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  They've done the Thompson Shell from Sixth Edition #Unix, and one can get the actual Bourne Shell through #Illumos (and its derivatives) nowadays. Here's one that the retrocomputerists have not tackled to my knowledge: Bill Joy's ashell from 1BSD. https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development/ashell/READ_ME It has hints of the later C shell about it. Look at how it does not allow redirecting only standard error, for example. (The man...

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  Fun fact: In 1977, in 1BSD, the #BSD people at UCB dared to imagine a world where people's #Unix home directories were not stored in the passwd account database. (Modern BSDs use master.passwd nowadays.) https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development/man6/sethome.6 https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development/man5/htmp.5 The idea that a terminal type was tied to a person seems quite odd at this remove. Also notice...

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  If your terminal emulator's font has caught up with Unicode 17, then thanks to the Sharp MZ you can do crazy 1960s twiddles, now. % while true do for i in C D E F do printf \ '\r%-*.*b%b\r\e[%dC' \ $((COLUMNS-1)) $((COLUMNS-1)) \ 'Waiting \u2026' \ '\U0001CC8'$i \ 9 sleep 1 done done #zsh #Unicode #TUIs #ComputerTerminals #SharpMZ

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  Both the musl and GNU C libraries have a TTYDEF_OFLAG macro in a <sys/ttydefaults.h> header. It sets XTABS on, like it is still the 1960s. No GNU or musl programs that I have laid my hands on use this macro. The 'sane' setting to the stty utilities from GNU Core Utilities and BusyBox, and various programs that do an equivalent, all explicitly have their own default setting value and do not use these macros. On the BSDs, XTABS was taken out of this macro some tim...

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  Reading two #HackerNews people positively hoping for a future where the Internet is filled with armies of 'agents' relentlessly attacking everything, is like reading a conversation between two gardeners hoping that their future involves rampant weeds and plagues of pests. #AI #LLMs

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  Presumably the maintainer of the ca-certificates package in #Debian now has a rush job on xyr hands. The Ubuntu package was changed a mere 2 hours ago. #eMudhra

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  Presumably on modern #FreeBSD the local fix is also a relatively simple exercise in using certctl(8), as it is on #NetBSD. https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=certctl&sektion=8 #eMudhra

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  I updated everything #eMudhra-related that I can update last night, and I do not use PHP on my own WWW sites. So I might be one of the few people today thinking about the #SharpMZ and about the fast food delivery person on an electric motorcycle who stopped at a red traffic light, and how that shouldn't really be a notable thing.

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  @fairtradestu It's not quite #InternetOfThings in this case. It's enterprise-level hardware management and monitoring at scale. From a company named #DanFoss. Monitor (say) a thousand refrigerators and freezers over tens of stores, and know where to send the engineer out to when something goes out of whack. It's supposed to be done securely, but the supermarkets apparently did not bother with that part of the manufacturer's instructions. #supermarkets #hack...

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  It's good to see that old-style music hall acts still exist in the 2020s, despite the best efforts of those 'Got Talent' shows to kill off the genre. (-: https://youtube.com/v/EcDJJSKs2o8 #rings #8rings #juggling

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  I was quietly thinking to myself that this week has been a very unusual week, in that on two occasions a comment or contribution that I've made has helped in a tiny way someone else's article or doco. I superstitiously thought that I'd better not comment on it, lest it jinx a third time from happening. But it has just happened a third time this morning, as I was thinking that. Interesting week.

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  I actually read the #FreeBSD Handbook's chapter on how FreeBSD bootstraps. It's stuck in 2010. I'm not kidding. There's stuff in there that changed in the FreeBSD 7.3 release notes. FreeBSD can boot on UEFI firmware nowadays, and directly from ZFS datasets. There's a gpart bootstrap command, and syscons does not use bright white for kernel messages any more. In the meantime, the Handbook is telling people how to accidentally destroy their MBR or GUID partition tables wi...

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  Devin Stone does a 50 minute #LegalEagle analysis of just the first part of the #BricksAndMinifigs #StarWars #LEGO affair in #Utah; says that there's a part 2 to come, covering what happened after the other YouTuber got involved; gives a dense information-packed point by point exposition and analysis of the legal positions, including rebuttals of the absurd ones; and points out how a lawyer would have saved some expensive mistakes from happening before even going to court. Then the comm...

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  'IKEA' rhymes with 'idea' and 'Jysk' rhymes with 'whisk'. Stands to reason, dunnit? (-: #SwedishLanguage #DanishLanguage #IKEA #Jysk

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  I really wish that people would tell all of these people currently panicking about #YouTube not recommending stuff that they subscribed to that *subscribing* to a channel gets its videos listed in one's *subscriptions* feed not necessarily in one's *recommendations*. Recommendations are an algorithmic guess as to what one might like, and if one never or rarely watches stuff from channels that one subscribed to, one might never be recommended anything from those channels. Subscr...

