around the world. However, cash doesn't always work everywhere, even currencies that are thought to be "stable" might be refused, especially when traveling and during uncertain times. Make what you want out of this info!

Thoughts

"A witty saying proves nothing." — Voltaire

Since we're always adding quotes here, let's add a quote criticizing quotes/sayings.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• not knowing the /proc filesystem
  https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkproc/
  https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkprocii/

  People should write more about their about their learning process on their blog, even with simple exercises such as listing processes by relying on the /proc fs.

• Avoid Load-bearing Shell Scripts
  https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2023/10/29/Avoid-Load-bearing-Shell-Scripts/

  Basically just a thought about scripts that grow out of size and eventually have to be rewritten.

• Useful shell functions
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/shell-functions/

  There used to be a time when we shared and exchanged these on forums like some trading cards.

• Jails vs docker
  https://justanerds.site/freebsd-jails-vs-docker/

  A simple run down of a few differences between FreeBSD jails and docker.

• Bluefin distro
  https://projectbluefin.io/

  As I understood it, this is a custom version of Fedora Silverblue but made for devs and "cloud native".

• Porting Linux "version" of pledge to go
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/porting-linux-pledge-to-go
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/two-hackers-one-keyboard-two-ways

  Plus another post from that blog since I found it cool.

• Gentoo's package deprecation procedure
  https://artemis.sh/2023/11/05/gentoo-mask-process.html

  It takes an enormous amount of efforts to maintain a distribution, to make sure all packages are well-kept and that users are aware of the changes going on.

Life & Other

• Cyber Hunt
  https://cyb.farm/

  This is the scavenger hunt/CTF that z3bra has been working on for the past year. It's amazingly well made, enjoy!

Thoughts

The competence sufficient to produce sentences capable of being understood may be completely insufficient to produce sentences capable of being listened to, sentences capable of being recognized as admissible in all situations where there is reason to speak — Pierre Bourdieu

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• recover lost text by coredumping firefox
  https://j3s.sh/thought/recover-lost-text-by-coredumping-firefox.html

  This resonates so much, my only solution to this is that if I spend more than 2-3min writing I should write on a text editor outside the browser. I'm not sure if I'll try out the coredump next time.

• Image-Based Linux Summit 2022
  https://lwn.net/Articles/912774/

  This is basically the background story behind "UAPI — User-Space API" of issue 169, which was the result of this summit organized by Microsoft.

• Boot loader specs
  https://iliana.fyi/blog/kexec-systemd-boot-kernel-image/

  This is an example of how to implement the previous link's UAPI boot loader specs.

• Software Lasts WAY Longer than You Think
  https://mikeseidle.com/2022/04/02/software-lasts-way-longer-than-you-would-think/

  A simple reflection on how pieces of software can carry across time.

• Customization
  https://blog.thetrevor.tech/my-terminal.n.html

  It's quite an expressive way to describe a terminal with a bunch of pretty print messages. Your terminal could be your next social media post.

• A tale of /dev/fd
  http://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/devfd

  As usual the behavior seems to only have quirks on Linux.

• Rogue escape sequence
  https://www.gresearch.com/blog/article/g-research-the-terminal-escapes/
  https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security

  I thought I had linked that first one when it came out. In sum, it's a vulnerability related to logs or output that accepts text that is valid terminal escape sequences, thus when displayed on a terminal they will execute or have a behavior that wasn't expected.

• Hey he's got wisdom, let's sit and listen
  https://blog.vito.nyc/posts/on-programming/

  This is the classic rant about learning to program, how it's a creative endeavour, etc..

• Server-side sandboxing on linux
  https://www.figma.com/blog/server-side-sandboxing-containers-and-seccomp/

  Think of the seccomp interface on Linux as something similar to OpenBSD's pledge (however a bit more complex to use, see). The article doesn't spend time on details but more on a generic view of different high-level things that relate to sandbox and their ups and downs.