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  In case you missed it, as I did, all of the people associated with Linux Journal are now *formerly* associated with Linux Journal, and all articles for well over a year now are #AIslop under a single byline of 'George Whittaker'. https://linuxjournal.com/content/masthead #LinuxJournal

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  Oh, no. I've just commented on an #AndrewBossom video, about #Usenet in the 1990s. I can see this escalating. But I'm confident that there were no colour TUI newsreaders before tin, which came out in 1991. No, green on black does not count. (-: And I was definitely using colour Fidonet and QWK readers in the late 1980s. Why, yes, this is a point about a 3 second piece of illustrative B roll in a video that isn't about Usenet. But Bossom put the caption on top of i...

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  It's a bit of a shame that this fella went to all of that trouble digging through Illumos. https://youtube.com/v/tUqHsv6JarY?lc=UgwAiVOVkz-sP_j-H7J4AaABAg #Illumos is one of the few platforms that does not have the <sys/ttydefaults.h> header from 4BSD. It was ironically quite the wrong place to look. The GNU and musl C libraries have the header, as do all of #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD. The problem is that although <sys/ttydefaults.h> has been around...

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  @keefeglise@mastodonapp.uk Well, one could go to #Hornton and experience the 1st of May today, if one wanted to celebrate events of A Long Time Ago, that got banned by the Emperor of Banbury in 1589. I'm guessing that the proximity to Warwickshire is what kept Hornton from being completely crushed by Darth Wheatley. (-: It starts at 12:30 according to Banbury FM. https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116498670858171433 https://banburyfm.com/event/hornton-may-day-celebration/ #MayDay #Maypole...

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  @bytebro@mastodonapp.uk That latter is wrong anyway. The major competitor to #systemd was Canonical's Upstart, with sometimes OpenRC as a minor one. van Smoorenburg init+rc was never a serious contender, on #Debian or anywhere else, when the decisions were made.

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  I wonder whether anyone on the FediVerse knows what obscure #magic ritual can be performed with a box of #teeth, income tax forms from 2003, and a Sacha Distel album. Because the relative has all three. The income tax forms box was not labelled. I think that this was a safety precaution against any old random person rocking up and accidentally raising some ancient Mesopotamian god. The plan is to consign the income tax forms to the flames, and keep the world safe. The boxes of teeth are Hol...

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  Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) is fairly standard #Ghostbusters fare, from the #McKennaGrace 'next generation' movie series rather than from the all-female re-make. There are all of the hallmarks there, from the siren on the hearse to Slimer. The baddie is suitably Ancient. New Yorkers are still New Yorkers. And the Ghostbusters have traps on drones. It's a little thin on the Venkman quips, but the original characters aren't supposed to be the main stars here. That I sp...

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  @bytebro@mastodonapp.uk This is not a conflict of standards. None of those are standardized. Indeed, this is what you get for using all of these non-standard things instead of the thing that *is* standardized: pkgadd from magtape, per the System 5 Interface Definition. https://illumos.org/man/8/pkgadd (-: #Unix #Illumos #SVID

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  I watched #TheInternship (2025). You don't have to. Really; you don't. Whilst it is good to see that #LizzyGreene is still in the business as an adult, this is a terrible movie. The cinematography is alright, as too the choreography, and locations. Almost of the actors acquit themselves reasonably. What lets it down are the story, which is utter confused nonsense that will have anyone who has ever watched any spy movie (even the children's ones) or action flick positively screa...

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  @londondreamtime The advantage that the Old People have over the Youth Of Today is that the former had #Jackanory as a prominent and well-known example of telling a story that one didn't write. Mind you, Jackanory still did only stories from books. #ChildrensBBC

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  @londondreamtime I thought, after writing that, that the #Discworld version would be that the Pyrotechnists' Arms was the modern name, now that they've ironed the kinks out and gentrified a bit, of what used to have the longer name of the Pyrotechnists' Arms, Legs, And Occasional Charred Complete Corpse. Even then, though, reality is not far off so I'm clearly not being imaginative enough. (-: There's an account apparently (It's quoted in a book.) in the 1825-09-04 e...

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  @bytebro It's all of the food groups: meat, vegetables, bread, and chilli sauce. (-: #kebabs #nutrition

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  #CaliforniaLaw is written by people who are either very ignorant or very incompetent. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 They have assumed that all operating systems are like Microsoft Windows 11, Android, or iOS; and have written legislation for operating systems where people download glorified WWW client 'apps', from 'stores', which use 'accounts' that they have with vendors or Microsoft/Google/Apple. But the legis...

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  I used Click-and-Collect at #Ryman yesterday. Throughout the process, when selecting things that I wanted to buy, looking at my on-line shopping cart, and through the checkout to my payment processor and back, Ryman assured me that I could 'Click-and-Collect TODAY'. I even reset the basket and re-picked the items carefully so that none of them had to be back-ordered, which changed the collection date of all items. The basket had 'TODAY' and 'In Stock' everywhere; and t...

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  Low tide at both sides of the country. https://mastodonapp.uk/@newquayweather/116407670835690908 #Newquay #WeatherStation